Roadmac Surfacing has worked on several large-scale government projects to rehabilitate key arterial roads around South Africa including; N3 Warden Asphalt R317m, N1 Bloemfontein Bypass Asphalt R267m, and various others across South Africa.
A key challenge of the construction industry is that supplier invoices are often issued a long time after project completion. Given the high annual turnover of Roadmac Surfacing, it was found that there was rarely ‘one version of the truth’ in the budget reconciliation between projects and accounts. Therefore, the greatest challenge was reconciling procurement and operational costs with the financial ledger. The Roadmac Surfacing project sites did not have the tools to manage their expenditure on a daily basis. Therefore, the challenge was to provide project teams with a real-time cost management solution that could run at every site 24hrs a day.
The CCS solution offered a committed and seamless accrual cost functionality that could reconcile and reflect invoices and payments in real-time. In so doing, this would improve cost management against the original BOQ tender pricing from small to large scale complex projects, and have the added benefit of updating productivity worksheets as projects evolve.
For CCS to implement a tailored solution during the financial year that could seamless adopt the old system without any disruption to the current business projects or its cost management function.
The CCS consultants installed both Candy and BuildSmart to streamline business processes and enable real-time management of projects with seamless cost versus allowable, and financial reporting. Until this installation, the length of time taken for invoices to reach the procurement office meant it was difficult for Roadmac Surfacing to effectively manage site-based costs, such as orders and deliveries. Therefore, the committed and accrual cost functionality in BuildSmart was critical. The implementation of BuildSmart as a seamless cost and operations management solution took just three weeks. As part of the implementation process, the CCS team conducted live on-site training on actual data, using live software on a demonstration database. Roadmac Surfacing implemented the complete CCS solution to manage their projects from estimation to site plan and valuations through operations management with automated site costing reconciled to final account.