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How construction360 transforms your business
A Top US Construction Company Consolidates CRM Across 15 Business Units with HSO and construction360
A centralized CRM platform designed specifically for construction companies boosts business development, connects disjointed data and processes, and automates proposal preparation processes.
Company Overview
For more than 125 years, this global civil, building, and specialty construction company with more than 600 employees has provided diversified general contracting and design-build services throughout the world. The company is known for complex building project commitments and the ability to perform large, complex transportation and civil construction.
The Challenge: Unify multiple businesses operating independently and using different CRM systems
The company’s 15 business units, operating across the US and the Western Pacific, were using different, disconnected CRM systems, including Deltek Vision and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This situation created siloes, not only of disconnected data, but of disjointed marketing and business development processes, impacting the company’s ability to accurately forecast revenue.
The decision was made to seek a single, enterprise-wide, integrated CRM solution that would enable the company to create consistent, streamlined processes and data models. The right solution would strengthen key areas like business development and lower the cost of ownership while facilitating change management by encouraging employees across all business units to adopt the new system. The solution would need to:
- Unify all business units under one CRM platform, replacing multiple disparate CRM systems, spreadsheets, and Word documents with a single source of truth for entering and updating marketing data, managing new business pursuits, and reporting on their pipeline
- Provide the scalability and sophistication to support a large, diverse construction company with multiple business units operating in different industries and market sectors
- Manage processes unique to construction companies, including sales planning, long-lead opportunity management, project experience tracking, corporate communications, and marketing proposal development
- Integrate with key business software systems like JD Edwards (ERP) and Dodge Global Network (lead tracking) to consolidate information and provide a 360-degree view of clients and projects
User adoption was also a key element of this initiative, as each of the business units was accustomed to running independently. The initial willingness to move to a common CRM varied across the company, so the company knew it would need to demonstrate the system’s usability as quickly as possible to gain the confidence and cooperation of all the business units. Therefore, it was vital for the new system to facilitate change management.
The Solution: A single, integrated CRM platform
After evaluating several vendors, including Deltek and Salesforce, the company decided on HSO and construction360. Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, construction360 is a cloud-based CRM platform specifically designed for construction companies and backed by a powerful Microsoft technology platform. construction360 provides a familiar Microsoft-centric user interface, unmatched cloud security, and native integration with Microsoft 365 (Office) and other Microsoft tools and applications that would support user adoption. The solution also included integration with JD Edwards and Dodge Global Network and provided the company with a newly defined, enterprise-wide data structure to unify reporting capabilities.
To support a delicate change management situation, HSO and the company used a phased approach, starting by bringing two of the 15 business units onto construction360. After demonstrating the success of the move, the team was able to migrate the remainder of the business units at a consistent pace over time.
The Benefits: Improved business development practices across the organization … and much more
The construction360 solution drove automation across the company’s business and streamlined key processes to provide:
- Visibility into client and partner interactions across the entire organization in a single place, enabling business development teams to improve pursuit intelligence, build a stronger pipeline, and take better advantage of cross-selling opportunities
- Document assembly features that enable marketing and business development teams to dynamically generate proposal documents —such as resumes and project sheets—out of the system, speeding up proposal preparation
- Onboarding of new business units—as new business units are created or added to the company, the software allows the easy onboarding of these businesses and offers continued expansion of the existing system
- A low total cost of ownership by leveraging a single centralized application and technology platform
- Ease of use for internal users, facilitating better user adoption
- A robust suite of standard reports and queries, providing the leadership team with full visibility into all clients, projects, and pursuits, and facilitating the ability to make informed business decisions
- Accurate and complete data across the entire company, with easy access to data to enable ad-hoc queries and analysis
- Support for compliance with regulatory and SOX Section 404 requirements
With construction360, this fast-growing company tackled big challenges that cleared the way for continued growth and success. Data is now in a centralized location as a trusted, single source of truth, processes have been automated, business development is managing a strong pipeline, and the leadership team has the visibility to guide the company in the right direction.
As a company that has grown by acquisition, construction360’s powerful, easy-to-use tools and familiar user interface have helped bring employees across all business units comfortably into the fold, preserving these valuable assets and paving the way for continued future expansion.