REMCAN Projects service offerings initially founded on railroad culvert maintenance as a Langley, BC firm to help railroads maintain tracks and install culverts. The firm expanded those services and has since grown into a multi-faceted, nationally recognized maintenance and construction rail industry leader in Canada.
As opportunities arose, the company expanded its bridges and structures services to include railway maintenance, railway construction, civil construction, signals and communications, and Light Rail Transit. REMCAN’s goal is to be the safest, most responsive, and innovative contracting firm in the North American rail industry.
REMCAN Projects had been running on a patchwork of disconnected systems including legacy Sage that required a lot of manual work. “REMCAN had begun to max out the number of authorized users they were allotted in the system. This forced the team to push accounting, billing, and approvals outside the system to keep up with the rapid growth,” says Jason Thomas, President of REMCAN.
Manual Entry Headaches
Without the ability to upload data automatically, every figure was entered manually, including a 200-page fuel bill that was input into Excel and then in Sage. “That one invoice took three to five days to enter into the system,” says Andrea Deakove, Project Lead.
Getting the accounting clerk to provide a three-year history of some 120 credit cards in use across the business proved challenging as well. “The Visa program the business operated under saved roughly $3,400 annually but there was one person who manually entered every single card, which ended up turning into 25 percent of her time,” Andrea says.
Field employees entered hours and expenses, known as field ticket reports, in a spreadsheet or on a piece of paper that was then photographed and faxed or emailed. “Then the billing team and the payroll team would type them twice, once for billing and then a second time so they could run payroll.”
“Last year we processed 40,000 field ticket reports,” Andrea says, illustrating the enormity of the manual processes.
REMCAN couldn’t sustain and scale with such rapid growth without adding a lot more people. “We had many shared offices with three people, and the back office was outgrowing their space.”
The team first secured back-end infrastructure to support a modern ERP, high speed internet, smart phones, and wireless devices. Then they began the search for an ERP, one that could seamlessly connect to its field ticket program, had Cloud access, and was affordable.