UniPhi 17 success seen in the 100% growth rate since live
Firstly, we'd like to apologise for the radio silence these past couple of months. Our excuse? New business!
UniPhi 17 has proven to be a great success, with some bedding down of the new features (thanks bleeding edge clients, we love you). In addition to rolling out the software to dozens of new customers during August and September, we've also been coping (like many others) with all staff in lock down. However, being glass overflowing kind of people, the main focus of the past two months has been the exciting growth in the business.
UniPhi is supporting well over AUD100bn in infrastructure projects including some significantly high profile major works. In the last two months, 5 new major projects have been added to this list. In coming months we'll be publishing case studies on each of these as we work through the permissions process and pass enough time to be able to demonstrate the significant benefits we are bringing to these ventures.
Expanded use - collaboration across silos
Admittedly, our support for these projects traditionally has been niche. A bit of JV management here, design issues management there, but never all the features working together as designed. Due to UniPhi 17, four of the new deployments are finally being designed to leverage at least 50% of the functionality that exists in our application. One exciting example of this brings together a virtuous flow of issues management through to variation claim and invoice.
UniPhi's issues management module is the most value adding module in the system. Design teams on major projects are starting to realise this and are capturing their issues as an when they occur in UniPhi (with some even converting risks to issues as they trend to something that could lead to a variation). Collaboration and commentary on the issue, along with actions to resolve it are logged over time. Some get resolved, others become possible variations.
These possible variations are added to UniPhi's contracts module (now that this is being used by the JV for invoicing) and this surreptitiously updates the EAC. The issue is linked to this possible variation and the documents module documents the quote for the client to review. Comments will be maintained against the original issue but the information captured will be displayed contextually in no less than 7 places throughout the application. This goes a massive way to unlocking tacit knowledge as people in other silos start to learn about issues across the program and can input into their resolution.
Finally, if approved, the variation status changes and is ready to be invoiced against. Resource loads can be applied against it and this variation will automatically appear in peoples time-sheets. As it is delivered, progress gets updated, the invoice goes out the door and should a dispute occur, all the information from day 1 to day 100 is there for review by anyone with a UniPhi license.
Overseas expansion
It is also exciting to announce 5 new deployments commencing in Europe. These major sales successes are the fruits of 2 years of sales effort including a fortuitous 2020 roadshow that completed in February of that year. More announcements will be forthcoming on these ventures soon.
Virtuous Circle Enterprise Resource Planning
We've also added dozens of enterprise deployments for small and medium enterprises to manage their businesses. UniPhi 17 finally delivers on our vision (18 years on) of a virtuous circle enterprise resource planning system that:
- Captures and tracks the conversion of prospects and leads
- Assesses the go/no go opportunities of bids to these leads
- Facilitates the development of estimates for new bids
- Risk adjusts both the cash flow and resource effort profile of these bids
- Seamlessly converts these bids to wins or losses providing key CRM sales metrics automatically
- Baselines, cash flow, EAC and resource effort information
- Supports the updating of estimates to complete across all three elements above (i.e. cash flow, EAC and resource profiling)
- Captures time-sheet data with distributed data capture of progress through updated effort estimates and collaborative commentary
- Invoices for completed work as well as managing purchasing through to supplier payments
- Manage the assessment of earned value against effort and baseline
- Report profit to date and at completion
- Track backlog and booked to burn
- Consolidate all of the above into portfolio based information on any of the above matrices (e.g. total backlog, sector profitability, company booked to burn, corporate cash flow, over and under utilised staff etc).
- Use all of this information to generate new leads and the circle is complete.
Can anyone name a system that does all of the above and for under AUD1,000/user/year (excluding timesheet users which are considerably less).
How did we do it? The critical success item was realising that all this data supports each other. By developing cross functional software, you break down not only the silos of people but also the silos of systems. Time-sheet information is needed for invoicing, earned value and estimate to complete resource planning so why not have these systems along with your time-sheets so the data just flows to these modules automatically. A fee included in a bid should become the contract value post bid via the changing of its status, not the re-entering of it into the job system from the submission system. a project commences at opportunity stage and can be tracked pre-award through to completion.....etc etc.
One major benefit to this design that was not foreseen is the benefit of integrating time-sheets into an ERP and lead to the one thing our users could do to get even more value out of our product. Time-sheets have to be entered by everyone. This distributed data capture model is at the heart of our design but it has been difficult to challenge people to open the system up to the entire ecosystem of project participants. Time-sheets gives us that opportunity and once we realised this, we have added more and more features to it to coax the project controls community into using systems to gather information rather than meetings to do so.
Try it out, it is an amazing productivity improver!
