Data Management is the Key to Managing the Flow of Information
THE CLIENT
Our client is a leading provider of midstream services in North America. Entrance was engaged by this client to unify a disorganized structure that spread data across many sources, including SharePoint, Excel and the accounting system.
THE PROBLEM
Since the client’s data was spread across a number of systems, any given data point had anywhere from two to three different naming conventions, which led to confusion and duplication. A specific pain point was that employees had no default job title, so they were often billed at a higher or lower rate than they should have been.
In addition, there was no accountability between actual run-time of equipment and billing, and the client knew that money was being lost as a result.
THE SOLUTION
Entrance built a custom software application that creates a record for each completed job, including specific work performed and a default billing rate by employee. There is now a single naming convention across the flow of data, thus eliminating the previous confusion and billing errors. A recent addition to the field data capture application integrates data from a third party system that monitors the actual run-time of equipment.
The application receives this data in real time and correlates it to the billing data. Now, if operations logs billing for six hours of use but the actual equipment run-time was eight hours it is readily apparent from a report and may be easily corrected. The main benefit of this data management and field data capture system is that the client can ensure that all work performed is billed correctly, which will result in direct improvements in cash flow. The benefits in terms of reliable transfer and storage of data have already proved themselves out as well. As a result of having several years’ worth of data to analyze, our client was able to test pricing scenarios and make small adjustments to their pricing strategy, improving their bottom line by five million dollars.
For more on how data management can help support your company goals, check out this post…