Global Diving & Salvage Case Study
Providing an accounting and operations platform with depth.
From retrieving sunken fishing boats in Puget Sound, to securing runaway oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, to dam and bridge construction projects in Colorado, the professional crews of Global Diving & Salvage travel the country tackling some of the most technical and dangerous tasks imaginable. Back in the company’s Seattle headquarters, the staff relies on Sage MAS 90 ERP, and is ably supported by ICS Support to successfully manage both its projects and its finances.
Coming Up For Air
The company had been using the core financial modules of Sage MAS 90 ERP for several years when Trinity Yeung joined the company as controller. “There was a real disconnect between accounting and operations that resulted in a lot of duplicate data entry and potential for errors. The company was tracking jobs manually, and invoicing out of Excel - rekeying the totals into Sage MAS 90,” she recalls. “It was my goal to bring these activities into the software, but we needed the right tools to do it.”
Integrated Computer Systems Support consultants reviewed the company’s operations and strategized with management about how to meet current needs and provide a strong platform for growth. Among ICS Support’s recommendations were an upgrade to the most current version of Sage MAS 90 ERP, and the implementation of JobOps, a comprehensive job management solution tightly integrated with Sage MAS 90 ERP. “ICS Support showed us how JobOps could help us manage both our construction and our salvage projects, and generate billings directly from the software,” Yeung says.
Efficient Union Payroll
Processing payroll for Global Diving & Salvage’s more than 250 employees is complex. Divers are members of various unions, and many of the company’s projects are government contracts. “We need to produce a Certified Payroll Report, and individual reports to the various unions across all the jurisdictions we operate in,” explains Yeung. It’s not enough to track hours worked, the company must track the job code, union, date and time worked, overtime pay, and hazard pay. “I used to have to sort through paper time cards to get this information,” says Yeung.
Using the Time Tracker component of JobOps, the company records the hours worked by each diver by day, and in what job capacity they were working. On payday, those hours are automatically transferred in the Sage MAS 90 Payroll module. “It used to take me two days to process payroll for 50 people,” recalls Yeung. “Now we process more than 250 employees in the same amount of time.”
More Profitable Projects
With JobOps, employee hours can be posted to a project at any time. This provides management with an up-to-date picture of labor costs and ensures that any cost overruns to be identified while the company can still has time to react - not days or weeks later.
“Our jobs are more profitable now,” says Yeung. “In part because we have real-time numbers and can adjust our techniques during the job if we see costs rising in a certain area.” In addition, the estimators have access to comprehensive details of past jobs, allowing them to improve the accuracy of future estimates. Equipment costing and utilization is fully tracked within Job Ops, allowing the Global Diving & Salvage to expense the cost of the equipment it uses on its projects. “We didn’t have accurate equipment cost figures before JobOps,” says Yeung. “For example, now we can track the hours of usage on the compressor and expense the cost of equipment to the job.”
Effective Work Flow
Invoicing is now performed entirely within Sage MAS 90 ERP. This eliminates the duplicate data entry and associated errors and allows Yeung and her staff to quickly address customer billing questions. “Before we only had summary data in Sage MAS 90, so we often had to refer customer questions to our job managers. Now that we have full invoice detail, we can answer most questions right away,” she says.
ICS showed Global Diving & Salvage how to configure the Alerts module to notify Yeung of important occurrences within the database. “When a new customer is added, or when a job is under-billed or over budget, I get an e-mail message telling me so,” explains Yeung. She considers these notifications an essential part of the company’s project and financial management strategy, “I’m able to help keep projects on track, and ensure billings are completed on time.”
Secure Data Access
In the past, management restricted use of the software due to security concerns. The role-based security which is now part of Sage MAS 90 ERP allayed those concerns. ICS showed Yeung how to set up security roles, such as Accounts Payable Entry Clerk, or Payroll Administrator, assign specific rights to those roles, and then assign those roles to users. Now, the company can control for each task which users have View, Create, Modify, or Delete privileges. Data fields on screens can be hidden from view or designated as view only, allowing the company to confidently provide the appropriate level of access to each employee. In addition, Sage MAS 90 ERP maintains a complete audit trail of changes made to the database, including the user ID and date of the change. “Management has a great deal of confidence in the security of our data now,” says Yeung.
“I trust Integrated Computer Systems Support to provide honest, straightforward answers to my questions. I don’t feel like they’re just trying to sell me something; rather that they’re trying to help us get the most from the software. Everything they do is geared at minimizing the impact to our business, while maximizing the gain we achieve from the software.”
- Trinity Yeung, Controller, Global Diving & Salvage