Microsoft® Small Business Financials - Tolis and Associates
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Situation If you deliver consistently excellent quality in the construction industry, your work helps create visibility and build a good reputation. Most new customers of Tolis and Associates, a builder of above-ground swimming pools, have seen one of the more than 5,000 pools the company has built or have talked to a satisfied customer.
Building swimming pools is a seasonal business—the period of highest activity for Tolis extends from May to September. Customers frequently purchase a pool in the spring and then look for a construction service to build the new pool for the warm season. Tolis’s business grew quickly as the company’s reputation created increasing demand for its services. During the summer, construction crews were busy all over the state, completing jobs quickly and moving on to the next one. Paul Tolis, President and Founder of Tolis and Associates, says, “We want to capture every customer request and respond to it quickly. That’s how we can distinguish ourselves from the competition.”
For more than 20 years, Tolis had operated very successfully with very limited use of technology. The company’s business management was mostly paper-based, but did use Peachtree accounting software and spreadsheets to track financial information. In a time-consuming process, office staff responded to requests from new customers by manually creating proposals and mailing them to customers, who returned the paper forms with a signature and a deposit. The company did not have a Web site where customers could learn about Tolis’s services and find answers to their questions.
Says Paul Tolis, “Tolis reached a point where the company’s office could not keep up with customer demand anymore. I was concerned about maintaining our high quality of service and continuing the growth of the business.” Tolis also wanted to act on opportunities he perceived for improving efficiencies. For example, construction crew leaders had to drive regularly to the office to submit job and payroll records and receive information on new jobs. Tolis knew there had to be other ways of managing such tasks with today’s technologies.
Solution Tolis decided to enlist expertise outside of the organization to assist with restructuring his company’s business processes. Tolis located INTERTEQ Business Solutions, a business engineering services and business solutions consulting company located in South Windsor, Connecticut. INTERTEQ Business Solutions was a fitting resource for Tolis because the consultant organization demonstrated strong expertise in the areas of business and financial management, business processes improvement, and integration of business management software tools and best practices.
Tolis, in collaboration with INTERTEQ Business Solutions, redesigned the way his company manages its business. INTERTEQ Business Solutions implemented an integrated software solution that makes it easier to capture new business and perform customer transactions, and that also supports more efficient management of internal business processes.
Comprehensive Business Software Infrastructure for Small Business Today Tolis has a powerful foundation for its technology infrastructure: the Microsoft® Windows ServerTM 2003 operating system, the Microsoft Windows® XP Professional operating system, Microsoft SQL ServerTM 2000, and Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, which is a complete server solution for small businesses. To facilitate financial management and reporting, Tolis uses Microsoft Business Solutions Small Business Financials North America Edition. INTERTEQ Business Solutions performed a number of technical steps to build Tolis a dependable, extensible technology infrastructure that could help streamline and accelerate business management. INTERTEQ Business Solutions integrated Microsoft Business Solutions Small Business Financials and Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003. The consultants accomplished this integration by using the Microsoft Visual Studio® version 6.0 development system and the Continuum API tool, supported by the Microsoft Visual Basic® development system. To develop stored procedures and Data Transformation Services (DTS) scripts, INTERTEQ Business Solutions used two SQL Server 2000 tools, Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer.
E-Business Tools Integrated with Business Processes Using Internet Information Services 6.0 as the Web server, INTERTEQ Business Solutions developed tolispools.com, a Web site with e-commerce capabilities. Through a section of the site called Proposal Builder, customers can easily prepare their own proposals for pool construction work, submit a deposit, generate a contract, and get a new project on the company’s calendar. For in-house operations, INTERTEQ Business Solutions used Microsoft Office Access 2003 to implement the Proposal Builder with additional functionality for job management and printing of contracts as an Access 2003 database project file (.adp). Microsoft Office Word 2003 serves as the integrated print engine for the Proposal Builder, with contract documents created as smart Word 2003 files with embedded data fields. Proposal Builder integrates with Small Business Financials to facilitate a smooth, complete business process.
Tolis office staff, similar to customers, access the Proposal Builder component of the integrated solution to respond to telephone inquiries. The solution also supports credit card payment processing and facilitates work order management to schedule and manage field crew operations. Crew leaders can connect from remote locations to retrieve new project information, report on completed projects, and submit payroll information. Using a series of DTS scripts scheduled through SQL Server Agent jobs on the internal server, the solution’s external and internal components synchronize customer and business information every 15 minutes.
Benefits "We increased the volume of business we handle and provide even better service to our customers," says Paul Tolis. "Our technology solutions can support the business effectively, no matter how fast and far we grow." In addition to helping Tolis do business more efficiently, the company’s integrated technology infrastructure helps enable branching out into new business opportunities.
Doubled Number of Proposals and Introduced Process Efficiencies Says Tolis, "Without adding staff, we doubled the number of proposals handled at our office. We even reduced training time from two weeks or more to just a few days."
In the past, Tolis hired temporary office workers for the busy season, training them on the company’s business and processes. Tolis now saves the cost of this yearly staffing change. Regular office staff, no longer using a variety of spreadsheets and information sources, can also work with the Proposal Builder to help those customers who would rather call in than use the company’s Web site.
Other efficiencies support the increasing business volume. With the integration of Small Business Financials and Proposal Builder, billing, payment processing, and accounting tasks are fast and straight-forward. Tolis and his team can track the cost and profitability of projects in Small Business Financials. Crew leaders, instead of spending time driving to the office, sign in to the company’s business systems through the Web site. There, they can enter payroll information, update project information, enter customer payments, and receive information on newly scheduled projects. “Our field team leaders spend almost all of their time at customer sites and running projects, not with administrative duties—they get more profitable work done,” says Tolis.
Cut Lead Time and Improved Customer Service Many customers have questions about the details of pool construction. They want to understand how construction will affect their property, how Tolis determines costs, and more. Today the company’s Web site has an extensive frequently asked questions (FAQ) section that helps address many questions, so office staff is no longer engaged in lengthy calls. In planning a construction project, Proposal Builder presents all options for ground preparation, pool bases, and more. In addition, Proposal Builder correctly calculates costs and helps to schedule jobs.
"When customers are better informed, they are more strongly committed to their projects," says Paul Tolis. “And we can now build pools with minimal lead time and satisfy customer expectations.” After the integrated business management solution was implemented, it made good business sense for the company to hire additional installation crews in order to accommodate the number of projects quickly generated through the office. In consequence, the company cut its lead time for starting new projects from up to five weeks down to two weeks or even less.
At project completion, final billing through Small Business Financials is fast and reliable. Small Business Financials tracks all customer and transaction information, so it is easy to review financial and business events.
Increased Potential of New Business Opportunities During the off-season, Tolis field teams have usually only repaired and maintained swimming pools. With flexible, extensible management technology, the company is now reviewing the business case for additional services, such as home repair or snow plowing. Says Paul Tolis, “It is now very easy to plan additional lines of business and offer our technology to support services that help other companies in our industry.”
Sales representatives in retail stores can already access online the Tolis e-commerce tools to help customers with the building and installation of a pool they purchased in the store. Having already received inquiries from New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, Tolis is also evaluating the business proposition of offering management services to non-competing companies. Such businesses could enjoy the benefits of Proposal Builder and Small Business Financials, as Tolis could offer them online access to the Proposal Builder and would provide management of those companies’ financials and other business processes on its own systems. Says Paul Tolis, “Many people in the trade like the freedom and income of being self-employed, but they may not have a business management background. In consequence, service quality suffers, the store referring business to the contractor may have second thoughts, and the contractor may have to handle customer issues as opposed to making money. We can help these small companies operate professionally and support their business management needs for much less than they could on their own.”
Microsoft Business Solutions Microsoft Business Solutions offer integrated business applications and services that allow small and midsize organizations and divisions of large enterprises to connect employees, customers, and suppliers for improved efficiency. The financial management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and analytics applications work with other Microsoft software, including the Microsoft Office System and the Windows operating system, to streamline processes across an entire organization. This gives businesses insight to respond rapidly, plan strategically, and execute quickly. Microsoft Business Solutions are delivered through a worldwide network of channel partners that provide specialized services and local support tailored to a company’s needs
Microsoft® Small Business Financials - Tolis and Associates
