Urban Solutions – Improving our business with ROLL
ROLL User: Lorenzo Canal
The Business: Urban Solutions
Industry: Engineering Consultancy
Urban Solutions Limited is an engineering project management consultancy based in Auckland, New Zealand. They are a team of qualified engineers and project management professionals who work to initiate, plan, procure and deliver capital works projects for both the private and public sectors.
Software Before ROLL
Mainly spreadsheets
Life before ROLL
Urban Solutions were struggling with a lack of transparency and visibility over the business. To get the required information on how projects and the business was performing, time consuming spreadsheets were employed which, whilst presenting the required information back to the business team, also soaked up valuable time and resources with inefficient process.
In addition, Urban Solutions wanted to run a business where their staff and individual managers were empowered to manage their own projects directly. For this to happen, they needed a system that would enable them to share job information across the team so everyone had visibility over the projects they were involved with.
Although using Xero, end of month invoicing was time consuming and very much a manual process. The process also meant that tying project financial information to other project information was difficult and resulted in a lack of full visibility over how individual projects were progressing.
As the company grew, the team at Urban Solutions new that the current setup was not sustainable and a new software solution would be required that would facilitate the growth of the business.
ROLL experience in one sentence
“ROLL is a natural fit to improving our business and it has just worked really really well and when we’ve had an issue, the team at ROLL have been really responsive.”
— Lorenzo Canal
More detail
The Urban Solutions team favour usability over total functionality. When looking for a software solution, they compared ROLL to WorkflowMax. Whilst WorkflowMax had a lot of functionality, it was inherently unusable and inflexible. For Urban Solutions, user uptake was important and the excellent user interface with ROLL meant high user uptake and adoption within the team.
Managing Director, Lorenzo Canal: “With ROLL we received a really elegant workflow system that gives visibility from job leads through to all projects in progress.”
Effectively, with ROLL, they “knew where they were at”.
The flexibility built into he system makes the product inherently usable and is another reason why ROLL was chosen over WorkflowMax. “ROLL has the combination of rules and flexibility right which results in fast process and less time on administration work company wide”.
One Year On
A full year on with ROLL and Urban Solutions is a growing, vibrant company with ROLL being central to the way they work and the culture in the business.
“For the team, ROLL is used as much as Outlook and their other tools. ROLL gives them the visibility they need to carry out their jobs efficiently and they like using the product.”
Invoicing is down to a couple of hours at month end and is much more automated and streamlined. The appropriate checks and balances are inherent in the system without convoluting the process and enable management to quickly check on individual project health whilst generating invoices.
The ability to see financial predictions based on real project data is hugely valuable and with Xero providing the historical view over business performance and ROLL providing the future view, Urban Solutions have a software solution that clearly gives the team the information they need to drive and grow the business.
More information
Urban Solutions: urbansolutions.co.nz
Managing Director: Lorenzo Canal