Powering Wilson Construction with finance insight

Key results snapshot

Automated monthly financial statements and created work-in-progress (WIP) reports.

Saved up to 4 days per month on weekly reporting, and up to 2 weeks per month for GL and WIP reporting.

Recognize margin fade in a timely and accurate manner.

Who is Wilson Construction?

Wilson Construction Company specializes in the design and construction of vital electric utility infrastructure needed by power providers across the United States and beyond. Wilson Construction provides infinite solutions and exceptional results for satisfied clients through a collaborative team environment and has worked on projects across the United States, Canada, American Samoa, and Indonesia.

Business challenges

Wilson Construction, one of the largest privately held utility construction companies in the United States, wanted insight into their operational and financial performance without the delays associated with manually compiling reports and validating numbers.

Wilson Construction identified several key business drivers as part of their decision to evaluate a Financial Performance Management platform, including a holistic view of their company’s operations, automation without relying on spreadsheets, and increased confidence in the data they share with stakeholders. Additionally, the finance team wanted to provide quicker and more consistent project data to their operations department.

Applications deployed

Financial Planning and Analysis

System integrations

Forecasting job revenue has vastly improved with Prophix. We now interface our ERP, project scheduling, and bid management platforms with Prophix. Previously, we were gathering multiple spreadsheets for 100+ different projects with estimated monthly billing and compiling it all into a single Excel spreadsheet. We can now forecast production based on actual quantities coming from MS Project and compare it to the budget to determine if a project is tracking on margin.

Marty Gardner

CFO, Wilson Construction

Why Prophix

When Wilson Construction began to evaluate the best solutions to fit their needs, they narrowed their selection to Adaptive Insights and Prophix. Ultimately, Wilson Construction went with Prophix because:

The flexibility to manage and develop reporting capabilities was better suited to a project-based construction company.
The finance team could configure security by role or individual user down to specific projects or GL accounts.
Dashboards allowed their team to visualize data and trends for their operations team.

Key results

Wilson Construction integrated Prophix with three systems: Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate (ERP), MS Project Enterprise (project scheduling), and Cosential (bid management). The finance team bases their business operations on six different models including finance, job cost reporting, currency, personnel planning, equipment planning, and weekly production.

Now, Wilson Construction takes a company-wide, collaborative approach by involving various departments in their financial processes, including finance, project managers, the president and executive team, and their safety, helicopter, and environment departments, so each department can access the data that is relevant to them.

With Prophix, Wilson Construction was able to:

Automate their monthly financial statements, create a work-in-progress (WIP) report, and establish a robust budgeting process.

Create a forecast process that incorporates data from their ERP, project scheduling, and bid management platforms.

Increased the value of their ERP solution by integrating it instead of replacing it.

Save up to four days a month for weekly reporting and up to two weeks per month for GL and WIP reporting.

Provide project managers with job cost reporting, weekly labor and equipment costs and hours, billings and receivables, and monthly gross margin reports.

Give the executive team a holistic view of company KPI metrics and trending revenue and margin by customer, project manager, business unit, and region.

Access reporting of labor hours to measure safety metrics and support works compensation and OSHA metrics reporting.

Measure the helicopter department’s direct and indirect costs versus flight hour changes.

Track the direct costs and hours against a project’s environmental budget.

Integrate budgeting and forecasting of equipment purchases and reporting on equipment hours versus units of production.

Provide accurate and timely information due to the automation of the nightly interface process from Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate.

Identify margin fade quickly to flag projects that indicate underperformance or overperformance against budget and adjust accordingly or proactively adjust.