Company:
GB Card & Partners
Sector:
Consulting Engineers
Location:
UK
Website:
Job Costing
CRM
QA
Human Resources
As a niche business with increasing demand, Geoffrey Card, Managing Director of GB Card & Partners, saw that their existing time and project management approach needed to change in order to support and future-proof the rapidly growing business.
Their existing system was spreadsheet based, making it time consuming to capture and subsequently examine information, measure profitability, and generate reports.
“As a consultancy we sell expertise and intelligent design solutions, not a tangible product that you can put a unit price on,” says Geoffrey. “Our team handle projects in a number of countries, so we needed a system that would allow us to easily input project cost profiles and on-going variations in real time wherever we are operating in the world. We also needed to be able to drill down and examine time spent against any given project so that we can ensure we are providing the best service for our clients whilst optimising resource efficiency wherever possible.”
The system selected also needed to be able to examine the profitability of projects and of the business. In addition to all this, GB Card & Partners wanted something that would support them in developing their Quality Assurance system so that they comply with ISO 9001 going forward.
After researching the market and identifying the project management systems available that would meets their needs, several systems were trialled to ensure that whichever system was chosen was a good fit with GB Card & Partners’ business model and how its employees work.
“As well as delivering everything we needed from a new practice management system, Rapport3’s interface stood out as being much more intuitive than the others during trialing” explains Geoffrey. “It has a synergy with how we think as engineers and this logical set-up has helped with getting the system up and running with very few difficulties.”
The client
The client
Rapport3 has only been operational for a short while, but it is already hitting GB Card & Partners’ key objectives for implementing a new system. Invoicing in particular is seeing major time savings, as Geoffrey explains:
“Creating an invoice is much simpler now, with Rapport3 automatically capturing time and expenses against each project for us. We’re engineers, not accountants and want to optimise our time designing solutions for clients.”
The HR and Contacts modules are also paying dividends, allowing GB Card & Partners to manage resources and availability accurately, keep track of qualifications, specialisms and CPD, and ensure clients are assigned team members that they can build or have built a good working relationship with. All this enables them to hand pick the best team for each job.
Requirements
Requirements
The solution
The solution