

Established 75 years ago, we seek to continually provide high-quality construction services. “The experience working with Cargas was awesome.Morley Builders’ entire business philosophy is based on the “long-term” view.

They built something that works for us,” said Smith. They didn’t try to fit us into some sort of out-of-the-box solution. “They made sure they understood our business and developed a solution in response to that. He said Cargas involved the right experts at each stage. “That built confidence and people embraced it.”įrom the smooth handoff from Cargas’s sales team to its operations group for implementation to its Power BI engineer and analyst, Smith said he felt well-supported throughout the entire process.

But with this, we could start fresh and think through every step of the process.” Smith shared. We had no user confidence in the old system. “It’s really intuitive and works well for our team. It doesn’t have the “noise” their former system had. Moreover, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM’s easy-to-navigate interface allows Benchmark users to drill down into individual project information and get a clear picture of what’s happening. Smith explained, “With everything front and center, it has opened the doors to thinking about what other metrics we might track for better business planning.” All data is in one place, and Cargas set up a powerful “Work in Progress and Opportunities” Power BI dashboard that readily lets Smith and others see information in a meaningful and actionable way. Now, Power BI extracts and centralizes sales data from the CRM and recorded revenue data from accounting’s Excel files. We could see about four months out, but when predicting beyond that - trying to do planning even a year out - our headlights were dim,” explained Smith. “With our former solution, we didn’t have good headlights on what was coming our way. They can more effectively assess the influx of projects coming the company’s way and predict future financial performance and staffing needs. The Cargas solution has given Benchmark better long-term visibility. The industry slowed down during the spring and summer of 2020, so Smith and others at Benchmark began to research their options.Įxpanded Business Forecasting and Decision-Making Capabilities via Centralized, Streamlined Data
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However, the company was busy, and they never had enough time to figure out how to improve the system or look for alternatives. People weren’t using it because we had to jump through hoops to make it do what we needed it to,” Smith explained. “The solution wasn’t working for a variety of reasons, and we needed to make a change. Smith also shared that Benchmark’s previous CRM had no effective dashboards to help him monitor forecasted vs. “If for whatever reason a project was pushed out, we had to manually re-plug the information into the system,” said Smith. The system didn’t automatically adjust the monthly forecasts to reflect the new project timelines if delays occurred. Smith’s business development team entered estimated monthly revenues into the system for upcoming contracted projects based on their projected start and completion dates.
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“Every time we’d go into it, we had to think, ‘How do I do this?’ It involved a lot of clicking, and the user screens had many things we didn’t use - lots of noise.”īenchmark’s previous CRM also required extra manual effort when forecasting month-by-month project revenue. Smith explained the difficulties of entering information into the system. It became a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts - all kinds of things patched together - and didn’t accomplish much.” “We held onto it for a long time, and it existed through three VPs of Marketing, all of whom put their stamp on it. “We went from using informal excel sheets to a complicated system that was way more than what was needed,” shared Smith. As a service company, Benchmark didn’t need much of the inherent functionality in the system. Benchmark Construction purchased the solution nearly a decade ago, unaware it was too complex for their particular needs. A Cumbersome CRM and Short-Sighted Business InsightsĪccording to Stuart Smith, Benchmark’s Vice President of Market Growth, the company struggled with an overly-complicated, cumbersome CRM.
