The all-in-one solution suitable for every purpose – sought and found
Success story kanalprofi
kanalprofi GmbH offers its customers comprehensive services around the canal. The individual share of the approximately 1,300 projects per year increased continuously and finally provided the impetus for the search for a professional project management software. With Projektron BCS, kanalprofi GmbH found the right solution for its projects and at the same time standardised other areas.
kanalprofi GmbH has been active in the field of sewer inspection, cleaning and leak testing since 1999. Over the years, further services have been added to complete the portfolio for our customers. We currently also offer the cleaning of branched sewer networks, as well as their surveying and sewer rehabilitation in closed construction. With 80 employees and 18 inspection vehicles, 5 rehabilitation vehicles and 4 cleaning vehicles, we are currently a relatively large company in this sector. In the meantime, we have spun off our rehabilitation crews into an independent company, kp-kanalsanierung GmbH.
Our customers are mainly public clients as well as industrial companies and engineering offices. In large projects, we also cooperate with other companies in our sector.
The search for a project management tool
As a service company, we are always measuring the extent to which we can respond to the needs of our clients. For some time now, a trend has been emerging here to which we had to react as quickly as possible: In almost all customer projects, higher and higher individual shares resulted. With our previous tools, which largely consisted of historically grown lists and tables, we could no longer do justice to this development.
Our endeavour to respond to these individual characteristics, especially with regard to teamwork, gave us the task of finding a software that meets our requirements and those of our customers. Requirements such as adaptability, a realistic budget, a reasonable implementation time and the ability to run on as many devices as possible were only the tip of the iceberg. In addition, the software they were looking for should help to process the approx. 1,300 small projects per year using templates, workflows and automated processes. The aim was to guide the day-to-day business in an orderly manner and make it easier to plan.
Since we had not used any software in the area of project planning until then, we wanted to use the opportunity to standardise other areas on the software side with the corresponding decision. Since, in our experience, another isolated solution is not suitable for the future, we decided to harmonise as many areas as possible on the software side and to cover them with the new product. At the end of the day, we were looking for the well-known "egg-sucking lizard", because in addition to the new department, we also wanted to renew the areas of quotation preparation, CRM, invoicing, DMS and controlling and equip them with a uniform software solution.
Reasons for Projektron BCS
After we had sifted through various software products, we came to a shortlist based on the offers we had asked for in each case. A trade fair in our region gave us the opportunity to experience many of these programmes in action. Among other things, we informed ourselves about the requested system at the Projektron GmbH stand and had it demonstrated to us. It quickly became clear to us that we had possibly found our sought-after "egg-laying pillow in the wilderness". We particularly liked the licence model and the costs for the introduction and continuation of the programme in the future, which did not seem utopian even for our size.
After we had gained a thoroughly positive impression at the trade fair, especially through the presentation of the employee on site, this impression was confirmed in an agreed appointment at our company. In a short workshop, we went through the details and the various options of BCS and were briefly shown ways in which we could benefit from using the programme.
The combination of these reasons led to our decision to use BCS.
BCS in use
The introduction of BCS was carried out by the employee of Projektron who was already familiar to us. In a 2-day introductory workshop, the employee installed and configured the programme according to our wishes. Several further appointments, which served the purpose of customisation, rounded off the introduction phase. We were able to get started with the core functions of the software very quickly. Other functions, such as invoicing, were to be implemented in later stages.
We have been working productively with BCS since 2011. In the meantime, all of our 10 office staff work with the programme. Through the introduction of BCS, we work together on our projects in a wide variety of functions.
Conclusion
The decision in 2011 to coordinate our projects with a professional project management software and to prepare them accordingly was the only right one. This was the only way to cope with the constant increase in complexity and the number of individual projects. It is hard to imagine how we would have been able to cope with this change without BCS.
We are currently expanding the project processing function, which is crucial for us, by automating more, especially in project preparation. The planned implementation of invoicing and the related controlling are currently on hold due to too many sector-specific approaches. For this we still need many adjustments in BCS via individual development.
We are very satisfied with the current status of the software and its current use. The next step will be to involve our work crews and bring the software directly to our vehicles in the form of tablets.
