Demand Manager helps Australian based companies get access to financing for clean energy upgrades such as solar power, energy efficient lighting upgrades, etc. They help bring money to the the table to make those projects happen. But with each project, there is a raft of paperwork and information they need to process to get access to the required financing.
Improving Project Efficiency
Jeff Bye of Demand Manager was looking for a project management system that could help handle a larger volume of projects. He searched for the system that would best fit their needs and chose HighGear. Since implementing the enterprise level task management system, the company has been able to process a much larger amount of projects. Bye was pleasantly surprised to find out they could give customers access to the system. Customers could upload documents directly into HighGear bypassing e-mail or a DropBox solution.
But the biggest impact on their workplace has been defining the process for how they look at their projects. In addition to the benefits of record keeping, information and access from anywhere in the world, it gives staff members a clear structure of what information they need to collect, how they need to process it, and how they save that information.
Reducing the Cost of Audits
A large unexpected cost savings came in the way of auditing compliance. Demand Manager is regularly audited, about 10 to 12 times a year. These audits were costing the company $30,000 per audit due to the need of the auditors to physically come out to their office and go through their paperwork manually. Auditors would spend a great deal of time on site to complete all the necessary paperwork. Since the implementation of HighGear, auditors are given direct access to the system and permitted to login to the appropriate files in electronic format. Auditors can now do 99% of the audit from their own office, on their own time. A cost savings of $15,000 per audit is directly attributable to HighGear.
Streamlining Operations
Bye had initially been concerned that the cloud-hosted software system was housed in the United States and with different time zones, tech support and customer service might be an issue. He was pleasantly surprised to find no issues with the service provided. Even with a few installation glitches in the beginning, he was very happy with how issues were handled by tech support at all hours. Bye stated, “We can be traveling around the world on all different time zones and we can all access the same information in real time. I found myself on the banks of the Seine River one day processing jobs in HighGear, when I had some extra time to kill.”
HighGear provides a non-repudiated record of compliance that managers trust and auditors love. Every change from individual work history to system wide configurations is recorded for a high level of scrutiny. Compliance management software with project and workflow management built in has had a very positive impact on Demand Manager.