CCS Cleaning Streamlines Reporting & Planning with Business Central & Solver
14th Feb 2024
A 3rd generation Irish family business, CCS was founded in 1966 to deliver professional contract cleaning services to Ireland’s retail sector. With a reputation for the delivery of service excellence, CCS has grown from strength to strength expanding its business focus to include the specialist cleaning of offices, hotels, and data centers. Today CCS employs thousands of people across Ireland, the UK, France, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
As a growing global business, CCS needed a modern ERP software, one that could commercially support its operations across multiple currencies and borders while ensuring compliance with local tax and statutory requirements. With an eye to the future, it was important that the new software would be able to scale to support continued business growth. In addition, CCS sought a solution that would enhance productivity and efficiency. The company had been using a legacy system that had not been updated in recent years, resulting in a lot of time being spent on inefficient manual processes.
To future-proof their investment, the team at CCS sought to migrate to a cloud-based ERP system, one that would enable the company to remain agile in the future business environment.
Since solution go live CCS has transformed finance and reporting processes. Today the company is uploading data onto the system quickly and efficiently, which in turn is
helping the business streamline costs on the invoicing side. Additionally, document templates, branding and logos are now consistent across the business, whereas prior to the system upgrades, there were different document templates across different countries to comply with local legislation. CFO, Brian Flannery highlighted that “this was very important because when you’re a customer or supplier, you see the companyissued documents, the invoices, and the payment remittance documents. This creates an impression of the brand and the company. The more professional and consistent it looks, the higher the brand recognition.”
CCS has also seen improvements across bank transactions, invoicing and reporting. Bank reconciliation time has been reduced from several days to a few hours. CCS now has a process in place where every Monday morning the relevant CSV bank statements are uploaded to Business Central, and all cash receipts and payments are booked to the bank account. This means that the system is up to date every Monday, and by the end of the month, virtually all the company banking has been done through Business Central.
Driven by the capabilities of Business Central, the company has been prompted to adopt a new philosophy- “always be closing”. Previously, scanning and organising invoices was a time consuming manual task. The introduction of Continia Document Capture allows CCS to enhance its purchase invoice system by automatically scanning and storing the documents. Over 70% of the company’s suppliers are now managed on the system, resulting in a dramatic reduction in invoice processing time and allowing staff to focus time on more value-added tasks.
Regarding reporting, Solver is enabling the automated creation of the company’s monthly management accounts pack. Before this project, the whole close-to-report process took between 20-28 days. CCS expects to reduce this to 14 days by the end of this year, thanks to the introduction of Solver and Business Central.
Speaking on the decision to partner with Storm Technology, Flannery stated; “Storm set themselves apart from competitors by offering training to CCS staff on how to put data migration templates together. This helped the CCS team to further understand the architecture of the new system, ensuring they would be able to input and extract data. While other companies had offered to do the data migration, our team would not have benefitted from the system knowledge or have the ability to self-serve without this training provided.”
“ERP projects are a big undertaking for any organisation. As a CFO you only lead maybe one or two in your career, so you want to make sure that you’re in safe hands with your chosen technology partner. We felt we were in good hands with Storm Technology, given their expertise. We were surprised from our initial consultations to learn that so many of the ERP team were also qualified accountants, which of course helped the discussion massively. We knew that they understood our needs from both a technological perspective and a financial management perspective” concluded Flannery.
To find out more visit storm.ie.
