One Source of the Truth for Campion Homes
Scottish homebuilder Campion Homes pride themselves on delivering quality and choice. Awarded a coveted Home Builder Federation CSS 5 star rating, they have been building exceptional properties, for both the affordable housing and private sector, on attractive and thoughtfully designed developments for over 30 years.
Challenge
Campion Homes wanted to transform their existing solutions and processes. Having gone through a significant period of growth they were aiming to make the transition to a steady state growth. However, their existing systems and spreadsheet-based processes posed a major barrier to them achieving this.
Solution
COINS Construction Cloud is a powerful collection of value-added, construction-specific digital solutions, which would help Campion Homes integrate all aspects of their business, providing a central platform for them to achieve a single source of truth as well as to rationalise their processes.
Project Details
Background
Susan Jackson, Joint Managing Director of Campion Homes realised that to grow their business a major change was needed, one which would transform not only their current construction technology and systems, but also their processes – integrating all aspects of their business. It was critical for them to achieve a single source of truth to identify margin savings and performance insights.
Supporting business growth
Campion Homes had gone through a significant growth period, with turnover doubling in the period ending June 2017. They were facing a major technological challenge, as their existing systems were unable to support their future objective of steady state growth. Not only were the existing core commercial and finance packages inflexible, they had outgrown their contract costing package, and a huge amount of manual intervention was required. Campion Homes also needed the ability to identify business insights – specifically around reporting functionality which was critical for them to identify where they could make margin improvements.
We were a business that was operating with far too many spreadsheets.
Susan Jackson, Joint Managing Director, Campion Homes
The first stage in their digital transformation was to enlist the support of Scottish Enterprise. With the expert guidance of an IT consultant specialising in construction ERP solutions, a thorough selection process culminated in COINS being selected as their construction technology partner.
Impressive cashflow forecasting functionality
Campion Homes were particularly impressed with COINS cashflow forecasting functionality, as well as the comprehensive range of applications for managing the entire construction lifecycle. The COINS Choices module was also very important to their business.
We pride ourselves on the significant level of choices which Campion Homes offers to customers, these are one of our key USPs, so management and data analysis of these is really important to us.
Susan Jackson, Managing Director, Campion Homes
A single solution for construction
A big bang approach towards the COINS implementation was planned. The replacement of existing systems, along with the development of new processes, was a major challenge for the delivery team who realised that success is not just about the technology, it’s also about the people who use it.
Rigorous planning was necessary to ensure processes and training were in place for the live date of 1 July 2019 to ensure a seamless transition from the legacy systems to COINS.
Throughout the solution design process in 2018 many of the Campion Homes team ‘bought into’ the new solutions – so we were really pushing against an open door.
Roger Vaux, COINS Business Development Manager
The key person responsible for driving this transformation, from start to finish, has been Joint Managing Director, Susan Jackson. The core delivery team, consisting of herself along with both Campion Homes Director of Surveying and their Head of Finance, were tasked with leading the change, with the clear message that it was happening and that everyone was in it together.
Training was viewed as a top priority – with attendance being non-negotiable. The initial focus was on commercials, finance and payroll as these three systems were all being replaced by COINS, a single solution.
Increased efficiency
In the first year of using COINS Campion Homes have already made huge time savings – with the reduction in time taken to run the weekly payroll saving them a day and a half every week. This efficiency has allowed the payroll assistant to focus more efforts on HR, adding more value into the business.
A new way of working
Implementing COINS has forced Campion Homes to rationalise how they operate and change the way they do things.
COINS SureStart is a construction-specific package of software, business processes and implementation services which includes configuration settings and predefined tables.
By embracing COINS SureStart for homebuilders, Campion Homes have benefitted from sector specific configurations designed to help standardise, simplify and automate their processes.
COINS came to us with Surestart, why would we not learn from the experience of construction technology experts? If there is a better way of doing things and COINS is showing us the way then we should do it that way.
Susan Jackson, Managing Director, Campion Homes
A key change is that the surveying team now have more control and visibility over subcontractor payments, which has the added benefit of saving time for the finance team – estimated at one day a week.
As a result of the process Campion Homes have restructured their budgets, contract costing has been rationalised and is now much more straightforward
One source of the truth
Campion Homes have achieved their goal of a single source of the truth, the mantra they cascade across their business. Replacing multiple spreadsheets and systems with a single, easy-to-use solution, with an intuitive interface accessible to a variety of users has had a huge impact for their construction business.
One source of the truth, that’s what a construction ERP is all about. Data goes into COINS once and is accessible across so many different parts of the system by a variety of users.
Susan Jackson, Managing Director, Campion Homes
Cloud-based remote working
The impact of the sudden construction sector closure on 23 March 2020 in Scotland as a result of the coronavirus has been huge; however Campion Homes have seen unexpected benefits from moving to a cloud-based construction solution, with data being easily accessed from anywhere via a range of devices – from mobile phones, to tablets and computers.
We would have ground to a halt as a business without COINS; we could not have worked our old systems remotely. Everyone working on COINS commercial, finance and payroll was able to seamlessly work from home.
Susan Jackson, Managing Director, Campion Homes
COINS Construction Cloud has enabled Campion Homes to operate in such a way that anybody interacting with them during that period would not have noticed any difference – enabling them to give out the clear message that Campion Homes is still very much open for business.
At the height of the shutdown Campion Homes were able to run their business with a reduced team of only ten people and six directors. Prior to COINS they would have been unable to operate with such a small team, saving them money during this difficult period.
This core team discovered they were easily able to collaborate remotely. COINS Construction Cloud is built and hosted on Microsoft Azure, which integrates with Microsoft 365, compatible with SharePoint, Outlook, Teams and more.
I would say that we would have struggled badly without COINS during lockdown. Web-based access to the system has allowed us to work remotely from each other and be fully aware of what others have been doing. COINS also forces a more standardised approach which allows us to pick up on the work of others more easily.
Director of Surveying, Campion Homes
The finance team have also seen the benefits of remote working using COINS. During the lockdown period they have been able to seamlessly convert to a paperless way of operating with COINS being absolutely integral. This will have long term benefits with the finance team planning to continue this new paperless way of working into the future – a change which could have taken months to achieve but with the support of COINS has been easy to implement.
Future developments
Campion Homes are still on a journey with COINS with plans to ensure the solution is adopted throughout their construction business in the coming year with key areas identified as:
Groundworks - by analysing hard data Campion Homes will be able to determine on which projects to use their own plant division as opposed to subcontracting this activity.
Reporting – a key focus will be ensuring the data they need is entered onto the system in the first place, allowing them to run the reports they need at the end.
Construction Managers – a challenging next step is to integrate site-based processes - with their site managers adopting the COINS mobile construction app.
My absolute goal is that COINS will support business growth without us having to employ more people as we now have the capacity to manage more.
Susan Jackson, Managing Director, Campion Homes
Key Benefits
Increased Efficiency: 600+ hours / time saved every year on payroll processing
Time Saved: 400+ hours / time saved processing subcontractor payments
Increased Collaboration
Paperless Ways of Working
With thanks to:
Susan Jackson, Joint Managing Director, Campion Homes
Roger Vaux, COINS Business Development Manager
Case Study: Jane Redfern
