SAP Business One implementation for Evans & Partners

Evans & Partners, has successfully established a platform for growth and more informed business decision-making thanks to an on-time and on-budget implementation of SAP Business One by DXC Oxygen.

Founded in 2007, Evans & Partners is an independently owned Australian investment house providing comprehensive wealth management solutions for high-net worth individuals, leading institutions and corporations. Evans & Partners is committed to providing its customers with a wide range of services across all facets of their financial needs and affairs. These services are always delivered in a manner that reflects Evans and Partners’ clearly articulated investment philosophy.

Challenge

Finance Manager, Jim Biemond, says the business wanted a greater level of detail around its product and service offerings and wanted to see performance split by division and by state. “We also needed more detail about the revenues and related costs each of our advisors were generating.”

“Prior to implementing SAP we were using MYOB for transactional recording and a number of large spreadsheets for management reporting. That was fine for two dimensional enquiries, but for more granular reporting, it was too cumbersome and time-consuming to produce effectively in a spreadsheet environment.”

Solution

To solve this problem Evans & Partners engaged an independent consultant to run an RFP process to choose a new business management system. After a rigorous assessment of a number of products the firm selected SAP Business One and DXC Oxygen as its system integration partner.

“One of the advantages of the SAP Business One software – and one of the key reasons we selected it – was its ability to be configured out of the box, without a lot of time-consuming development. We were careful to define the scope of what we wanted to achieve and that paid off down the track.”

Biemond says the implementation was a complex, multi-vendor exercise. “We partnered with three other providers, one for expense management, another for customer management and another for report formatting. The SAP system had to talk to all three as there was significant data transfer needed to produce the management reporting we desired.

“SAP was the centre piece of the solution. DXC Oxygen worked very well with us and the other vendors, ensuring that the system design and implementation was coordinated effectively. The integration points work very well and the system has proven relatively easy to maintain.”

Result

Biemond says the most obvious benefit of the system is the amount of time saved producing basic reports. “We no longer have to do any manual rekeying or data manipulation. Thanks to the business automation features of the software, manually refreshing Excel reports month by month is a thing of the past.”

Thanks to the new SAP software, the firm has also been able to absorb an increase in business complexity and transaction volume without increasing its staff numbers.

Capturing data at a more granular level has been another positive, Biemond says. “The service our finance team provides back to the business is more responsive. We can now answer ad-hoc management queries about different products and services in a timely way, and we can provide a greater breadth and depth of information.

Thanks to this type of improved data capture, Evans & Partners is gaining better visibility into various aspects of the business, says Biemond. “The time it takes to serve up the data in an intelligent way has been reduced and is less error prone. Armed with this information the management team can make more informed decisions about strategic initiatives and general business performance.”

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