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USE OF ERP SYSTEMS ON THE RISE AS MORE BUSINESSES SEE THE BENEFITS
OF MANAGING ACTIVITIES ON A PROJECT BASIS
Montreal, Oct. 23, 2003 - By 2004, due to business' increasing collaborative
nature, 80% of enterprises operating in an e-commerce or project-based
environment will require the use of integrated, intercompany-capable project
accounting systems, a research conducted by the Gartner Group suggested.
Widely used by consultants and asset-intensive industries, the use of
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for project management has
also expanded to other industries.
ERP systems are a set of applications designed to improve business process
by automating management tasks and making information readily available
through the sharing or integration of data between the administrative,
accounting and human resources departments of an organization.
"Project management with ERP systems used to be a work structure
mainly adopted by engineering firms," said Jean-Claude Coutu, a Quebec
project management expert and founding-president of JOVACO Solutions,
a software company specialized in management solutions. Today, he said
"project-based ERP systems are also being implemented in non-profit
organizations, marketing firms, architectural companies and custom manufacturers,
too. Business owners and management executives from other industries are
increasingly adopting this structure and its technologies because they
allow flexibility and streamline company activities all at once.”
There is a greater success rate for completing projects
on time and within budget when a company monitors its
activities with a project control software, explained
Coutu who presented a conference on the topic last week,
as part of his firm's 20th anniversary celebration.
The Montreal-based software company invited members
of the business community to the conference to study
how project management supported by ERP systems can
be a cost efficient business structure to save time
and money.
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HELPING COMPANIES REAP REAL BENEFITS
With the global economy and more companies
looking for ways to cut costs, it is becoming
common practice for companies to work on joint-ventures
and to outsource complex projects. Consequently
many are seeing the necessity and benefits of
managing business on an activity basis with the
help of collaborative tools such as project-based
ERP systems.
According to a 2003 case study performed on Techmat
inc., a leading soil and material engineering
firm in Quebec who uses an ERP system called Project
Suite to manage company activities, the use of
such business solution has enabled the firm to
save an estimated 50% in administrative staff.
Developed by JOVACO in 1987, Project Suite is
a project-based ERP software composed of a set
of modules that allow collaboration and automate
tasks such as project-tracking, budgeting, invoicing,
and time and expense management.
"Our sales figure has almost doubled in
the last 15 years, yet the quantity of resources
assigned to administrative tasks remains the same,"
Techmat's administrative director Marius Bélanger
revealed. Beyond the numbers, in tangible return-on-investment
terms, Techmat project managers have been able
to obtain a quick response time on information
requests, the task of data entry has been gradually
replaced by management activities increasing employee
efficiency, while the risk of accounting errors
has been reduced," he described.
The benefits in adopting such enterprise-wide
systems are real, concluded to a study published
in the September issue of the International Journal
of Accounting Information Systems. Based on a
sample of companies that had implemented an ERP
system and those that did not, the research compared
the financial performance between the companies
after a three-year period. The research findings
indicated that firms without an ERP system experienced
lower financial performance than those working
with one.
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20 YEARS OF CONTRIBUTING KNOWLEDGE AND
EXPERIENCE
A Montreal-based, family-run enterprise since
1983, JOVACO is an end-to-end business solutions
provider and was the first Canadian company to
have developed an integrated project-based ERP
system. It has since performed almost 400 implementations
of various financial and management systems including
their Project Suite. Most installations are in
Quebec, with a few in the U.S. as the firm began
to market its product south of the border in the
past year.
Providing financial and project management solutions
to clients from a variety of industry sectors,
from small firms to large corporations, JOVACO’s
customers include, among others, Astral Media,
the Expos, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Ben And
Sons Drywall Inc Accentia inc., Progenics, CROP,
Développement et Paix, McCord Museum and
Investissement Québec.
"We have been able to cater to such a wide
range of business sectors because our approach
is to offer products that respond to the specific
pains of each client," said Coutu. “We’re
not just software vendors, but problem solvers.”
To accommodate both English- and French-speaking
customers, the firm has also invested in producing
their products in both languages.
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Source:
An Dieu Pham
Communications
(514) 323-3535, ext. 143
or 1-888-988-3535
E-mail: and@jovaco.ca
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