Boral Roofing Pty Ltd

Boral Roofing Improves Customer and Supplier Relationships with Epicor ERP (now known as Kinetic)

Boral Roofing is a national building products and services supplier with its head office in Adelaide, South Australia. The business has two revenue streams-supplying roofing and masonry products -and using licensed subcontractors to install and provide maintenance services.

Ageing system

Boral Roofing completes hundreds of roofing and masonry projects every month. It starts with an order for the product-such as roof tiles or pavers-from the customer. Boral Roofing then assembles the materials for the order and sends them to the worksite where they are installed by authorized subcontractors. Those subcontractors claim payment from Boral Roofing, and the company, in turn, invoices the builder or customer.

There are numerous transaction points throughout these projects and each requires accurate data and efficient processing. Boral Roofing had been managing this process with a legacy and unscalable enterprise resource management (ERP) system. This created a risk for Boral Roofing that is common with older systems.

Furthermore, while data was available to support ad hoc analysis, it was not structured in a contemporary fashion. This made analysis inefficient and, on occasion, repetitive.

Simon Elleway, digital solutions manager for Boral Roofing said, “Risk management drove our search for a new ERP solution that would be cloud-based, less expensive to own and maintain, and which could deliver the improved efficiency and reporting that the business required.”

Strong customer references, maturity, and capabilities

After reviewing various ERP solutions, Boral Roofing selected Kinetic because of its ability to meet specific functional requirements, the product's positioning on the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and customer references.

Elleway explained, “Kinetic was one of very few products that could meet Boral Roofing's need for a system that could manage a huge number of transactional projects, as opposed to simply managing ongoing or larger projects. Also, Kinetic was rated by Gartner as a mature product that's supported globally, which gave us peace of mind that it would perform according to our expectations.”

Accuracy and time savings

Using Kinetic, Boral Roofing can now transact digitally and with greater accuracy than ever before. The system automates a number of processes and lets the business exchange transactional documents with suppliers and customers electronically. This puts real-time project status and financial reporting information at their fingertips, providing increased visibility into business performance.

Elleway said, “Kinetic is helping to streamline the way we operate. This helps us to focus everyone's efforts to value-adding activities rather than on simple data entry. This enables improved service and, therefore, better customer and supplier relationships.

“The system is easy to use and, perhaps most importantly, it's scalable, so it has positioned Boral Roofing for future growth. The previous system was highly customized.

“With Kinetic, we have a system that's simply configured to our needs. As the company grows, Kinetic will continue to facilitate that growth without incurring the upgrade costs and inconvenience of other solutions.”

Elleway added, “While previous reporting was effective, we're now starting to unlock real-time data that can drive daily or even hourly decision making. This lets us track periodic goals and objectives much more closely, which delivers obvious advantages.”

As a result of real-time visibility of transactions with customers and suppliers, visibility of inventory demand has also increased. This enables more responsive inventory planning and forecasting, which carries a number of business and customer fulfilment advantages such as being able to respond to unexpected orders more efficiently and quickly.

Good corporate governance

Importantly, Kinetic helps Boral Roofing's team members adhere to good governance and business practices. For example, the system enforces clear rules around credit exposure, and provides for the simple application of delegated authority to take and record certain actions. Previously, if a customer was on a credit-hold, team members could more easily exercise discretion that was not within their level of authority.

Elleway commented, “The senior leadership team is pleased that Kinetic demands strict adherence to business practice because it reduces risk. Boral Roofing can also use the system to reduce risk in other ways. For example, the business only supplies products to licensed, insured and qualified installers. If a subcontractor's insurance has expired, we can proactively work with them to keep everything up to date. Without meeting this compliance rule, Epicor will prevent us from allocating the work.

“This kind of capability helps us take customer and supplier relationships to the next level, working as true partners.

“This is extremely important for us in terms of improving customer satisfaction. We're getting very good at pulling important data out of the system and using it to improve these relationships.”

Business efficiencies and cost reductions

The Kinetic system was originally installed as a risk management measure. Since it was implemented, the ways in which it can be further applied to Boral Roofing's unique requirements have expanded.

Facilitating business growth

Now that Kinetic is firmly entrenched in the business, with users finding it easy to navigate and simple to use, Boral Roofing is able to digitise paper-based processes and use mobile devices to access Kinetic from wherever, whenever. Again, this lets the team focus on the highest-value work, which is mostly in direct contact with suppliers and customers.

Elleway elaborated, “With more efficient processing capability and real-time data to analyze, we are able to see where the hotspots are and how to more effectively meet our customers' needs. We are shaping our delivery strategy to get products where they're needed, when they're needed. The combination of great transaction capabilities and useful data from Kinetic is proving critical to help us meet our strategic objectives and achieve our goals.”

Further, Boral Roofing will expand its use of mobile devices through Kinetic, enabling approvals, orders, and performance review from the field. Kinetic's integration with existing eCommerce tools is also a critical capability that is being used to its full extent.

Elleway explained, “The ease of integration between Kinetic and the Microsoft stack positions Boral for future growth in terms of data management. We're already seeing some exciting results through this type of integration, and we're looking forward to taking it further.”

Elleway concluded, “The system is easy to use and the team is creating sophisticated dashboards and analytical outputs that are driving daily actions and business decisions. I would recommend Kinetic to other organizations without hesitation because it delivers on expectations and supports the achievement of our targets and strategic objectives.”