Synergy2017 - From data to decision - Damiaan van Zanen
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Using data from Synergy practice management and other sources to create visibility in your AEC business and make key decisions. Focusing on sales and marketing, human resources, operations.
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Synergy2017 - From data to decision - Damiaan van Zanen
- 1. FROM DATA TO DECISIONS DAMIAAN VAN ZANEN TOTAL SYNERGY @damiaanvz
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone, Jon Devine was due to be speaking in this slot today, but unfortunately he couldn’t be here. I guess you could say we’ve deconstructed and reconstructed the presentation schedule… It’s worth noting that on Monday we started workshopping an alternative to Jon’s presentation and our designer Ross put this whole presentation together using his iPad, an Apple Pencil and Apple Notes on Tuesday night. Quite an effort! So, for those of you who came to the conference solely to see Jon speak (and I’m sure there are many of you), my deepest apologies - I don’t think I would ever be able to emulate a presentation by Jon and I definitely don’t have enough thingymajigs or doovalacky’s in my vocabulary to do so.
- For those who don’t know me, I joined Synergy in January after close to 10 years as a user in three synergy client organisations, including two engineering firms and a business consulting firm providing management support services to AEC clients. My roles covered marketing, administration and business management and later involved assisting clients implement Synergy to get the most out of the database. In April I’m heading over to London to start our UK office and launch Synergy Version 5 in the UK market.
- Lets talk about decision making at the executive level. We recognise that everyone in this room manages their business differently. We aren’t here to tell you what to do, but rather we hope that there are elements of what we cover today that that can add value and that you may be able to add to your management tool kit.
- As executives there are tough decisions to be made. With every decision, the more information we have in our tool kit, the easier it is. In businesses there is data or ‘sources of truth’ that, if understood, allows us to take the best path forward and remove the guess work. In your businesses specifically, you may rely on the sources of data we have listed here. These ‘buckets’ of data will overlap in some areas, but this only adds an opportunity to cross-check the reliability of data
- What are we getting at here? There is a famous quote by W. Edwards Deming – “Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.”
- We wanted to use this session to: highlight the data that you have in Synergy how this data may be used in conjunction with other data sources, to help you make informed management decisions. We tend to focus on data at a day-to-day level, but the challenge is to apply the analysis at a higher level and analyse trends to paint a picture of your business. Lets take a closer look at the Synergy Database
- Synergy is a Relational Database This means there is a whole lot of seemingly different information that is built in a way that allows this information to be pulled together. Because it is a relational database, all of the Synergy data repositories are linked. i.e. we can report on contacts by transactions, or Staff by sub-project. Synergy gives you valuable data in a few key areas of your business as shown on the slide This gives us a powerful level of information as long as we organise it in a manner that is useful.
- It is important to note: Database configuration is vital to getting what you need out of it. We’ve all heard the term “junk in, junk out“… Data integrity is key for decision making.
- Your data needs to work for you. Synergy reports can give you some great analysis - either using native reports or exporting to excel templates. You can also use software like Power BI or IBM Watson to name a few of the current buzz apps. Huge range of database reporting tools that can be used to pull the data out of SQL and present it in a meaningful manner. We can use the Odata feed to create real time reporting using Synergy data in these apps. Data outside of Synergy can also be bought in to these tools allowing reporting across multiple sources. These can not only paint a nice graphical picture, but they can pick up trends in the data that you may otherwise miss.
- Lets take a look at how we use this data for decision making.
- I’m going to cover three areas of the business where analysing data from Synergy and other data sources can help with top level decisions. You can use the analysis in these areas either together or side-by-side to help with your decision making. What we are really looking for are trends, shifts and changes across all of them.
- Lets take a look at some sales and marketing data that can help us understand where money spent is providing the best return.
- From within the business we can access reports from Synergy and other areas in the business to represent sales and marketing activity. Synergy data gives us a great representation of current clients and contacts Win/Loss ratio Likelihood of winning (%) Proposals completed Enquiries – received, responded to Client performance indicators – rating, industry, role, location, size, payment history, how they became a client etc.
- We can look earlier into the sales funnel at our prospects and leads by using some external data to get a deeper insight. CRM data Google analytics data Email campaign data (Mailchimp or similar) Other marketing campaign data (events, print advertisement, sponsorship etc.)
- Ultimately, we want to see where to spend money in the future to achieve maximum revenue for minimum spend. How do we do this ?
- There are a couple of types of reporting we could use here. Most lucrative types of clients (who we’d invite to the golf day), based on: Jobs won (single job v repeat business, size of project, sector, geographical location etc.) Invoice age (average days to payment) Profitability by primary contact
- We might also look at How you acquire your clients – which can be done at a contact level or project level, grouped by client: Tender, Referral, BD, Email Campaign, Print Ad, Events etc. New vs. Existing (repeat) client The next step is to report on spend in each area using Synergy and the Accounting Database, and assess the ROI for that spend associated with these clients for instance.
- e.g. Your report may show that you have three main types of clients. Developers undertake large projects nationwide that you need to bid for, but these are often closed tenders. A few of your key Project Managers have a relationship with these clients. These clients typically use the full payment term and generally ask you to quote on their next project with a high success rate. Local private clients that have one off small projects. They often pay late. Local Council projects that are mostly under $10k – no tendering required. They pay on time. From this example, without needing to do a ROI calculation, you would focus your client relationship efforts (and spend) primarily on the developers and secondly on gaining access to Councils.
- Human resources are the backbone of a design practice. The performance of these resources will have a profound effect on every aspect of the business. There is some great HR data in both Synergy and other sources to understand aspects of business performance.
- Lets first take a look at some Synergy reports in the HR area: Staff remuneration Efficiency – how good a person is at turning their time into revenue Revenue contribution Utilisation Utilisation is a relatively good indicator of a persons performance, but it isn’t as good as efficiency. You could have a staff member that is completely utilised but not that efficient (earning less per hour). reflection on a managers ability to keep a staff member busy Timesheet Forecast (pipeline of work) Attributes – e.g. staff attendance at training or company events
- Other Data sources HRIS Some of the data in synergy can be cross checked here Can also report on KPI’s, achievements, staff reviews. ‘red flag’ variables like injuries, complaints, leave, etc. Industry body - salary information Consult Australia Australian Institute of Architects
- We can use this data to understand and/or make decisions on: Performance of individuals and the impact of this (if any) for the employee and business Performance and management of teams – is the structure working, are the managers capable? Is there a specific project type or PM that works better with certain staff combinations Discover the Rainmaker - Who is bringing in the work (using sales and marketing data with HR data)
- Pulse-check on company culture (assess the red flags) Leave (typically sick/personal) – cross check this against local community health data Efficiency and utilisation – is there a general slump across the board Staff buy-in - for example: attendance at events and training Injuries, complaints, grievances
- Benchmarking of salary data with industry standards (using external data sources) Overhead Factor – is it too high, too low? What can be done to validate it or get it to a level you are comfortable with? e.g. OH Factor – we’ve had examples with some of our clients having very low OH factors – as low as 1.4 / 1.5. When everyone else has a factor of more like 1.9 or 2, this can be quite troublesome. We’ve had to work with them to help validate their low factor.
- Another example of the use of HR Data: multi-disciplinary engineering firm with a specialist acoustic division. We want to know why the acoustic division doesn’t make as much money as the other divisions. Sales and marketing data tells us that the division has work coming in, so should be doing well. The utilisation and efficiency report shows us a different story. The team and individuals aren’t performing. Therefore, we can see that the resources in that division are the source of the problem. The next step is to analyse why? We look at the team as a whole, and then deeper into each individual. Has there been any red flags? Basically we just work through the data we have and use logical relationships to help us arrive at a conclusion
- Hidden amongst the day-to-day project data is a large amount of information that helps us understand our operational and business performance.
- The main synergy reports that we can use to assess overall business performance are: Revenue by Sector/Discipline/Cost Centre etc. Profitability by Sector/Discipline/Cost Centre etc. Write-up / write-down ratio Budget v Actuals – assesses performance of PMs Profitability by staff rate – which level of employee is most profitable Write-off reason codes reporting – understand why write-offs happen (there is a cultural piece here on honesty and transparency to get the right data) This allows us to drill down to each component of the business from the whole business, to cost centres, divisions, teams and right down to individuals.
- Other sources of data: Accounting and financial reports from your accounting package, which will help us drill down into certain costs that are normally grouped in Synergy. Adding external data to this analysis such as ABS data for a specific cost centre (i.e Building Starts etc.) we can dig deeper into the performance of that cost centre.
- e.g. In a multi-office scenario, you can assess – Where work is won, where work is done, where work is profitable A firm with a Perth and Sydney office Is showing as quite profitable in the financial reports for the whole company. They are sharing resources across offices to even out workload. Perth is showing as profitable in a cost centre report. If we look at the write-up / write-down ratio (i.e. chargeable v. actual) we see that they are actually underperforming, maybe as a result of under-quoting on Perth jobs. If we just looked at revenue, Perth would look ok, but this is only because they are working on the overflow of Sydney projects.
- Similarly, if there are write-off reason codes for the Perth work, we will be able to report on that to get a good picture of what’s happening in Perth. We can also run an inter-charge report to see where work is originating. In another scenario, there may be an overall picture of profitability in the financial reports that is different at the cost centre level. So bringing the two data sources together can provide light on this scenario, particularly in deep diving into the actual overhead costs.
- Across all of the areas of the business we have looked at (and more) we want to constantly be looking for trends, shifts and changes.
- We can use the various sources of data available to look at trends or shifts in the business and gain a ‘big picture’ understanding of the state of the business. Given there is some overlap in the data sources in terms of information available, we can look at trends between databases – corroboration of changes in the business, and cross-check the data. If we can see trends and shifts in data we can start to predict the next move and paint a great picture of how the business is tracking.
- Here are some key points to take away - I hope some of them are useful for you.
- Managing the risk in your business is easier when you are using meaningful and objective data to help make informed decisions.
- The data you report on becomes part of your rolling SWOT analysis
- Pull data from every source available and analyse it together
- Use data from your day-to-day operations in an executive, high-level strategic capacity – paint the big picture.
- Ultimately, we want to remove the anxiety that is often associated with making business decisions, and be confident that we have made the best decision possible, with the information at hand.