Ivanhoe Contracting SAP® Business One Helps Pull Business Processes Together

“We see SAP Business One helping us manage our business through efficiencies, through timely
information, and through integrated processes.”
Roger Arcand, CFO, Ivanhoe Contracting Ltd.

Managing growth is the key to success – and a constant challenge. A case in point is Ivanhoe Contracting Ltd. (Ivanhoe); just
when growth started to become burdensome, the company got together with SAP partner VistaVu Solutions Inc. and installed
the SAP® Business One application. Now Ivanhoe’s management is moving step-by-step to rationalize and integrate every aspect
of the enterprise’s operations.

Ivanhoe was founded in 1994 by a single individual and has grown to 50 employees. Headquartered in Grand Prairie, Alberta, Canada, the company designs and manufactures effluent treatment systems and sells them to customers in northern Alberta, British Columbia, and Canada’s Northwest Territories. Ivanhoe’s services include system installation, periodic maintenance, and removal of systems when they are no longer needed. The company also rents systems to oil field operations.

Stressed Business Solutions
By 2006 the complexity associated with growth had stressed Ivanhoe’s existing business solutions to their maximum capacity. “We had disjointed, disaggregated software solutions,” says Roger Arcand, CFO at Ivanhoe. At the time, Ivanhoe’s business processes were supported by an accounting program, a custom database and spreadsheets.

“The solutions and processes that had been implemented when the company was smaller were by now challenged to adequately
support the evolving needs of the company,” says Troy Monaghan, PMP, services manager at VistaVu Solutions. “The company had pretty well outgrown them. It would need additional employees if it continued with them unchanged.”

Under the existing circumstances, Ivanhoe’s staff risked losing track of transactions or spending time searching for information,
costing the company money in both cases. There was also a considerable amount of data reentry and reconciliation between
disparate systems that represented lost dollars due to time spent correcting errors

Fortuitous Contact

In 2006 Ivanhoe decided it was time to move to a more sophisticated business solution. “We started looking for a single program that could tie things together for us and make the available

“The solutions and processes that had been implemented when the company
was smaller were by now challenged to adequately support the evolving needs
of the company.”
Troy Monaghan, PMP, Services Manager, VistaVu Solutions

information more timely,” recalls Arcand. “We wanted to have everything integrated, including parts dispatching, equipment
tracking, work orders, and field tickets,” says Arcand. “We wanted a full purchase order solution, and we wanted it all tied
to a single source of information.

”Fortuitously, it was about that time that VistaVu Solutions contacted Ivanhoe and introduced the company to SAP Business
One. Ivanhoe evaluated one other enterprise resource planning application and then selected SAP Business One as the most
appropriate choice. “I knew about SAP; I knew it was one of the largest software providers in the world and that it was generally
associated with Fortune 500 companies,” says Arcand. “I felt comfortable selecting SAP as my software provider.”

The scope of the implementation was financials, banking, vendor and customer data, purchasing, shipping and receiving, inventory, bill of materials, work orders, sales, dispatch, rentals, HR, and payroll. Implementation began in May 2006 and the software went live in December.

Expansive Plans
“Right now, we’re just using the basic bare bones of accounting,” says Arcand. “Our plans are to connect up to the camps and kitchens and what are called drilling shacks and sewage treatment facilities.” In addition, Ivanhoe builds some of its own apparatuse and plans to use the software to keep track of bills of material and manage manufacturing in the future.

It’s the comprehensiveness of the SAP software that has Ivanhoe moving forward in a deliberate fashion. VistaVu Solutions and Ivanhoe have been working side by side to customize the application to Ivanhoe’s requirements. VistaVu Solutions has also been providing training to Ivanhoe staff.

“Now that we have a good handle on the accounting functionality, we’ll start phasing in the rest of the functionality step-by-step,
starting with purchase orders,” says Arcand. “Then the sales quote and customer relationship management component. Beyond
that, we’ll initiate the dispatch software and VistaVu Solution’s field services module. Eventually we’ll start tracking capital assets and creating bills of material.”

Growth Management
Ivanhoe’s growth over the past four years has been on the order of 300% to 400%. That’s the kind of growth that SAP Business One is designed to manage. “We’re trying to build some infrastructure and stability into the company to help us continue to grow, and we see SAP Business One as part of the solution that will get us there,” says Arcand.

“We’re trying to build some infrastructure and stability into the company to help us continue to grow, and we see SAP Business One as part of the solution that will get us there.”
Roger Arcand, CFO, Ivanhoe Contracting Ltd..

Arcand believes the company’s new software will provide the benefits it was seeking at the outset. “We see SAP Business One
helping us manage our business through efficiencies, through timely information, and through integrated processes,” he says. “And it will also contribute to internal controls and reporting that will allow us to make better decisions.”