Fugro-TSM: Subsea energy and marine specialist improves purchasing and accounts payable processes with ExFlow

Fugro-TSM, an operating company of Fugro N.V., is a subsea contractor operating primarily across the Asia Pacific region and offering a range of services to the Oil and Gas and Marine industries. They provide life of field solutions to their customers, combining project management, engineering, modern dynamically positioned vessels and specialist subsea equipment for the…

THE CHALLENGE

Fugro-TSM is a subsea contractor offering a range of services to the Oil and Gas and Marine Industries, including provision of vessels, subsea equipment, personnel, engineering and more.

Fugro-TSM operates primarily across the Asia Pacific Region, with major offices in Australia and Singapore, while smaller offices have been strategically established in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

In the last few years, Fugro-TSM’s business has expanded significantly and as it has taken on more work, the need for process improvement also increased dramatically. One area that needed urgent revision was their procurement and accounts payable procedure. With Project Managers and a finance team divided between offices in Singapore and Perth, the purchasing and accounts payable process was complicated, lengthy and required a lot of double handling. A new purchase order process had been put in place when the organisation had implemented Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Purchase orders were successfully being generated by the procurement team and authorised by the relevant project managers. However, Gered Hetherington, Financial Controller at Fugro-TSM, illustrates one of the ongoing struggles they were faced with, “The significant problem we had was when invoices came in to be receipted against the relevant purchase orders and be processed for payment. Those coming back and forth, especially from Singapore were easily getting lost in translation and a more efficient process was needed.”

“AP Smart is a great solution for companies like ours with multiple locations. Everything is automated and online, making our procurement and accounts payable processes accessible, easy to follow and transparent.”

Gered Hetherington, Finacial Controller at Fugro-TSM

THE SOLUTION

Using ExFlow to automate their Accounts Payable process means that Fugro-TSM is able to close each month on time with accurate figures, allowing management to make important decisions – proactively and without delay.

While it is of course natural and normal for staff within an organisation to be initially hesitant of change, Fugro-TSM impressively reported no concerns or resistance from NAV users to adopt ExFlow prior to implementation. Maria believes that the staff’s open-mindedness can be put down to thorough and holistic training from SignUp Software Australia.

Another advantage with the ExFlow automated processes is that the company automatically follows compliance regulations, making the twice-yearly audit a much smoother process.

The fact that ExFlow is a Microsoft Certified application with over 700 successful installations worldwide also increased the feeling of security

“The significant advantage is the transparency that it brought to our purchasing and accounts payable process. Thanks to the tight integration with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, AP Smart communicates with our ERP solution and ensures that all our data is available in NAV.”

Gered Hetherington, Finacial Controller at Fugro-TSM

OUTCOME AND BENEFITS

The AP Smart solution enabled Fugro-TSM to streamline their processes, which solved the encumbering issue of having to line up manual processes in their offices in Perth and Singapore. Electronic workflows made it possible to eliminate tedious manual handling, freeing up the Accounts Payable and Procurement teams to focus their energy on more productive tasks. Thanks to the character recognition abilities of the software, AP Smart can read and interpret invoices and input that data straight into Microsoft Dynamics NAV, their ERP system, thereby greatly reducing the risk for manual data entry errors.

“AP Smart has brought us a range of benefits,” says Gered, “The significant advantage is the transparency that it brought to our purchasing and accounts payable process. Thanks to the tight integration with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, AP Smart communicates with our ERP solution and ensures that all our data is available in NAV. This means that our offices in Perth and Singapore have one source of truth. We now also have an authorisation workflow in place so the purchasing process has become much more efficient, and we have full visibility of who approves what.

“Furthermore, the software not only enters data automatically into our ERP solution, it also keeps electronic copies of all invoices and related paperwork so we don’t need to be concerned with the mountains of paperwork we had before. We can now run that side of our business virtually paperless, which is a great environmental win!”

The implementation of AP Smart was quick and pain-free. “UXC Eclipse was focused and delivered as per the timeline. They deliver a professional service which is of high quality, whether it is a full ERP implementation like our Microsoft Dynamics NAV project, or a smaller scale AP Smart project,” says Gered.

Gered concludes: “AP Smart is a great solution for companies like ours with multiple locations. Everything is automated and online, making your procurement and accounts payable processes accessible, easy to follow and transparent.”