Kim Sammut

General Manager, Operational Excellence, WSP

Supernova Award Category: 

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Organization: 

WSP is a globally recognized professional services firm employing approximately 48,000 people in over 500 offices. It develops creative, comprehensive and sustainable engineering solutions for a future where society can thrive. This project was led by the Australia region.

The Problem: 

The WSP Australia organization was looking to improve local operations to be more effective. It needed to better support the business with deep financial information and insights. The organization was on a dated legacy system managed by the US operation and faced high maintenance fees and a lack of control. The teams couldn’t do what was needed to improve the business locally in terms of reporting and financial transparency. From a system perspective it had 10 different applications to run the business.

The Solution: 

The organization selected Unit4 Business World, based on success with the solution in other WSP regions. They needed an integrated solution for core finance, procurement, time and expenses, HR, and payroll in order to eliminate 10 systems previously tied to core finance. WSP needed a system to automate and digitize all financial processes and provide flexible reporting.

The Results: 

WSP has much better alignment with the business processes than with their legacy system. The team can offer a lot more flexibility and provide project accounting and labor costing for different scenarios.

The way UBW captures information is an advantage. It allows the team to capture down to the work order level and  align down to the projects to do project reporting quite easily. Management can better understand the numbers.

The flexibility to reconfigure the system enables fast changes as the business changes. 

In procurement, they were able to modify and simplify the processes in a very straightforward way to remove bottlenecks.

The procurement system on Business World provides governance and controls through the workflow. Prior it was off-line approval.

They were able to consolidate applications – from 10 to 2.

Having an integrated system helps with user experience as they don’t have as many systems to work in.

The biggest advantage of the cloud is if anything happens, they can always turn to Unit4. It gives them peace of mind to know that the Unit4 cloud team is looking after the solutions- the people who know what they are doing. The big advantage of the cloud is they ensure they are getting the best outcome of using the system.
 

Metrics: 

90% of business information needed can be provided

80% of applications eliminated.

90% reduction in time to produce reports.

The Technology: 

Unit4 Business World is a people-centered cloud ERP with automated processes and augmented experiences driven by the latest technologies. It supports front and back office processes of people-centered organizations. It’s built on a flexible platform and designed for a very fast time-to-value. Business World harnesses the power of the Unit4 People Platform, which draws all Unit4 products together into a loosely-coupled solution with a microservices-based architecture.

Disruptive Factor: 

The team is able to provide much more insight and information to management. Because they have data down to the very specific project levels they can provide value-add reporting to the business.

They are able to adopt to business change easily. They can make changes quickly and don’t need to spend on consultants.

In the past, when they couldn’t cater to the business requirements, they would go and do something offline, or just not do it at all. So, the system slowed down the business changes. They had to adapt the business to the system. Now they can adapt the system to the business.

Since they are able to produce more reports to the business now, the business can make better decisions. In the past there was a big lack of information, now management can get about 90% of what they need straight out of the system. 

Shining Moment: 

The teams feels they shine every day when they are able to provide critical information to management. The business now depends on the immediate insights to drive growth and profitability.

About Your Organization

As one of the world's leading professional services firms, WSP provides engineering and design services to the Transportation & Infrastructure, Property & Buildings, environment, Power & Energy, Resources and Industry sectors. With approximately 48,000 people globally, we are uniquely positioned to deliver successful and sustainable projects, wherever our clients need us.