BLUEPRINT: WILSON-MOHR

THE EFFICIENCY EQUATION
The Building Partner
Wilson-Mohr is a wholesale distributor of quality control instrumentation to the energy and industrial markets and is also a comprehensive automation system engineering firm.

+ Surveying the Project
Wilson-Mohr needed more from their accounting system than just accounting. They required a system to support their finished goods assembly processes as defined by their engineering department. Each engineer-to-order project requires its own budget and actual costs must be captured and charged to each job to determine gross margin and profit from the job. After struggling with implementation with another Microsoft Navision reseller, they began a search for a consulting partner with the business acumen to address their requirements.

+ Drafting the Blueprint
Upon recommendation from Microsoft, Wilson-Mohr turned to The Rand Group (TRG) to provide an assessment on how to rectify existing system design flaws. Their issues centered around inaccurate item costs and a lack of resource costing on jobs. The financial reports did not always reflect true costs, so gross margins were often inflated.

+The Microsoft Building Blocks
Wilson-Mohr had selected Microsoft Navision to be their back-end business management system. Navision is a powerful application with broad and deep functionality, but the consultants on the implementation proved to be a far more important factor.

+ The Rand Group Expertise
Item costing became real-time and requisition worksheets were deployed to generate re-order quantities based on location, item, and variant. Fiscal departmental budgets and project manager job budget templates were automatically exported into Microsoft Excel, and imported back into Navision upon completion from each responsible party. TRG began by reviewing the system and a team of certified Navision developers and business consultants were able to make recommendations on how to resolve the outstanding system issues. Changes included a re-design of item cost calculations and added functionality around proper resource costing. Job budgets were revised to separate initial material costs from planned resource charges, as well as the ability to segregate projects into phases, tasks, and steps.

= Measurable Results
The fiscal budgeting process was reduced from weeks into days after the integration with Microsoft Excel. The purchasing process became much more precise and less man hours were necessary for physical counts. But most importantly (in terms of immediate cash outflow), correcting and providing real-time costs to each sale allowed commissions to be calculated on an accurate gross margin amount.