Carragh Group use LiveCosts to:
- Save 1 day a week
- See how their projects are performing in real-time
- Connect the office to the job site
About Carragh Group
Carragh Group design gardens and landscapes from concept to completion with skill and precision.
Visit www.carraghpaving.ie
Challenges
What problem were you trying to solve?
As our company grew, we were inputting more into Excel. Human input just led to errors.
You only get invoices at the end of a project, so you’re not really capturing the true cost of a project until it’s finished.
So that was the biggest challenge.
How was the problem affecting your business?
It was always after the fact. It was never a case that we could get halfway through the job and realise, “Oh, actually, we’re on track” or “We’re not on track, and let’s make some changes here”.
What other possible solutions did you consider?
There was another programme that the guys had implemented, but it just wasn’t user friendly, it was very clunky.
And it didn’t actually do what we needed it to do. So that was quickly put to one side and we went back to our Excel because we knew we could capture the information that we wanted in there, albeit it just wasn’t timely enough for us.
Results
What are some of the main benefits of using LiveCosts?
- I love the catalogue because I can go to all of our suppliers and get an up-to-date price list.
- We have furnished all of our team leads with a tablet, so they now have LiveCosts mobile, and they’re able to go in, grab their own PO, do their own ordering, live. The lads have really embraced that as well. They like having the ownership, which is great.
- From the Director or the Operations Manager’s point of view, is the dashboard, so they can have a look at the company overall and all of the projects that we have on the go, or drill down into individual projects and just see, “Are we on target? Is the budget being met?”
How much time does using LiveCosts save your business?
I would say for the whole office, we’re a day a week saved in terms of time. Big difference.
Our Finance Manager would have to pull together all the timesheets weekly from all the lads, and obviously he would do wages and all those sorts of things. But from his point of view, there’s hours saved because the lads are now responsible for putting their labour into each particular project.
So that goes straight into the project as opposed to finance manager having to take all of those timesheets.
What measurable benefits have you seen?
We all have the one platform now to get our information from.
It can be utilised across the company. The dashboard gives us visibility; it allows you to make decisions quickly, as opposed to getting to the end of a project and wondering, “Have we hit our target on that?”
“I would say for the whole office, we’re a day a week saved in terms of time. Big difference.”
Advice
What would you say to other people considering LiveCosts?
Live Costs doesn’t just become the IT in the office. We get live project data because whole company feeds into it, we save a day a week throughout the company, and we know if our projects are on target.
