Focus on Outcomes
Penta Technologies
Brookfield, Wis.
www.penta.com
It’s time to do what you do better. As margins tighten and costs rise, the one factor that will continually place you ahead of the competition is best-practice process execution.
Penta Technologies, www.penta.com, Brookfield, Wis., believes technology plays a strong role in achieving that goal. The company provides enterprise technology solutions for $25 million contractors up to multibillion-dollar construction firms. It understands success for these companies comes down to protecting margins, controlling risk, and managing resources. As such, Penta has focused its technology development efforts around helping execute on these objectives.
While the bulk of Penta’s customer base is comprised of specialty contractors, it also works with some very large general contractors. Such customer diversity is reflected in its 2007 list of customer wins that includes one of the largest specialty contractors in the United States, Cupertino Electric, www.cei.com, San Jose, Calif., and one of the largest builders of healthcare properties in the country, Hammes Co., www.hammesco.com, Brookfield, Wis.
On the frontend are solutions to help manage financials, project management, service, labor, and equipment cost. On the backend is an Oracle relational database, which provides the flexibility for the technology to be able to grow as the contracting company grows.
Penta is continually listening to its customers and providing technology solutions for real business challenges. Case in point is the recent release of the PENTA Business Analytics product.
Business intelligence technology is one of the hottest trends in construction technology these days, and that is exactly what this application delivers. PENTA Business Analytics takes the enterprise data that customers gather on a daily basis using PENTA and allows them to access, consolidate, and convert that data into more meaningful and actionable information they can use at multiple levels of their business.
While PENTA Business Analytics can help contractors keep a close eye on project and financial performance, this technology can also help contractors identify trends and use that information appropriately going forward. For example, companies are able to identify productivity rates by job function, by department, and even by individual within the company, or even quickly discover which tasks are over budget or under budget on a given job. This is all data—that identified at the proper stage—can drastically affect the profitability of a project.
The key factor associated with the success of this product is not only the capabilities of the technology, but also Penta’s ability to deliver it in a way that is manageable and cost-effective for the construction industry. In other words, many business intelligence tools on the market require extensive technical resources in order to be effective. In some cases, these resources are not available to the average contractor.
With PENTA Business Analytics users do not need to create and maintain a separate data warehouse for storing information. Instead, the PENTA Business Analytics tools are automatically built into Penta’s enterprise software and leverage data native in these applications. It also taps into other applications in use throughout the enterprise, such as estimating applications or information on spreadsheets.
Ajax Building Corp., www.ajaxbuilding.com, Midway, Fla., has been using PENTA Business Analytics for roughly five months. Ken Lindlau, CFO (chief financial officer), Ajax, calls it a slick program that helps him sort and sift the data in order to get at the information he needs the most.
“I do a lot of reporting by exception, the fact that someone has paid the bill is nice, but finding out who has not paid their bill is even more important to me,” says Lindlau. “It lets me tailor reports to specific things (within the business) so I track problems before they actually become problems.”
Ajax has been using technology from Penta for roughly 10 years, starting with financials. Aside from the analytics technology, the company recently started implementing Penta’s project management software on a few of its smaller projects with the intent of eventually rolling it out to all projects.
“With Penta I feel that they are always on a path of constant improvement,” says Lindlau. “I have always been impressed with their level of knowledge and cooperation. They all work together well and try to help you get better. If you point out something that you think would work better they try to figure out ways to make it happen.
“With Business Analytics, for example, we mentioned to them that in the database it would be helpful if we could withdraw information based on (certain) parameters, and as a result they have made changes to the database based on our recommendations,” adds Lindlau. “You can’t ask for much more than that.”
Penta also provides a set of mobile applications focused around field service and reporting that help extend data management capabilities out into the field. The company once again demonstrates a thorough understanding of its customer base, knowing field workers use many different types of mobile devices. Therefore, when developing its mobile applications Penta partnered with mobile platform provider Dexterra, www.dexterra.com, Bothell, Wash., which enables contractors to deploy the software on any mobile device and not be limited by complex integration requirements.
As Penta explains, the use of various other mobile applications requires companies to choose between cradle-based synchronization through a wireline network or a pure online wireless solution. Instead, Penta provides a suite of applications that support both wireline and wireless connectivity, and that are device agnostic, meaning the browser-based software can be easily deployed in many different types of devices, include Java-enabled phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), laptops, tablet PCs, etc. Multiple data source connectivity allows users to connect the applications to multiple backend business systems while a flexible development environment is available should companies wish to develop their own set of mobile applications.
Circling back to helping contractors do what they do better, Kurt Koenig, executive vice president and cofounder, Penta Technologies, considers this process to be a three-pronged approach. First is using an integrated enterprise system, followed by the ability to analyze the information gleaned from the system. The final, and perhaps most valuable, step is focusing on the execution of best practices that are defined via analytics.
“Analytics help you identify where you excel—what makes our best project managers, for example,” says Koenig. “The next step is using document management and workflow technology in order to embed those best practices into the workflow so that everyone can follow what you have defined as best practices.”
This is an area Penta is strongly dedicated to going forward. Koenig says the company has bolstered its professional services staff in order to help contractors with these efforts and ultimately “focus on the outcome.”
“Success is not defined by implementing a system that will help you automate a change order, for example,” says Koenig. “Success comes from the outcome produced by that process—the business result that has been achieved.”