Case Study: JP Group

During those thirty seven years, JP Group has grown and diversified into four separate businesses – JP Construction, JP Demolition, JP Plant Hire and JP Homes. With Head Office in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, JP Group has established an enviable reputation for completing quality construction projects throughout Great Britain within time and budget constraints.

The Group now has 170 employees and a £28 million turnover with clients as diverse as retail and fast food outlets, international oil companies, private and public developers, main contractors, motor dealerships and national supermarket chains. These include Tesco, Somerfield, Regal Motors, Cotswold BMW, Toyota, KFC, McDonalds, McCarthy and Stone, Esso and BP.

Neil Smith, Chief Executive of JP Group, says “Rather than simply offering general contracting, we can add more value by offering a project management role. We provide the customer with a dedicated team to project manage the complete project, ensuring fast and effective communication and decision-making, and co-ordination of all the parties involved.

This means we deliver our customers’ requirements on time and on budget and it’s the reason why we have a significant amount of repeat business.”

It’s not difficult to understand why a company with such high expectations of itself would have equally high expectations of the IT systems that help drive the business. “Administratively, our previous software solution was cumbersome” admits Jim Spratt, Head of Finance and IT for JP Group. “We were unable to rely on the data in the system and the extraction for analysis was awful. We had issues with the Trial Balance not adding up and we were convinced that a more modern system would provide us with a smootherprocess for getting data into the system and a more efficient way of getting information out.”

We still find EVision to be a tremendously robust and efficient software solution and we’re absolutely delighted with it.

When searching for the right system, JP Group involved all their users in the decision-making process. “We looked at Sage, Integrity, Cognition and EVision and tested each with some standard documentation and some more awkward documentation. We found EVision to be the easiest to use for both types and everybody agreed that the analytical side was far better in EVision. This, coupled with the fact that the software is built on Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV, with user-friendly screens throughout the application and good ‘drill down’ functionality, helped us to conclude that EVision was the best solution.”

By all accounts, the migration from JP Group’s legacy system to the new system went very well – “It’s testament to the knowledge, experience and skill of Tekton’s staff that it all went so smoothly” says Jim Spratt. “They understood our legacy system and the data migration methods were tried and tested so we were able to meet all our deadlines.”

After two years of using Tekton’s software, Neil Smith comments “We still find EVision to be a tremendously robust and efficient software solution and we’re absolutely delighted with it. It’s definitely lived up to our expectations and the software’s flexibility in terms of what you can do with forms and reports, like adding fields for example, is excellent.”

From a wider business perspective, the software has made JP Group’s day-to-day processing simpler and more efficient.

“It’s so easy to navigate around the system that more people are willing to use it, even those on the operational side who previously wouldn’t touch the legacy system” comments Neil Smith.

It’s testament to the knowledge, experience and skill of Tekton’s staff that it all went so smoothly.

“Month-end reporting is far easier than it was before because we can generate the figures and reports directly from EVision instead of putting everything into Excel and having to manipulate it for half a day as we used to. In fact, it helps us with our overall cost control - we lost two members of the Finance team and we haven’t needed to replace them!”

JP Group has worked with Tekton to put in place the new Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) functionality for the deduction and reporting of PAYE tax. Further upgrades are being done to increase the number of users on JP Group’s software. “We wanted a software system that would grow with us and provide the support we require” says Jim Spratt. “Tekton are responsive to our requests and we haven’t really needed to use the support facility. Previously, when using our legacy system, we were calling up with a different problem every week.

Now we find that we can sort any issues quickly inhouse because of EVision’s flexibility.”

Tekton is proud to be working with JP Group and look forward to its continued success well into the future, with EVision helping to optimise each project’s potential through the streamlining of business processes. This will help to retain JP Group’s reputation for high quality design, efficient and cost effective construction, and a high standard of finish, all within a pre-determined timescale.