JBC Industrial Services Case Study

About JBC Industrial Services

JBC Industrial Services (JBC) is a leading independent provider to the UK energy market. JBC supplies, installs, services and maintains industrial steam boilers and combustion equipment. The company has a number of offices across the UK, with 75 employees and turnover in excess of £8 million.

APH has had a successful partnership with JBC for over 5 years. APH delivers a number of solutions to JBC including:

JBC has ambitious growth plans. As well as large new implementations, the company is growing the side of the business that services existing plants. These customers are served by a large mobile workforce and receive recurring maintenance visits based on individual service contracts.

“We have 40 guys out on the road and we always struggled to pull their data in,” says Managing Director Geoff Sutcliffe.

“To grow the business profitably and effectively we needed to manage our jobs, callouts and maintenance contracts in much more detail. Tight integration between our accounting and job management systems was an important part of getting that more detailed view.”

JBC sourced the services of APH for its experience and knowledge of the ERP and job costing marketplace. APH recommended SAP Business One with add-on modules Eralis Job and Eralis Automate. APH designed the new system to streamline previously manual systems and feed all information into a central hub.

Eralis job provides a detailed view of JBC’s mobile workforce

“One of the main reasons we chose SAP Business One was because of Eralis Job – it acts as a window to the whole of our operation. Eralis Job operates on a shared cloud platform, so everyone can see the exact same information. It enables real time management for JBC,” Geoff Sutcliffe, Managing Director, JBC explains.

JBC uses Eralis Job to track costs and revenue against a range of cost centres. By recording time and materials used for each job, JBC can analyse the profitability of any job. Eralis Job is viewed and used by a wide range of JBC staff around the country. Geoff Sutcliffe says Eralis Job is flexible in allowing individual staff to view different levels of information.

APH also recommended JBC use another Eralis add-on module—Eralis Automate—to manage the recurring invoicing required by maintenance contracts. Eralis Automate manages and schedules the raising of recurring invoices. It’s a time saving solution that removes the need to manually create invoices. It also prevents the possibility of invoices being missed; they are already in the system and scheduled to run on a specific date.

“We used to do these individually. Now we use Eralis Automate to batch out hundreds of invoices a month with the press of a button. It’s freed up staff for more productive matters,” Geoff Sutcliffe says.

For a growing business the issue of scalability is key to future proofing an IT system. New users must be added quickly and easily, and they need access to email from multiple devices including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

For JBC, the challenge was to have a consistently high standard of Office 365 performance, particularly email access to employees, working across multiple sites and remotely. JBC also required consistent and cost-effective end user support.

With APH hosting and supporting Office 365 for JBC, the company’s employees enjoy reliable and robust Office 365 connectivity wherever and whenever they need it, thereby improving communication and collaboration across the organisation. Furthermore, APH drives consumption and provides best practice guidance. Data is secure, and time previously spent maintaining hardware and software can be used to move the company’s overall IT functionality forward.

In addition to providing a predictable monthly cost model, APH provides end-user Office 365 support of issues such as password resets, basic device troubleshooting, answering “how-to” questions, and proactive device monitoring and management.

Managed Services

APH provides a fully managed service to JBC.

“This means we take care of its platform ensuring that it remains with lights on, with applications regularly updated to the latest version and all house-keeping methodically planned and performed,” explains Charlie Heywood, Managing Director, APH.

JBC’s system is monitored 24x7x365, with Service Desk support to meet the needs of the infrastructure, applications and end-users. With APH managed services, the on-boarding and off-boarding of end users, as JBC requires, is managed.

APH provides a single point of entry for IT support and problem-solving via its Service Desk, and its proactive approach aims to catch incidents before JBC’s business encounters productivity loss. JBC benefits from predictable costs, less downtime, guaranteed response time and a greatly reduced IT burden.

Business Benefits

Key Outcomes