Oliver Caunt: So my name is Oliver Caunt, I’m managing director of JCS Nuclear Solutions. We provide nuclear radiation detection, sensing, and shielding solutions. We were at a cusp where we were changing some staff within the company. We were losing our in-house accountant and working with our external accounting firm to take on that role and function in the company. And under their advice we started looking at more modern systems, specifically Xero, to do the bookkeeping and accounting for the company. And that became a natural progression to look at the bolt-on for the CRM and MRP side of the business, basically. So we quickly came to three platforms that we shortlisted, and Flowlens was one of those that we ultimately chose to use.
Oliver Caunt: Part of that process was really understanding and stepping back and saying, “Okay, well, what do we do on a daily basis in terms of gathering information and data that we need for the day-to-day running of the company?” And quickly concluded that we were operating the better part of 15 spreadsheets that we needed to touch on a regular basis every week. Anything from job costing, cash flow forecasting, sales order, summaries, all that kind of stuff, basically. And it was really, there’s been conversations with our accountants and then it got me started in conversations with you guys and others, really understanding what information that we can get in real time from modern systems. Yeah, so that was our first pain point that we said, “Okay, well, if we can really reduce the amount of duplication and data extraction from our systems, that would be very, very useful.”
Oliver Caunt: The whole company, the whole business, we all sat down and really checked in to try and describe each of our particular roles, whether that’s from the sales order entry, from product management, for building bills and materials, to credit control, everything, and really understanding where the pain points were. We hadn’t had an effective CRM mechanism for a long, long time. We were relying on antiquated systems, or even just your email client to be our main CRM system. That was a major screamer for us, basically. Yeah, so effectively we looked at every function within the business, whether that’s marketing or sales or administration, finance, and really started putting together what were the main pain points that we needed to address. And the bulk of it was really, we were duplicating a lot of data. We were putting data from reports on our sales activities, it was also being fed into our job costing activities, it was also being fed into our cash flow forecast, all that kind of stuff.
Oliver Caunt: And it was quite a realization to understand that all of this was mounting up to a lot of time every week that the management at the company was demanding. But it was almost excessive in terms of what we were asking the team to do. We had early buy-in, we knew that we needed to modernize. We had other agendas as well. We wanted to push our entire systems from antiquated server-based systems. Or our server was becoming antiquated and we said, “Okay, we’ve got to make a decision if we push our entire operation into the cloud.” We had an agenda to be moving towards being qualified for cyber essentials and cyber essentials plus for the fields in which we work. So this all came at the same time, really. So we were all thinking about, “Okay, how do we modernize? We have an opportunity because change has come upon us,” which is a good thing. So as I said, the buy-in wasn’t a problem with the team. Everybody was happy to contribute. And actually, yeah, so that was all part of the process.
Oliver Caunt: And we were then as a team, we all had different preferences of what we wanted from different systems and we all made a pitch to each other about what the best option was, really. And we opted for the system that presented less pain, but we did know that there will have to be compromise somewhere along the way, because what we were doing was changing. And we were changing from quite an old-fashioned system into something that was new, and that you can’t try and fit a square peg from an old system into a round hole. But if you understand what the outcomes are and what the data is that you need, you can learn to change your operations or you can make some changes within your operation to actually fit with modern systems.
Oliver Caunt: Once we made the decision to go with Flowlens and we started with an early trial, we worked with the team at Flowlens to really actually go through a trial proper where we were really replicating the day-to-day operations that we were doing. That was really important because we needed everybody in the team to understand what was involved with the difference in the systems. So the trial was really our first phase of training more than anything else. So we were learning how we need to import data or export and cleanse data from old systems imported into Flowlens. And that was really then our first opportunity to roll the sleeves up and really get involved with the system and really try and break it and see if we could actually, if this was going to work for us or not.
Oliver Caunt: And that was really the first time, during the trial was the first time that we could actually really identify whether it was going to be useful for us or not. And it was. Yeah, so that, in terms of onboarding, that was our most important phase before signing up to phase, i.e., before signing the contract with Flowlens to actually go live with it. We’d had quite an extensive trial period where we were really looking for something to be worried about. I think in all honesty we had overcome all of that prior to signing up. So there wasn’t anything particularly scary. There may be a few things that we knew that we would have to change our internal procedures. So we were trying to reduce the day-to-day management of 12 or 15 spreadsheets, if we could reduce all of that into Flowlens and combine with Xero giving us all of that data in real time would be good.
Oliver Caunt: There’s one particular process that we do that’s very unique to our system that we kept active. So we were worried about that and how that would work with Flowlens, but we’ve decided to keep that live because it’s only one spreadsheet out of lots that we’ve now got rid of, basically. So identifying that one pain point, agree that we still do that within the company, because that’s still important for us for this sort of information that we need. The benefit is we’ve lost the data processing and the input of all those other spreadsheets. So that one standing on its own is not painful for us at all.
Oliver Caunt: We’ve got a very, very detailed job costing, like a register that we keep live on all of our projects, where there’s lots of moving parts for the bits that we buy and sell, including lots of currency fluctuations and bits and pieces that all contribute to how we might cost a future similar job, basically. And that’s always been our referral point that we’ll go back to, so a way you can just look at the buy and sell price of a particular part or a bomb of parts to build a product. The job costing is where we would go to find out how much all the logistics and the background costs of that particular job were, that we know we can get from Xero and from Flowlens in other ways, but this is a quick snapshot. So that’s what we do.
Oliver Caunt: Rewriting the process map, all the principles are pretty much the same. So we have got supplies, we’ve got parts, we’ve got preferred suppliers. We would always be revalidating costs and bringing them in. And that all happens in the background or as we’re building up for a particular job. But in terms of getting a quotation, nurturing a quotation all the way through to inquiry, sales lead quotation, and then accepting a purchase order from a customer and creating sales or whatever, all of those principles are exactly the same what we used to do. But what we’ve been able to do now is put it into a single flow of a complete process that starts and finishes it within Flowlens rather than having lots of other operations that we need to do. We have now a single touch point and a clear audit trail from start to finish now, which we didn’t have before.
Oliver Caunt: So right in that map, process map for our systems now, is a lot easier to do. It’s a lot easier to follow. And actually your knowledge base on the Flowlens website is really good. And we do use that, and we’ve incorporated all of that into our own training manuals now. So instead of rewriting completely training manuals for the system, we just have links to all the relevant pages within the Flowlens knowledge base, which has saved us a load of time. The impacts have been nothing but positive, I have to say, at all levels of the operation within the company. So from my perspective as MD, I can see in real time and my dashboard is full of widgets that are unique to me in terms of what invoice, what’s our invoice month been like and what do our sales orders look like, what’s our inquiries and inquiry conversions? We never had this data in real time before. There were always reports that we would have to run or put out a spreadsheet, copy it into a different system, try and put all that together.
Oliver Caunt: So my reporting to the board every month used to take me a good day or two just in terms of compiling that data. And now these are reports that are either live widgets or just stuff that I can just download as a PDF and just send around to everybody. But we don’t even do that, we just have a live review now. So Flowlens is fantastic for that. So from an overarching management perspective, the information is real, it’s in real time, which is fantastic and doesn’t take any time to bring to the forefront. The day-to-day operations is fantastic, where again, we have colleagues who are only interested in chasing purchase orders and when purchase orders will be arriving, because the impact could be quite negative if we don’t know that something’s arriving right up to the last minute, and that has a further impact with our customers and stuff like that too, which happens in the real world.
Oliver Caunt: So they have widgets where it says, “Show me everything that’s going to be required in the next four weeks.” And so we have a report that’s active and live that we can see on the dashboard of, “Okay, well, this is what we’re expecting in the next four weeks.” That’s had an immediate impact in terms of, we can all see what’s going on at the same time and we can actually, so we’re not having to query everybody, “Where are we at? Where are we with that?” So we know where we are. It’s great. So yeah, so that impact has been immediate. It’s helped us become a lot more efficient with how we manage suppliers and therefore how we communicate the status of a project to a customer, which our customers really appreciate. The cost is time rather than finance in our particular business.
Oliver Caunt: So again, we’re a small team that’s delivering quite high value products. Prior to Flowlens it would have been very, very reactive. And actually what we are is becoming a lot more proactive in saying, “Okay, we know where we are and where we’re going to be in six weeks’ time or eight weeks’ time,” which in our world is really valuable. Once we knew that our in-house bookkeeper was retiring, we’d already started that voyage of discovery and understanding what we needed to do to replace that, and should that role be an internal role or an external role? We were already working with our firm of external accountants, Horsfield and Smith, who have been doing our end of year accounts for many years. So we effectively had a budget.
Oliver Caunt: So when we were speaking to our accountant in terms of, “Okay, so this is the function that we need delivered,” we didn’t speak to them about the budget because we wanted them to come back with a proposal of how would be working together and the value and the level of information that we would be getting driven by Xero, which has been fed to by Flowlens. It was actually far greater. What we’re getting for effectively the same budget is far more information, far quicker information, and far more people helping support my company, basically, from my firm of accountants, which is great. So we’ve got three or four experts in different fields to do with finance that we didn’t have before. Yeah, so that decision was completely vindicated.
Oliver Caunt: I think there’s more than three features I couldn’t live without now. I think definitely the ease of managing inquiries and seeing the status of inquiries. Like all businesses, you rely on, what’s our level of inquiry and how quickly are we going to convert those into sales orders, and how quickly are those sales orders going to convert into products that we can invoice?” Effectively. So having your finger on the pulse of that is information that I didn’t really appreciate how valuable it was until we started using it. And now it’s the first thing I look at every day, if there’s any changes or when our particular sales orders hit and stuff like that. So it’s the immediacy of information which is the most valuable, and the reporting is second to none. It’s fantastic. And the fact that you can tweak and tailor reports specific for your particular needs or particular supplier or a particular product is really good.
Oliver Caunt: And the fact that you can check all of that information on a widget on the dashboard, as a visual graph in a lot of cases, is really, really useful. The transportability, we are now cyber essentials qualified, and the fact that we can put two factor authentication so I can still work away from home in a compliant way, or work away from the office in a compliant way, is really, really useful, really useful for me. So we’re not reliant on server based applications now, we’re cloud-based. Yeah, so I do find myself doing a lot of tweaking and adjusting and projects when I’m not in the office. But that’s really useful. And especially over the last 18 months during COVID, being able to deploy the system during COVID and actually work remotely and have the whole team become fluent in Flowlens and actually adopt it as our system while we’ve been working away from the office has been testimony to the system.
Oliver Caunt: We have monthly audits from an external provider. They do all of our in-house audits, basically. So they’ve been part of the journey of understanding what Flowlens is and the benefit that it’s going to be. So last year we had identified that we need to update our systems. And then in February we were going through the trial period of Flowlens and we were able to show our external auditor what we’re implementing or what we’re going to be implementing. And we’d already started to become quite familiar with that process, even though we were still in trial, to the extent that we were confident enough to show the auditor how it works and how it’s going to work for us moving forward. So it came at a good time, because this auditor is going to come back in February next year and we’ll be able to show that, Okay, you saw it during the trial and now you’re going to see it in actual real time.” And we’re going to be really proud of that.
Oliver Caunt: And again, all of these audits have been online. And so you normally would get in a room and we’d have a projector on it maybe showing stuff like that. But because it’s been screen-sharing as well, again, it’s been a lot more efficient to actually show people stuff remotely as well.
Oliver Caunt: You’ve got to start making a plan about what you want from your digital change rather than, “We’re going to change digital.” I.e., what are the outcomes? And you’re thinking about, “Okay, we’ve implemented a system,” and you have to try and visualize what that is before you’ve made the decision on what system you do. We mapped out every process that we need before we started deciding what platform that we were going to use and what’s most important to us, what’s been missing. So what bits, if we implemented a platform, how much difference would that make to our daily life? So we did it in reverse. So we went from the endgame in terms of what we really want, and then all the links back, basically. So that’s invoicing a part, or an asset as we call it now. So all the way through to the original inquiry and all those processes in reverse. That really helped us understand what we need from a system, what we’re doing at the moment.
Oliver Caunt: It really helps identify what the pain points are in the company too. Yeah, so my advice is, map out every single process that you have and try and understand where you can save time. And then once you’ve done that and you’ve chosen a system, cleanse your data and spend a lot of time getting your data right before you’re imported into a system. We did that, and we learned in the trial, we just took our old data from our old accounts package and we just exported that, put it in the right columns, and reimported it into Flowlens during the trial. And it quickly became apparent that we’ve got decades of legacy stuff that we just don’t need. So we spent a lot of time away from Flowlens taking that data, cleansing it, going through, archiving stuff. So we haven’t lost anything, but it’s really understanding, “Okay, that doesn’t need to be in the system any more. And if it does, we know where to get it and we can reimport it in. We know that.”
Oliver Caunt: So we’ve become quite experts in importing data into Flowlens, which is really easy. Map your systems and get your data ready before you import, is definitely my two words of wisdom. Anybody that makes stuff, whether it’s a big machine that needs lots of component parts or a big bill of materials, anything that needs to be asset tracked or sales orders or products that you need to track and support with your customers, I would say with Flowlens we can do that really, really well now. So we’re an instrument manufacturer, or we sell stuff that needs a history. So we’ve even brought in old assets that we’ve sold away from Flowlens that we’ve now reimported into the system because they’re out in the field and they might need repair or service when they come back to us, basically. And we could do that and we can identify by serial number. So anybody that makes things, any components, or sells stuff, sells instruments or widgets or gadgets or whatever it may be, that kind of stuff would work really well. And SMEs definitely.
