Kolsen is one of the largest local employers in the Northern Territory, with more than 400 staff working across facilities, electrical and industrial service streams. Headquartered in Darwin with branches in Katherine and Alice Springs, Kolsen businesses include Sterling NT, Espec, Regional Asset Maintenance Services and Switchboard and Power Controls.
Kolsen specialises in operating in hazardous areas and high security work environments, such as LNG plants, mine sites and defence bases, as well as public spaces and road networks. Whilst each business operates independently, they sometimes collaborate to deliver integrated services to shared clients or sites.
The company has grown rapidly over the past five years with the acquisition of several new businesses, rounding out an already impressive offering. Along with each acquisition came a mix of legacy cloud based platforms, making business reporting challenging. Data was siloed in three different cloud platforms – job management solutions SimPRO and AroFlo, and accounting platform, Xero.
Kolsen’s Group Financial Controller, Colin Spooner, wanted a way to wrangle all the data into a warehouse, to streamline and improve reporting times. “Whilst cloud apps are undoubtedly here to stay, the reporting tends to be somewhat inflexible and basic,” says Colin. “We wanted to find a way that we could integrate the data from multiple platforms to produce business insights that could power the company.”
Firstly, Kolsen used SyncHub to connect their two primary SaaS platforms - SimPRO and Xero - to bring historical data down into their Power BI reporting dashboards. Next, SyncHub continued to run in the background, keeping the data up to date and providing real-time reports and notifications.
After working with SyncHub for a few months, Kolsen took advantage of SyncHub’s partner platform to have the AroFlo connector built out for them. That enabled all Kolsen’s data to feed seamlessly into their reporting tool.
Initially, we worked with SyncHub and another company to solve the challenge of siloed data, but quickly recognised that the customer service and abilities of the SyncHub team were vastly superior,” says Colin. “Thus, we reached out and asked the SyncHub team to develop a connector that would allow us to easily access our data. The SyncHub team got us to where we wanted to be and I think we all wonder how we ever lived without it.
The simplicity of the SyncHub solution means that the team at Kolsen are now limited only by their imagination when it comes to business reporting. “We get great visibility on employee activity and can exception report across the business to drive desired outcomes and behaviours,” says Colin. “We have much better visibility on labour utilisation and rostering now and we already have data driven cost savings.“
With SyncHub, the company has been able to streamline processes that were previously cumbersome. “Custom dashboards allow us to determine what we want and when, without time intensive data extraction methods,” says Colin. “For us, that’s been invaluable in terms of running a data driven business. Data is something that you tend to accumulate as a bi-product of doing business and harnessing it is key to making fast, accurate choices that will drive your business in the right direction.”
With SyncHub we get great visibility on employee activity and can exception report across the business to drive desired outcomes and behaviours. We have much better visibility on labour utilisation and rostering now and we already have data driven cost savings.