Consulting firm improves data visibility with Sage Intacct

Client background

EMSI is a field services and professional consulting firm helping industrial companies stay in compliance with air pollution regulations. EMSI was founded upon the core principles of environmental consciousness, customer service, accountability, perseverance and teamwork; offering customers a partnership that will change the way they think about environmental compliance. EMSI replaces faith with full-service compliance you can trust.

The business challenge

EMSI works with companies across the US, tracking emissions, helping with reporting to agencies and helping them stay in compliance with their permits. Because they are spread out geographically and work with expensive gas analyzing equipment, they needed to be able to track their equipment, projects and people.

"That was the big thing when we sat down with Baker Tilly to talk about implementing Sage Intacct," says Israel Askew, CFO at EMSI. "How do we track our projects well and make sure we don't have leakage of billing and time?" Sage Intacct's Project Costing and Billing capabilities were the answer to EMSI's needs. "Since then," says Askew, "we've added modules to get the most out of the system."

Getting access to good data across functional areas was key for Askew and his team.

"We needed the ability to push good data back to managers about their performance relative to other sites. A lot of times they might think that this is just the way things are. But we come to find out that another site's not having those issues. If you don't have good data, it's all just anecdotal."

Strategy and solution

After implementing Sage Intacct's Fixed Assets, Askew and his team decided to take the system even further. They wanted to schedule their equipment, know where each piece is going, and know when it needs to be replaced. They also wanted to track the repairs of their equipment more quickly so they can make better decisions.

EMSI was using an equipment tracking system that had recently come out with some new releases and functionality, and Askew saw some opportunity for leveraging that system more. But after comparing those capabilities and the cost of upgrading that system with what Sage Intacct could do, even with the cost of having Baker Tilly build it as a custom application, it was still cheaper to keep the tracking functionality inside the Sage Intacct platform.

"It made every bit of sense to have it integrated with the rest of our ERP and accounting data," says Askew. "There's a huge upside to having it integrate with all of our projects, with purchasing, with the system that everyone was already using."

Additionally, Askew and his team was able to design the system to work exactly how they wanted it to. Getting buy-in and participation from area managers, operations personnel and the system's users was crucial to the success of the project. And the process wasn't overly complicated. After collecting requirements from his team, Askew shared them with Baker Tilly's development and technical services team, who documented the requirements, finalizing them after a couple of iterations. Baker Tilly then built a proof of concept version of the new system and then incorporated feedback from EMSI on some tweaks and additions they felt were necessary.

Now that the system has been live for some time, Askew and his team are seeing the benefits of the custom application Baker Tilly built for them. "We've been able to attack problems more quickly because we see the data more clearly," says Askew. And those responsible for managing equipment repairs have been able to drastically reduce the amount of paperwork and the number of emails required for each repair.

Askew sees Sage Intacct's configurability in the three ways. First, the original implementation is a fairly quick process since Sage Intacct is configured with clicks, not code. Entities can be added with a click of a button and the system can be adjusted based on changes to the business without requiring a team of developers and months of work.

Additionally, Sage Intacct has the flexibility to add processes that the system might not have been designed for specifically. EMSI uses Sage Intacct to track the travel requests of their employees alongside their projects. That's a change that Askew was able to figure out on his own by adding some custom fields and setting up some approvals.

And finally, Sage Intacct's powerful APIs and development platform allow companies like EMSI to collaborate with an experienced development team, like Baker Tilly, to modify the application, build in workflow automation and even build custom applications, like EMSI's equipment tracking system. These additions and modifications all integrate natively with Sage Intacct's core and add-on modules. Baker Tilly also built a custom integration between Sage Intacct and EHS Insight, the safety and compliance software EMSI uses.