Domayne Engineering markets itself as the only multi-disciplinary building maintenance management company locally offering 24-hour national service with guaranteed response times. Domayne provides maintenance and repair services of buildings, industrial plants and equipment associated with engineering support services countrywide.
The company runs a call centre, offering a 'one-number, one-call' facility with one contact initiating Domayne Engineering Services' network of technicians. The call centre is backed up by a 24-hour mobile service complemented by a fleet of 50 fully-equipped vehicles operating throughout SA, the company says.
Realising its accounting system was out of date and in need of an upgrade last year, the company went back to its supplier and discovered it would cost the same to upgrade as it would to install a new system from scratch. So Domayne went to market for a new solution and settled on Pastel Evolution.
Says Domayne Engineering commercial manager Dave Smith: "We were impressed by the fact that, although we needed to customise Evolution to accommodate our need for divisional accounts to be separated and for our financial director to draw reports from the system in a specific format, the cost of implementing the solution was half that of its competitors."
Price was a major factor, says Smith, as was the local support offered.
"The package we used previously was US-based, so if we ran into a problem, it could be three or four days before got an answer from the States," he says.
Evolution's Contact Management module was also a significant factor. Says Smith: "Evolution's built-in contact management functionality allows us to automatically keep our senior executives informed of each new contract signed. It also alerts me to contract renewal dates, some of which require me to notify clients that their agreed standard fee escalation percentages will commence for the next year. In other words, Evolution allows us to not only control our historical financial information, but also trigger and manage new revenue streams.
"We were also able to integrate the solution into our call centre, which is mission-critical to us in that it monitors and manages our 24-hour mobile service as delivered by our 200 field personnel and fleet of 70 vehicles," he notes.
Rolling over with ease
The cost of implementing the [Pastel] solution was half that of its competitors.
Dave Smith, commercial manager, Domayne Engineering
Domayne's old package had run across its wide area network (WAN), with users at satellite branches logging in using PC Anywhere and taking control of the machine at head office in order to use the accounting software. The previous accounting solution was also running on an NT server, which meant Domayne had to upgrade its hardware as part of the roll-out to Evolution.
Says Smith: "When we rolled out, it was an entire project - Evolution plus the hardware. The planning stage was quite long because we were changing service providers. It took about a month to plan the implementation and went live at financial year-end after a two-week implementation period."
Domayne rolled over to its new system within a 24-hour period. The data was transferred from the old system, frameworks and parameters were set up and, by the next day, the company had started using Evolution to its full extent.
"It was then a case of hand-holding," says Smith.
The data transfer was done off-site by Pastel partner Brilliant Link, which was also tasked with doing three weeks' worth of hand-holding at Domayne after the go-live date.
"Because Pastel Evolution is so easy to use, we ended up needing only 10 days," Smith reveals.
The system went live last June and is now being used over the company's WAN in real-time by 20 users at Domayne's head office in Johannesburg and two branches in Durban and Pretoria.
Smith says the company is completely satisfied with the decision to engage Pastel and will add a new branch in Cape Town shortly.
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