From tracking costs on marine construction and dredging projects to ensuring employees get paid on-time, the Manson Hub (“the Hub” for short) enhances business processes with one program. Supported by a small but savvy team, the Hub—an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system—unifies proprietary business data under one structure. Led by ERP Manager Kyle Allen,— who receives support from IT Senior Software Engineer Paul Massee and Production Engineers Jon Nowak, Joseph Hannon, and Austin Idle—the ERP team increases reliability, efficiency, and security between departments by ensuring that the Hub operates smoothly and efficiently in granting users access to pertinent information on one shared platform.
“We back groups that utilize the Hub for their daily operations, such as Operations, Equipment, Purchasing, Accounting, Payroll, IT, and Executive Management,” Kyle says, “unifying all divisions, work phases, and tasks toward a common goal of leveraging data.”
The Hub is a system that helps users input, track, share, and make sense of important company data. The program enhances automation to process information for employees, allowing them to effortlessly perform previously time-consuming tasks such as migrating data, accessing reports, and inputting information for Accounting, Payroll, and IT. For Operations and Equipment teams, the program can assist in managing vessels on active jobsites and during various project phases. The program manages the lifecycles of important documents and their usefulness to Manson’s workforce, ultimately acting as the “brain” of Manson.
To keep things running smoothly, Kyle and the support group maintain a watchful eye, addressing typical pain points like helping employees gain portal access, transferring data, setting up accounts, and fixing errors.
The support group’s work keeps the Hub humming along, creating custom reports and queries and formatting information to present it in an understandable way. “Although the Hub provides standard pre-built reports and queries, many of them require customization by our team into a format that contains the data and key fields that are desired by management,” says Production Engineer Austin Idle.
At first glance, the team’s day-to-day tasks may seem like just troubleshooting Hub-related software issues and closing tickets, but their responsibilities go beyond configuration checks.
The team applies a personal approach in order to assist employees with their problems, following up with department leads and connecting key people to figure out solutions to boost operations. This also brings attention to urgent items and how they affect users across the board.
Computer Methods International Corp (CMiC) is the developer and service provider of the Hub and is a leading enterprise software company for construction companies. Establishing better processes also involves working and communicating with CMiC, which helps the team track new implementations and better understand the program’s functionality.
“Now that the core functionality of the Hub is working so well with a live system, the team is working on quality-of-life improvements to make it even better for everyone,” says Vice President and Chief Civil Engineer for Dredging Mike Warwick. “The new workflows, apps, queries, and data connectors harness the potential of our new ERP system and are the embodiment of finding a better way.”
The team looks forward to continuing to expand the Hub and demonstrating the platform’s capabilities with mobile use through smartphones and tablets. Kyle and the team are at the forefront—planning, testing, and collaborating with team leads to gather suggestions and feedback for the new system features, and implementing the mobile rollout.
“We have more data at our fingertips than ever before,” says Chief Financial Officer Jon Rodriguez. “The Hub drives and supports all aspects of Manson’s business; there’s a strategic benefit to having all collected information under one roof.”
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