Ravi Kannan | SIS Partner
When I sat down to interview Ravi Kannan, SIS Partner, my first question was, “What aspects of our SIS IP are most mission-critical for construction and project services companies?” His answer was clear, “Everything in our SIS Construct 365 IP for Microsoft Dynamics is mission-critical for construction and project-based companies.” In this dialog, we will delve into his answer.
Q: First, how did you get into Dynamics?
A: My background is in manufacturing. I started with a consulting company and then became VP of Information Services for the Simmons company helping them move from make-to-stock to just-in-time manufacturing. Later I met my partners, Mark Kershteyn and Steven Mulka, who had similar backgrounds, and we started SIS in 1998.
We started in project services with Solomon, and one of our earliest clients was a construction company. We persuaded the software manufacturer of Solomon (Pre Microsoft) to add functionality for construction. One piece of functionality was to do with the core business process in construction for professional services and all fixed fee projects.
We started with at-risk projects. Management of at-risk projects has its own life cycle all the way from budgeting to procurement, human resources, payroll, and then certainly billing, and revenue recognition. All of that is unique. And there is the forecasting of course, critical and, ECAC, etc. We invested resources and effort to build the critical components to get into the construction space.
We grew from there, and our products have expanded substantially in functionality and depth. We are the only Dynamics Partner in the Microsoft ecosystem that is 100% focused in this area. We are the strongest in terms of the functionality we have created.
Q: Who do we run into outside of Dynamics?
A: Our competition outside the channel is SAP, IFS, and Oracle in the enterprise space.
None of the mid-market products scale to what enterprise companies need effectively. Microsoft technology makes the Dynamics story a compelling alternative for enterprise organizations.
Q: I would like to offer our readers a quick view of what mission-critical elements are in our solutions? Why do they need our solutions?
A: I think all our IP is mission-critical after years of perfecting solutions for the construction and project services businesses.
From a purely functional viewpoint, Microsoft does not have the functionality out of the box to support construction companies. Our mission-critical applications are in two areas:
- All requirements for union labor and payroll. In construction, the ability to manage labor costs is critical. That capability does not exist in base Microsoft Dynamics 365. That is true even from a competitive viewpoint. Many construction software providers struggle to fill that pocket, but we have a complete integrated solution for them.
- The second one is our SIS Construct 365 Project Cost Management solution. We deeply support all the construction finance and accounting business processes. This is critical because they cannot execute projects with Microsoft Dynamics 365 out of the box. It takes every component of the business process to manage at-risk projects, which is 90% of all projects in enterprise companies. That is what they call lump sum fixed fee or lump sum cost plus guaranteed projects. We support all end-to-end business processes from business development and bidding and preconstruction with project management all the way through execution and project close-out. Then we can surface all the KPIs and analytics to the end-users through Power BI analytics and reporting.
It is the entire solution that is important. Labor costing is critical. Budgeting is critical. Forecasting is critical. Revenue recognition is critical as well as support for a resilient supply chain.
Q: In the area of mission-critical, let us talk about field services as we have just announced SIS Construct 365 Advanced Field Services? How do we compare with other Field services in Dynamics 365?
A: I think historically, the integration of field service has been a standalone application. If you look at legacy field service applications in every company being implemented, it is often disjointed.
Those companies do field service primarily for operational needs because they are unlike construction field services which are a real-time business. Meaning that you have a technician and a work order that has a noticeably short life cycle, and they need to manage it on their remote device and collect data. Microsoft does that well as part of their piece of the solution. When you focus on our clients who are specialty contractors, these are companies with the most complex processes.
SIS Construct 365 Advanced Field Service (AFS) is not a standalone solution. It is a tightly integrated solution to provide the front-end field to be tightly integrated with the back office whether that is credit checks, customer onboarding, credit and rebills, or a hierarchy of customers worksite versus billing site. You have construction companies with field service as a business line, or it is a profit center. And they are very tightly integrated as a specialty contractor. As a matter of fact, their margin is larger.
From our solution, we have extended the solution with our SIS Construct 365 so that we have business processes all the way from business development to the billing – the lifecycle of the service experience. AFS is tightly integrated to finance and operations and is a specific product. The field service framework is integrated with construction due to the fact the field service staff also does work for the construction department. They execute service contracts while the construction project is in progress.
Q: What does the future hold for SIS in our product category?
A: SIS is now supporting the Heavy Highway vertical, another large enterprise market, where there is a demand for digital transformation and acceleration. We feel that we are in the right place at the right time. For us, we are going to continue to create enhancements for this market. Just like we are doing in the specialty market, which covers Mechanical and other specialties.
We have all the pieces, including HR and payroll, that the heavy highway/civil industry needs because they are Union-based contractors and heavy civil/highway. We have an exceptionally large chunk of what we call the specialty marketing industry. Within these two markets, SIS has developed solutions that can be t-shirt sized for any project-based organization to manage the complexities that are inherent to the construction industry. We are confident that the future of SIS and its IP will drive large enterprises to their digital transformation.
Q: How can people reach out to you for more information?
A: They can visit our website at www.sisn.com and complete a contact form or email info@sisn.com.
