1st Choice Facilities Services is one of the UK’s fastest growing workplace service providers. Its diverse product and service portfolio covers everything a business could need for its properties and buildings, including maintenance, commercial cleaning, security and commercial fit-out. Established in 1992, the company is a thriving, customer-focused facilities management service provider and is proud of its 100% customer satisfaction record.
Background
As a rapidly growing business, 1st Choice Facilities Services felt their operations were constrained by their previous finance system. As the business grew, they were unable to analyse their data and were relying too much on manual processes and spreadsheets, which resulted in duplication of data, effort and wasted time. This led them to choose SAP Business One, hosted on Ascarii’s AWS platform, as a replacement so that they could automate their processes, analyse their data and support the business growth plans.
Jonathan Styles, Managing Director, says “we really wanted a cloud-based solution that could be accessed from anywhere, and we were very reassured that with Ascarii as our partner, SAP Business One is hosted on AWS. As an 24-7 service provider, we needed to be confident in the reliability and uptime of a world-leading hosting provider.”
Implementation
Ascarii’s lead technical consultant worked alongside the team at 1st Choice Facilities Services to ensure the smooth implementation of the system. Jonathan says, “the experience with our technical consultant was brilliant. We were very fortunate to have him support us through the implementation process – he held our hand throughout and nothing was too much trouble for him. I don’t think we would be where we are or have got to the level we have without his support.”
Benefits
First Choice Facilities Services has been using SAP Business One for a couple of years now, with an add-on from iDocuments for employees to log their time against jobs and for complete customer operations management. It has given them much greater analysis and insight into their sales, purchasing and business expenses, and Jonathan says, “the whole process from raising a purchase order through to invoicing is much smoother.” SAP Business One has enabled them to ensure they were invoicing their customers properly for work carried out by third-party contractors, and Jonathan says that having a cloud-based system that enables them to work from anywhere is a big benefit.
The biggest benefit by far, however, is the rapid company growth that SAP Business One has supported. Jonathan says, “since implementing SAP Business One, we have grown from an £8million turnover to a £15million turnover company – we wouldn’t have been able to grow to this level without SAP Business One. As we grow and diversify, SAP Business One grows with us.