Founded as a not-for-profit, Energy Options has grown at a rate most businesses would envy – and has turned to Abel™ to control complex stock requirements and job margins, and manage inter-branch finances across seven offices.
Energy Options’ commitment to sustainable heating is obvious as soon as you walk in the door. On a crisp Bay of Plenty morning, a recycled pellet burner heats its Whakatane head office. Founded in 1999, the company began with a community project to teach unemployed people how to retrofit home insulation. But the scale of opportunity it tapped into has seen it grow at a high-energy rate ever since.
A finalist in the Deloitte Fast 50 Awards, it has grown from insulating just 50 homes to now fitting out, or installing heating in, in 3000-4000 a year. Staff numbers have more than trebled from 30 to nearly 100. Growth has come from wider recognition of the benefits of warm homes, but also the fact that it was the first to focus on enabling home owners to more easily access insulation grants (which range from 33% to full costs) available from its owner, the Eastern Bay Energy Trust, and other public agencies such as some District Health Boards and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA).
When Denice Bennett-Rae joined as its CFO one-and-a-half years ago Energy Options had expanded to branches in Tauranga, Rotorua, Taupo, Hawkes Bay, Gisborne and Marlborough – and its business management systems had not kept pace with its rate of growth.
There were two separate accounting packages across all the branches. In a business where funding organizations need timely and accurate reporting, an open-source CRM system was being pushed to also manage stock and pricing. Because ceiling insulation is laid out in continuous strips there is a high risk of wastage through off-cuts. But tracking the contents of each $15,000 container load of insulation materials they received – let alone the margin on each job – was an almost impossible task.
“The accounts were opaque and not much use,” Mrs Bennett-Rae says. “There were a lot of reiterations and a lot time wasted in trying to get good analysis out of the financials.”
Seeking a step-up in technology, they found several potential suppliers demanding that they first junk their CRM. One insisted on being engaged before offering a price estimate. “Abel were different,” she says. “Everyone else said, here is our system, you fit your business into our system. Abel said we will configure our system to fit your needs.”
From the outset she liked the simplicity of Abel’s single price guarantee, where Energy Options installs Abel and switches on only the functionality it needs. Three months into the implementation wider gains are also clear.
Instead of wading through duplications, Abel’s inter-branch functionality shows individual branch profitability at a glance. Stock taking that used to require a monthly physical check is done automatically in real time. Each branch can re-order for its own needs, and they know if any stock is lost. Instead of informed guesswork, “we can tell job-by- job what our margin is, which we were never able to do before.”
Having first focussed on financials, they are now connecting Energy Options’ CRM directly to Abel, allowing them to build on the investment they had. Accurate visibility over the business will change how they grow. “We are looking to use Abel to tell us where we should be going rather than where we have been,” Mrs Bennett-Rae says. Allowing them to be even more successful in keeping more homes warm.