C2O Group

An entrepreneurial business that outgrew its spreadsheets

C2O Group delivers electrical, mechanical and communications work to the energy and infrastructure sectors — LNG and industrial construction, commissioning and completions, transmission, and specialist resourcing that puts skilled electricians and technicians onto client sites. Roughly 80 percent of the business is time and materials: mobilize a crew, capture their time, pay them, bill the client. The business is split almost evenly between Australia and the United States, is expanding into new regions, and has grown substantially over the past three years.

That growth ran on QuickBooks, small point applications and, above all, Excel. Stan, C2O's CFO, knew it would not hold.

“We realized this is not going to be sustainable. It was how do we move our operating processes away from Excel into a robust system, and ultimately create the foundation to scale the business.”Stan, CFO, C2O Group

Solve the problem, don't buy the fancy thing

Construction buys technology on trust — colleagues recommend what worked for them, and the incumbents are often old and complicated. C2O went the other way and defined the problem in one sentence: win work, mobilize a team, capture their time, pay them, bill the client. It involved the people in both countries who do each step, and let the executive team — the two country CEOs, the president, the CFO and the global CEO — make the call.

The evaluation took six to nine months. The team had a hypothesis in the first three and spent the rest validating that nothing critical was missing.

Why NetSuite plus its partners

NetSuite versus Dynamics was, in Stan's words, the easier decision; the real question was whether the platform would solve the business, which NetSuite alone does not. NetSuite's payroll is US-centric, and in a labor business payroll is inseparable from time capture. C2O selected Dayforce for both and integrated it with NetSuite. The deciding factor for the ERP itself was the ecosystem: NetSuite for accounting, and a SuiteApp — BlueCollar Projects — that pulls every cost stream of a time-and-materials business together against the project so it can be billed.

As a smaller player among very large clients, C2O cannot dictate invoice formats or time-sheet conventions. The combined stack bends to each customer while keeping one process underneath.

Implementation with people who know construction

The implementation was organized around five or six macro-processes — procure-to-pay, fixed asset management and the rest — walked end to end with the BlueCollar team. The global CEO had a precise vision for the outcome, and the team designed to it.

“People really understood the construction business as well as they understood NetSuite plus the Blue Collar SuiteApp. That combination was really helpful for us to get to where our vision is.”Stan, CFO, C2O Group

C2O went live knowing a busy team would do just enough training and testing and finish learning in production — a conscious trade, since waiting for perfect readiness would have meant never going live. Stabilization is under way, with the US ahead because Dayforce was already live there.

What's next

For its second-largest US customer, C2O now builds sales orders that generate crew time sheets, gets them signed and has the week's invoice ready the next morning — on a project with hundreds of employees. By year end about 400 US employees will be billed this way. The goal is to double the business in twelve months, and this automation is how.

“I don't think there's anywhere in the industry right now where you can see all your time-sheet data, review and approve it on Monday, and on Tuesday have all your time sheets and invoices ready.”Stan, CFO, C2O Group