KBC is a leading International consulting and technology company specialising in the oil refining & petrochemical industries. With over 200 employees and seven offices throughout Europe, The United States and Asia, KBC is a truly international organisation. The company is listed on the UK stock market under the EPIC symbol KBC.

“time@work’s user interface and its sophisticate reporting options were key factors in KBC’s purchasing decision”

“There were three main reasons we selected the time@work solution” commented Jonathan Hedges - Financial Controller, “firstly, our end-users and project managers preferred the more intuitive and easy to use interface of time@work and we had identified end-user acceptance as being key to project success. Secondly the variety of reporting options in time@work made me feel very confident that I would be able to deliver a high level of management information. Perhaps of most importance however we felt the time@work team at Teredo were clearly committed to providing a solution to KBC’s business needs rather than just a software package”

Whilst a rudimentary email-based time recording solution had previously been implemented it was not integrated with other financial systems and unable to provide the flexibility required by an ambitious international organisation. In particular, using the data captured to provide meaningful management information was proving difficult.

As a professional services organisation, KBC delivers projects ranging in length from weeks to several years and like many project-based organisations their charging model is based on a mixture of fixed-price, milestone and time & materials.

Like many organisations in the current economic climate, KBC sought to control their costs and manage the organisation more effectively. As competitive pressure drove prices down, costs remained fixed and pricing models evolved in response to changing customer demands, it became imperative that the correct systems were in place to ensure project profitability.

KBC has implemented the time & expense recording, invoicing, budgeting, multi-currency and multi-company modules of time@work. Employees throughout the world access their timesheets through the web-based Professional Services Workbench, which also allows them to enter expense claims and access user-specific reports. Workers in areas with weak telecoms infrastructures use an offline timesheet which allows them to synchronise through email.

In the coming months, KBC will be extending its use of time@work through the implementation of additional modules and extended use of the existing solution.
KBC will implement the Resource Planning module to enable them to allocate staff to projects based on their availability, skillsets and preferences.
In addition to live projects, sales projects and client account sales targets will be added to the system, allowing better reporting of profitability at the client and country/region level.

When asked to sum up his experiences of the project and his cooperation with the time@work project team, Jonathan said:
“no implementation of this type is going to be totally painless, touching as it does on many different aspects of the business – however I was very impressed by the determination of the time@work consultants to solve any issues we came up against and deliver a working solution. If I were to repeat this process I would have no hesitation in selecting Teredo and time@work again”.