Company Background

Cardno was founded as an engineering practice in Brisbane, Queensland in 1945 as Cardno & Davies. In 2004, Cardno listed on the Australian Securities Exchange to position the company for further growth and achieve its vision of being a world leader in the provision of professional services to improve the physical and social environment.

Since then, the company has focused on growth strategies to increase the diversity of services offered to clients, while also expanding its international presence.

Today, Cardno has a truly global presence with approximately 3,000 staff in Australia and New Zealand, 4,200 staff in the United States, and 600 staff in Latin America, with the balance of staff working on projects in a number of developing countries. From the company’s 300 offices, it provides multi-disciplinary services across ten international markets.

Cardno’s focus on growth and diversification to better serve its clients requires a business software platform that supports Cardno’s unique needs as a multi-national professional services firm, including:

• The ability to scale up in line with Cardno’s growth ambitions.
• Comprehensive multi-company and inter-company capabilities, with integrated multi-currency support.
• The ability to streamline business practices and reporting.

Challenge

In 2005, Cardno had approximately 560 staff in 26 companies spread over 16 offices, predominantly located throughout Australia. The company had a customized financial solution that met its requirements, but would not meet the need for scalability to accommodate future growth and expansion into other countries. Furthermore, there were also a number of different legacy systems in use within businesses that Cardno had acquired, which limited the firm’s ability to produce consolidated financial and management reports.

The company’s focus on international growth through acquisition and the need to more efficiently produce multi-currency consolidated financial statements were the primary requirements behind Cardno’s search for a new global business software solution. That system also had to address the operational requirements of a professional services firm. In addition, Cardno had established a strategy that, if successful, would rapidly grow the size and reach of the business – and the firm’s new business software solution would need to be able to support that expansion seamlessly.

Solution

In July 2005, after a rigorous business system evaluation process, Cardno selected BST Global as its business software solution provider and deployed BST Enterprise across its operations in 2006. The reasons for Cardno’s ultimate selection of BST Global included:

• The ability to have a feature-rich, integrated business software solution that aligned with the needs of a professional services organization.
• Integrated support for a multi-company structure and complex intercompany transactions.
• Multi-currency features.
• The ability to streamline and automate various business processes using workflows.
• Reporting and query facilities to support management of project and company performance.

Impact

Since implementing BST Enterprise, Cardno has grown from 560 staff and 16 offices in 2005 to a global consultancy with 8,000 staff and 290 offices. The improvements to Cardno’s business management capabilities with BST Enterprise have been significant, including:

• The introduction of a greatly improved billing process with invoices produced and sent to clients more efficiently, resulting in improved cash flow.
• The delivery of multi-company and multi-currency capabilities, resulting in more streamlined business processes.
• The ability to provide Project and Operation Managers with complete and comprehensive visibility into any project with real-time information.
• Comprehensive utilization and productivity reporting across the business that supports monitoring and management action on resource allocation and deployment.