John Laing plc. is a specialist investor in, and manager of infrastructure assets in the UK and internationally, principally for the public sector. They have built an enviable reputation as a market leader in privately financed infrastructure and manage 80 privately-financed infrastructure schemes for the public sector, ranging from the Intercity Express Programme, the Second Severn Crossing between England and Wales to the Greater Manchester Waste Management PFI.

The challenge:

The business model had been repositioned when the group moved out of the direct building and construction business to focus on infrastructure investment. Inadequacies in the legacy business systems environment had started to cause issues, as the new business model gained traction. Antiquated interfaces between the Sun GL and other functional systems such as Procurement, Projects and Fixed Assets had resulted in an unnecessarily high head count and the business had become reliant on manual spread sheets for MI reporting, project and asset accounting specific to their key PPP/PFI projects. SAP BPC had been purchased for financial consolidation however TCO was high.

The solution:

The business selected the Agresso ERP solution to integrate the disparate Finance, Procurement and Project systems into a single instance. Thereafter, due to better data control and the clarity afforded by Agresso, SAP BPC was phased out, replaced by an Agresso add-on (Logix4). SA provided a team of Business Analysts to conduct a review of the business processes and requirements, creating a detailed requirements document for Unit4 (the vendor partner). We then provided additional Agresso product specialists to deliver the build of the application and support the go-live process.

The outcome:

Post go-live the Applications Systems Team is now two FTE (four pre-project) and delivering meaningful MI.