Dalkia

Dalkia is a leading provider of facilities management and industrial maintenance services in Sweden, with operations nationwide. Part of Dalkia International, which is owned by the Veolia Environment, Dalkia has 900 employees in Sweden and annual revenue in the region of US $ 120 million. Customers can be found in the private and public sectors, often operating large and complex facilities such as hospitals and hotels as well as industrial and other technologically advanced properties.

IFS Applications™ provides Dalkia with a contract management system that allows the company to follow up contracts in detail, making it easier to monitor the relationship between cost, revenue and profitability and giving Dalkia the freedom to grow and change as it needs.

The challenge

Dalkia started life as Locum Drift, a wholly owned company providing in-house facilities management for Stockholm county council in Sweden. Dalkia acquired the company in the late 1990s and started a period of expansion and growth. To facilitate this, the company reviewed its IT support. Sven Themptander, IT director at Dalkia, explains the situation, “We had a number of different work order systems that were not integrated throughout the company, and the financials software could not give us the corporate support we required. And although most of the systems we had were good, they were too small to support our planned expansion.” In particular, Dalkia wanted better follow-up capabilities for costs and revenue as well as a contract management solution integrated with invoicing functionality.

The solution

When Locum Drift was acquired by Dalkia, the company had been an IFS customer since 1997, running solutions for maintenance, distribution and human resource management, among others. “IFS offered us a very credible solution to our requirements,” added Sven Themptander, “so we saw no reason to change supplier. The contract module was critical, as was the fact that IFS could provide us with a client-server, Oracle-based system that guaranteed room to grow and handle large amounts of data.”

Implementation

Given that Dalkia has been an IFS customer since 1997, its natural that the companies have collaborated on a number of implementation and upgrade projects, not least the transition from character-based to graphical interface. Sven Themptander again, “Our collaboration with IFS has been very constructive, and the implementation consultants from IFS have done a great job. The latest upgrade went very smoothly and worked well from day one.”

Benefits

With IFS Applications, Dalkia can follow up contracts in detail. As work orders are directly linked to agreements, it is much easier to see how costs are related to revenue and profitability for each individual contract. This makes it much easier to analyze agreements, make strategic changes and increase competitiveness. Sven Themptander illustrates the point, “The ability to price jobs according to customer specifications has enhanced our sales process. Thanks to IFS Applications, we know exactly what each element costs.”
The different components are fully integrated so service technicians can easily report time and project costs per hour directly into the system. On the same screen, they see exactly what they have produced and the data goes straight into the payroll component. Even items like sick leave can be entered directly by the technicians. This significantly cuts down on errors associated with data transfer and reduces the work related to payroll administration.

Another benefit of the system is its scalability. Since it is component-based and platform-independent, companies can grow and change as the need arises. Dalkia has experienced this in recent years as it has grown via acquisitions and mergers—and IFS Applications has continued to provide consistent IT support. The business performance capabilities also enable management to analyze operations in great detail and make strategic adjustments based on accurate data that is available with minimal delay. Integration means that updates in one part of the system are reflected in all other parts that are affected.

Dalkia plans to extend its collaboration with IFS into sales & marketing components as well as mobile solutions. The reason, as Sven Themptander puts it, is that “IFS truly lives up to one of its old slogans: Set your business free. With IFS Applications, we have the freedom to grow without worrying whether our IT support can keep up.”

Software

IFS Applications™ for Service Management