Briq announces acquisition of Swipez, bringing automation to billing and accounts receivable
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O’Shea Builders is a family-owned general contracting construction management company based in Illinois. Founded in 1900, they are one of the oldest construction companies in the United States, and today their annual revenue is approximately 200 million dollars.
O’Shea Builders has been a client of Briq’s since 2020 and found themselves with a new challenge in 2022 when they were moving their data from Viewpoint Spectrum to CMIC. Their primary concern was how ongoing jobs could progress and be accounted for accurately during the period of change from one accounting system to another.
There was a huge amount of data regarding multiple jobs at different stages of completion that needed to be moved from one system to the other without any data loss. One way to do this would have been to hire people to enter information held in Spectrum into CMIC manually. The concern was this would be hugely time-consuming and expensive and have substantial potential for error. This is where Briq was able to come in.
“Automation bots don't need breaks. They work 24/7, there are no overtime costs, and we can scale these things as big as we need to.”
– Harry Schmidt, Director of Business Strategy, O’Shea Builders
Where repetitive, time-consuming data entry is needed, Briq has the answer. O’Shea decided to change their course of action and use Briq’s automations to help them hit their implementation deadline. They worked closely with Briq automation engineers to identify the data and where it belonged, and figure out the correct steps to extract and input data. The extraction process would be important as the sequence it came in mattered. Automation engineers mapped the process and worked on how to get it out, transform it, and finally re-enter it in CMIC.
“The plan was aggressive yet doable. We were probably leaning pretty far forward in the straps, but at that point, we were like we had no other choice but Briq.”
– Harry Schmidt
Once the process was mapped, Briq had to scale it across O’Shea’s data and drive forward. The process from getting Briq on board to moving the data from Spectrum to CMIC took three months, approximately half the time it would have taken if it was a manual process.
At the start, Briq and O’Shea worked to ensure everything was set up correctly on the front end to ensure a smooth transition. Thanks to the time and care taken in the preparation stage, it was a more efficient and accurate process.
“These bots were in the 99% accuracy range and saved us about 6,000 hours of people time.”
– Harry Schmidt
The benefits of this work with Briq were threefold. Firstly, bringing Briq in to migrate their business data allowed O’Shea to implement CMIC on time, which saved them time and money on the project. Secondly, automating the process allowed for a high level of precision that wouldn’t have been possible as people become fatigued through the repetitive data migration process.
“With Briq, there's a lot more trust that the data moved from one system to the other correctly. With thousands and thousands of entries, humans are bound to make multiple errors that bots won’t.”
– Harry Schmidt
Lastly, lining up the data, transferring it over, and figuring out the process for the move, gave O’Shea a much better understanding of what was actually in their database overall. The knowledge gained was an uncounted but excellent advantage for future planning.
