Integrating Autodesk Construction Cloud Cost Management with ERP

KYLE EWE: Hi, all. Welcome to AU 2024. Before we start, let's go through the safe harbor statement. This is to ensure you guys understand the expectations.

Well, let's get this going. Today's topic is on integrating ACC cost management with ERP. Make sure you guys are in the correct class, which is CS1108. We will start with a bit of intro on who we are. First, I'm Kyle Ewe. I'm the digital lead for Gamuda, focusing mainly on digitalization for the contracts and commercial side. With me, we have Pei Jie, our software engineer who is the one working on ACC ERP automation. Also with us, Mei Mei. She is our senior QS digital engineer in charge of this project. And we are all from Gamuda under the G-E-T, or "GET," which is Gamuda Excellence Transformation Team.

We will not go through too much on who we are here. But an overview-- Gamuda is an engineering property and infra company, and we are one of the largest infra companies in Malaysia. Do refer to the handouts for more details about us.

Let's start. Today, we will be looking at three main sections. First is on explore, where we look at how we find the right tools and resources. Next, Mei Mei will talk about the transformation journey. And finally, Pei Jie will talk about the build, where we develop, test, and deploy our solutions.

Explore-- well, before we start, let me ask this. Anyone here is using ACC cost management? Next, anyone here has started ACC cost management with ERP integrations? First, we thought it is going to be quite straightforward work. We started with a few proposed options, option A to D, just to ensure we always have some backup plans. We were also looking for external resources who has done this before within the construction industry to help us out.

Well, our journey is not smooth as one thought. Suddenly, we are banging on multiple walls. We came to realize our ERP system has been heavily customized, especially with all those custom forms and tables. You see, before we started ACC to ERP, our ERP was used directly to manage our construction projects.

This is where we have to customize the ERP to do IPA, which is Interim Payment Application, and IPC, which is Interim Payment Certificate, especially when we are dealing with projects in this region, Asia-Pacific side. But then we face a lot of issues, like how we can retain our PQ information, our subcontracts, and also to be able to do BIM fully.

This is where we see the ERP system is good in certain things, but not here. We are losing a lot of data, and we are unable to manage them properly. And we try to integrate with ACC cost management here especially. With all these custom ERP, we realized our options are running out. As you can see, we are left out with option C and D.

Fortunately, we have something that works. We were so happy when we first saw the data got through using the OPA, which is On-Prem Agent from ACC Connect. So it was amazing when we saw that ACC Connect actually works here for us. This is when we form a bigger team and also engage a few consultants to see whether they can do this solution or not, especially using ACC Connect.

Well, we finally gotten a consultant who has some experience in the construction industry and ACC Connect. Not easy to find, I think everyone knows. As you can see, we are using on-prem agents under the ACC Connect. We work with the consultant to come up with a bit more details on the phases we need to develop. This one, payment posting. That's a bit of a dilemma here, which I'll talk about it later.

Basically, for payment posting, we need to post the approved payment from ACC to the ERP. Phase two, contract creations. This is where we create those contracts which is PO, or Purchase Order, ERP. Now, if you look carefully, you may start to ask, shouldn't you do contract creation first, then only payment posting?

So this is what I'm referring to. The reason is contracts and PO are already created in both system in all our running projects. That's where we need to prioritize and need to focus on posting first, and only we come back on the contracts later. After we have phase one and phase two completed, we focus on phase three, which is indirect costs syncing from ERP to ACC.

And finally, syncing the master data between the two systems on phase four. You see the choices we made for all these spaces are mainly because we have ongoing projects running, and we critically need them to be on board. Next, I will pass this to Mei Mei to talk more about our transformation journey. Over to you, Mei Mei.

MEI MEI: Thanks, Kyle. I'm Mei Mei, and my role is to bridge the ACC cost management uses, mainly the contract and commercial teams and the software development team, to ensure the seamless communication and collaboration between them. I'm here excited to walk you through the transformation of our payment process.

Let's begin by taking a quick look at the entire payment process as it existed before we integrated ACC cost management with our ERP systems. The process start with creating the subcontract and preparing the billing information within ACC cost management. After the billing information is prepared, it go through approval process in ACC. Once it's approved, the contract admin requires to download the payment files. From ACC, attach the payment files to an email and send it to our finance executive.

The payment data has to be manually entered into our ERP system by our finance executive as well. And finally, the payment can be processed in the ERP system. Is there a payment process similar to this? While this process does get the job done, but let's look into step 3, 4, and 5.

This menu steps downloading file, sending emails and entering data were clear bottleneck in our process, leading to inefficiencies and increasing the risk of errors. The manual download of files increases the risk of misplaced or incorrect data. Manually sending files via email, relying on individuals to correctly handle and distribute the files and payment data.

The manual data entry process is perhaps the most error-prone and tedious step. After the integration, the previously manual tasks, like downloading payment files, emailing, and inputting data into the ERP system, are now automated through ACC Connect.

The result, as you can see in the deck-- a more streamlined, efficient, and accurate payment process after the integration. By automating these manual steps, we freed up valuable time for our team to focus on more strategic tasks, reduce the risk of errors, and speed up the overall payment cycle. Transforming our payment process wasn't an overnight task. It was a well-planned and executed project.

Next, let me walk you through the four key phases in our transformation journey. We started with user requirement studies, feasibility studies, and business impact assessment. We also consider audit requirements when we were defining the project scope and specifications. This phase was crucial for understanding the needs and setting the clear direction for the whole team. And we decided to divide the integration project into four phases, as Kyle explained just now, based on the study we conducted.

Next, we developed a business blueprint and revised it multiple times to ensure all the milestones and phases were accounted for. We also defined and planned key activities, including SIT, UAT, and deployment for each of the phases to ensure timely project delivery.

In the data mapping and recipe development phase, we dedicated a significant portion of our time to ensure seamless data integration. This involves mapping over 120 contract elements and more than 230 payment elements to ensure accurate data flow between these two systems. Each element was carefully analyzed to identify how it would interact with other components in the system and the workflow. We also develop ETL recipes to automate data extraction/transformation into require format and loading it into the target systems, which is our ERP system.

Additionally, condition recipe were also created to handle exceptions and complex real-world use cases, especially in this construction industry. This meticulous mapping and recipe development were very crucial for minimizing errors and enhancing the efficiency of the entire payment process.

Finally, during the test and deploy phase, we executed over 20 test scenarios and activities, including comprehensive SIT and internal UAT. This rigorous testing ensure that this system was robust and ready for successful deployment. The result of our integration are evidenced in the significant performance improvement achieved.

We have increased overall process efficiency by around 20%, streamlining the workflow and reducing the number of steps, which also minimize delays. Time savings were substantial, with a 70% reduction in time-consuming manual tasks thanks to automation. Data accuracy improved by more than 85%, as the automation of data transfer between systems reduces the human error associated with all the manual data entry works.

While we achieved significant improvement in process efficiency, time savings, and data accuracy, these successes didn't come without their challenges. Now let's turn our attention to the challenges that we faced during the development phase. PJ will discuss the obstacle we face and encounter and strategy we employed to overcome them. Pass it to PJ.

PEI JIE NGU: Thanks, Mei Mei. Hi, everyone. I'm PJ. I'm a software developer, mainly focusing on developing the integration between cost management and the ERP system.

For this section, I will share with you about the development and the challenges of the integration. As mentioned previously, there are four phases, but today, we are going to focus on two main phases only, which is payment posting and contract creation. This is how the whole process looks like if we combine both payment posting and contract creation. I'll explain both phases in details later.

Now want to share with you about the payment posting process. First, user will create payment and go through the approval workflow in the Cost Management. Once the payment has been set as proof, ACC Connect will be doing its job in terms of extract, transform, map, and load data. After that, ACC Connect will check if there's any change management in the payment. If yes, it will proceed to process the change management and map it accordingly. If there is any version order or they were attached in the payment, it will proceed to process it and increase the contract commitment in the ERP system.

From there, if there is no variation order or [INAUDIBLE], it will proceed to post the payment along with the other type of change management, such as advance payment, debit/credit note, and a few other types. If the payment is successfully created in the system, user will be able to see the log status along with the payment number generated by the ERP system in the cost management screen. If fail, user will need to make necessary changes to the payment based on the error message.

The next process flow that will share is the second phase of the integration, which is the contract creation. As you can see, there's a series of process that will contribute to the contract creation. First, user will need to create contract in Cost Management. Once the contract status has been set to executed, ACC Connect will proceed to extract and process the Cost Management data. After that, we map all the data to its respective field in the ERP system, and ACC Connect will post the contract data into the ERP system.

The ERP system will then process and validate all the data and return the result. If the ERP system failed to create contract, user will be able to see that it has a failed status in Cost Management, and they will need to do necessary amendments to the contract. If ERP system returns success, the user will be able to see the integrated status along with the number generated by the ERP system.

Here are the two snippets of the integration status. The third snippet shows that the integration process has been success, and the bottom snippet shows that the integration has failed.

Next, we have two main recipes with multiple functions. On the left, we have the payment posting, and on the right, we have the contract creation posting recipe. Of course, this snippet does not show the whole recipe that we did. This is just a small part of it only. Do you think it's easy to integrate both systems? In our case, it's not easy to integrate these two systems, and I'll explain to you why.

There are three main challenges that we face during this integration. The first is the customization of our ERP system. The second is the collaboration between different disciplines. And lastly, how to ensure the accuracy and the consistency of the data. I will now deep dive into each of the challenges and explain with you what is it about and what are the solutions for each of the challenges that we face.

So the ERP system that we have for our organization is actually customized based on our needs. This makes it more challenging to integrate both systems. So for those who want to integrate Cost Management and the ERP system, make sure you don't have too much customization on your ERP system. If possible, don't customize your ERP system at all.

For our ERP system, we use a custom form and table, which is an extra layer that keeps all the data before it actually goes into the actual fields in the system. What we did was we identified all the fields in the different tables from the ERP and map it with the Cost Management data.

Then we have mapping issue. When we thought we could just take all the data and just push it into the system-- no, it's not that easy. It's like comparing apples and oranges because certain fields in the ERP system requires formula to calculate the amount before we can actually map the data into the field accordingly.

We solve all this by listing down all the necessary formulas and indicators as well as perform calculations with the Cost Management data using ACC Connect before we pass it into the ERP system. For example, since we have different texts for different country. Our ERP system has a set of indicators which we will need to provide to the system when the integration happens. In this case, we will need to set up the indicators in our Cost Management so that the ACC Connect will be able to extract the indicators out.

We also faced processing issues such as pushing the data into the ERP system, but the ERP system does not show the correct data in the field. Let me give you one example. We mapped retention amount into the ERP system, but the value doesn't show correctly due to the mapping issue between the display table and the actual tables in the ERP system. Then we raise this issue to our ERP team, and they resolve the issue for us very quickly so that we can continue with the development.

The second challenges are collaboration between different disciplines. Since we have different people from different disciplines, we will need to understand how both system works as well as the terminology used by every discipline. For example, in cost management, we call it contract or subcontract. But in our ERP system, it is known as PO, Purchase Order.

Every discipline involved in the integration needs to be on the same page, as we outlined all the methods to retrieve all the data needed from the Course Management data-- from the Cost Management to the ERP system. Other than that, we also need to align all the variables, process flow, validation, and formula of the ERP system so that we can identify what we need to do with the Cost Management data before the integration happens.

After aligning everything, we verify the logic by pushing all the data into the ERP system for testing purposes. Sometimes, the result is not what we expected it to be, so we have to resolve the problem by fixing and continue building the logic until every party reached an agreement.

Lastly, the last challenge is how to ensure the accuracy and the consistency of the data when integrating from Cost Management to the ERP system. Have anyone of you faced decimal issues before? In our integration, one of our problems is the decimal points because most of the field in our ERP system only allows two decimal points. But for Cost Management, it allows many decimal points. So what do we do?

Fortunately, our consultants are able to resolve this issue by using a function to do all the necessary roundings. Then we conducted multiple UAT, User Acceptance Testing, with different scenarios to test whether all the data is being passed into the ERP system accurately or not. In the end, the outcome was very consistent with the help of our consultant. That's all from me. Thank you. Next, I'll pass it back to Kyle to talk about our future planning.

KYLE EWE: Thanks PJ and Mei Mei. I hope we did not bore the audience, but, instead, you guys get more insights on how we get there, including the ups and downs, which we hope will be part of our lesson learned today. [INAUDIBLE].

I mentioned we have phase 3 and phase 4 to complete. In fact, we have already completed phase 3 development for indirect costs to get the expenses, direct POs, and other costs from ERP to ACC. We are going through some tests and mapping now, especially for phase 3. As for phase 4, the development has already begun. This is where we focus on the master data, which includes company codes, WBS codes, vendor lists syncing, and so on between ACC and ERP.

Finally, there are some other enhancements we need to work on. One of them is how we handle debit/credit notes. We would like to automate that process a bit more to improve the overall experience.

Also, as mentioned in the beginning, where the gaps in ERP is being filled up by ACC Cost Management to avoid data losses, especially in PQ information, contract information, and BIM information, that's another area in the 5D contract claims. Recently, we have successfully developed a process which allows us to visualize the contracts claim in 3D, 4D, and 5D. I hope we can show it to you guys this next year. Thanks, everyone, for attending this session. Good evening and see you soon.