In addition, Van Dun is involved in residential and nonresidential construction projects. Peter Monster, Chris van der Heijden, and Fonny van de Heijning collectively form the management team. They operate out of Someren and Ulicoten with a team of approximately 35 employees.
These include environmental consultants, structural engineers, and architects. They collaborate on projects in which they take the burden off clients when it comes to permits and provide them with customized solutions.
To effectively manage large numbers of these types of projects, which can sometimes take years to complete, strong support from IT solutions is crucial for Van Dun Advies.
Redesign and Migration
Chris van der Heijden is one of the three managing directors of Van Dun Advies. His area of focus is automation and innovation. The firm has been using Exact software for its financial administration for many years. Van der Heijden discusses developments in the field of software:
“We used to work with Top Systems. In 2010, they Exact Synergy (then known as ASP) was set up at our company for our project administration. However, our company itself and all the processes related to permits were changing at a rapid pace. We soon realized that the way Synergy was set up no longer aligned with our processes, so we decided to migrate to Synergy Enterprise at the same time.”
Van der Heijden goes on to discuss the various applications of the new systems at Van Dun:
“Our entire financial accounting system has been in Exact Globe. We plan to scan and automatically process our incoming invoices in the near future using a new, smart solution. So that’s on the agenda. We’ve now integrated our outgoing invoices with Synergy using solutions from Qics, another Exact partner. We track our hours in Qics Time and Qics Planner, and invoicing is also handled through Qics. For invoicing, Qics then uses information from Globe and Synergy, with which it integrates seamlessly.”
Projects in Exact Globe and Exact Synergy
At the moment, we're still creating our new projects in Exact Globe. All project-related matters are then fully recorded in Exact Synergy.
But that’s about to change. Once we’re completely done migrating everything, creating projects will also be handled in Qics Planner. It’s still hard to say exactly what the benefits of the new setup will be, but when it comes to tracking our hours, we’ve already noticed that it’s much more convenient and easier than before.
We’ll gradually migrate everything to Synergy Enterprise in combination with Qics Planner. From that point on, we expect our administrative processes to be further streamlined. That’s why we’re doing this, and we have every confidence that it will work out.
Requests and Document Management
We do use requests, but not in the way they were originally intended. We currently use them to handle our entire project registration process.
We create a single request, and within it we’ve included several date fields and a memo field where we record everything. But soon we’ll be using this in a different way, so that we can trigger certain actions based on requests, whether they’re created automatically or not.
We attach all relevant documents to the projects Exact Synergy. It's a central location that's easily accessible to everyone.
Workflows
Workflows and requests are a bit intertwined in our system. They form the basis for everything we’re currently doing with project registration. We’ll also be using this more extensively in the future to assign tasks.
We actually do this in a variety of ways within our organization. On the one hand, we handle requests in collaboration with the Event Manager. On the other hand, we use Sumatra. This tool helps us generate useful overviews and lists of action items.
Standard CRM
We use a standard CRM system to record our customers’ name, address, and contact information, including contact persons and their details, as well as the customer’s industry. It’s fairly basic, but it does contain a fair amount of information that we can access.
”For example, if we need a list of all cattle farmers in a particular municipality, we can pull it up right away."
