Why engineering firm Buro Happold uses two ERP systems - Unit4 and Deltek

As a mid-sized company with complex needs, the engineering firm believes in buying the best and integrating between them

"You don't come to us if you want a supermarket design", says Jason Kane, IT director at Bath-based engineering and professional services firm Buro Happold. "If you want something like the Millennium Dome, which to this day is the largest tensile fabric building in the world, that's when you come to Buro Happold."

Buro Happold is not a huge company, but it is geographically diverse, its 1,800 employees spread across 18 countries ("or sometimes 16 or 17, it varies from day to day"). It specialises in designing one-off construction designs, works in progress including the Louvre Abu Dhabi and new buildings for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. When it comes to enterprise IT, it's the sort of company that could easily fall between stools: non-standard, neither large nor small and working on projects across the globe that vary widely in scope and complexity. It's certainly not a one-size-fits-all scenario.

Because of this, the company has learned to be agile in its choice and application of technologies, said Kane. Buro Happold has adopted an intentionally hybrid strategy, some cloud, some on-premises (often for compliance reasons), and only buying what they need.

Even in this day there is no ERP provider that will service everything you need, Jason Kane, Buro Happold

When looking at ERP systems, for example, they found there was not one that covers all the bases.

"Even in this day there is no ERP provider that will service everything you need. They've all got their strengths and their weaknesses, and we're passionate in believing you get the best of breed for each function, and integrate between them," Kane said.

He concedes the "big boys" might do everything and more - but for a mid-sized business that 'more' is actually a problem. "We'd be paying for a lot of functionality we don't need. Anyway our revenue last year was about £200 million, so if you go down the Oracle or SAP route that's most of that gone."

So, Buro Happold uses two ERPs. One, Unit4, is largely on-premises owing to the fact that Buro Happold is a long-standing customer going back more than a decade. The other, Deltek, runs in the cloud in a private instance, a bespoke setup created for the company because of the large volume of multi-currency transactions it conducts.

"We use Deltek for project resourcing, for total cost to complete, for pipeline management and for CRM, whereas Unit 4 is our core financials and HR platform. They do different jobs but there's very tight integration between the two," Kane explained.

The company has steadily added functionality to Unit4, by way of modules, many of which are cloud-based, said business systems manager Jaime Everard, explaining the ERP is now about fifty-fifty on-premises and cloud.

"We started out with financials, and then we moved into project costing and billing, and in 2014 we bought the HRS module. So all those modules are integrated. And then we've just completed a global rollout of expenses, which can all now be done via a mobile app."

At the time there was much debate at Buro Happold whether to add the new functionality to Unit4 or to build it into the newer Deltek system, which started by favouring the latter, said Kane.

"The reason we were flip-flopping a few years ago was the Unit4 UI was dire. The user experience was pretty poor," he said.

In the meantime, though, Unit4 overhauled its ERP line-up, adding a completely new interface, and that, together with other improvements, tipped the balance in its favour.

We could spend an awful lot of money just to move infrastructure and not realise additional functionality for our end users

But wasn't Kane interested in moving everything to Unit4's cloud at the same time? Never say never, he said, pragmatically, but only when it makes proper business sense.

"We could spend an awful lot of money just to move infrastructure and not realise additional functionality for our end users," said Kane, referencing a recent 'forced' move from on-premises Exchange to Microsoft 365. "Email is still email. It cost us a quarter of a million pounds to not change the business functionality."

Updates to the cloud version of Unit4 flow into the on-premises software within a reasonable time-frame, he went on, and anyway with ERP stability is more important than a constant flow of new features.

"Working in many different countries there are some real challenges, particularly around local laws and things like absence, accruing holidays, expenses and exchange rates, but we have found the product has been pretty flexible and we haven't had to do any kind of detailed customisation," Everard said.

Over the past year we have heavily adopted Microsoft Teams

Which is not to say that some new features can't be extremely useful. Take the AI assistant, Wanda.

"Covid has changed the way that we work much faster than perhaps we would have done," Kane said. "Over the past year we have heavily adopted Microsoft Teams, not just in terms of video and audio but we've built it into the way we run our client-facing projects."

Wanda sits within Teams and allows users to essentially run all they need from within the application, for example granting leave or checking expenses. "If there's something on my list I just get a nice little nag from Wanda and I can do it without leaving teams, and without someone chasing me by email" Kane said.

Asked for advice for other companies looking at a hybrid ERP model, Kane and Everard both emphasised the importance of a good partner network to implement the inevitable bespoke setups and integrations, and an attentive customer success team, areas in which both vendors have been exemplary, according to Kane.

Speaking about Unit4 he said: "In the grand scheme of things we're probably a small customer. But we've found they do everything to help you to adopt the technology, which we don't get with some of our other providers."