Northwest Cascade, Inc. provides civil construction and sanitation services. Established in 1967 and headquartered in Puyallup, Washington, the company also has offices in Woodinville, Washington: Salem and Portland, Oregon; and Rathdrum, Idaho.
Northwest Cascade operates separate divisions including Honey Buckets, FloHawks, septic tanks, and construction. Honey Buckets are the ubiquitous clean portable restrooms used on construction sites and special events in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The FloHawks division offers commercial pumping and cleaning services for plumbing, septic tanks, and grease traps.
An MASI client for 10 years, Northwest Cascade originally purchased Avista software (prior to it becoming Navision). In 2001 the company’s financial management group upgraded from this character-based software to the graphical user interface (GUI) version of what was then called Navision Attain. In 2005, the whole company upgraded to Microsoft Navision 4.0, the latest version.
The most recent full upgrade was precipitated by the growth of the company and the increasing number of transactions processed. Revenue for all divisions was $28 million in 1997 and has increased to $49 million in 2005. As an example of this enormous growth, the Honey Buckets division billed for 5,000 units a month in 1997, and now bills 20,000 units a month. The company has 70 Navision users in their multiple locations.
The problem:
“We couldn’t get there from here,” explained Vicki Souza, Controller of Northwest Cascade. “We had very serious capacity issues.”
The solution:
To solve the capacity issue, the company migrated from their Navision database to a Microsoft SQL Server to run with Navision. This SQL Server database is recommended for companies with large volumes of transactions.
The upgrade has allowed all locations to utilize the system even during heavy use. For example, they can process the Honey Buckets daily activities during the day without causing any noticeable degradation to the system. Every Honey Buckets delivery and service driver carries and uses a Palm Pilot to record his daily activity. He scans the unit’s barcode upon delivery, service, pickup, and inspection. The data is uploaded from the Palm Pilots to the accounting system and processed. Also, at the end of the day the route for the next day is downloaded to the Palm Pilot. The system automatically generates the route reports based on the cleaning/service schedule designated on the initial order.
It used to take four hours to run the Honey Buckets invoices, and now it takes an hour. “We can actually get our jobs done in a reasonable amount of time!” commented Vicki.
Leanne Russell in Customer Service at Northwest Cascade did the software training of the Honey Buckets division after being trained by MASI. “I like it!” she commented of the new version of Navision. She explained that the searching features were making the job of customer service much easier. She also reported that looking up information by a phone number or part of a word or address was very fast.
Vicki commented on the recent upgrade process, “Looking back it was a fun, exciting time. Diane and Ron [from MASI] worked their butts off! I’ve always enjoyed working with them and I look forward to working with them in the future.”
Northwest Cascade moved into a new building last August, bringing all of the Puyallup employees together in one building. Now with the software upgrade, Vicki said, “We’re making sure we have the right structure to move forward, so we’re ready to make the next leap!”