Radiance Technologies, a Huntsville-based company focusing on solutions for defense, intelligence and civilian clients like the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force, is replacing its legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with Unanet GovCon ERP and customer relationship management technology (CRM) to streamline processes and reduce manual errors in the business. The employee-owned company, with approximately 1,000 employees, determined that its legacy ERP provider was actually making their business processes more cumbersome and less efficient for their teams.

“Our previous system included multiple software tools, but none of them were fully integrated and automated. As a result, we were spending a lot of time taking data out of one system through downloads, and entering or importing it into another system,” said Paige Nix, chief financial officer at Radiance.

Radiance’s teams also experienced difficulties with functionality and technical issues such as upgrades that were hastily rolled out with errors in them.

“We fully expect Unanet to make our processes more efficient through integration and automation, reduce the amount of time required to enter and review data and create smoother internal processes and workflows. For example, getting consultants and subcontractors to input their purchase order/invoice data into an efficient system will ensure all costs incurred each month are captured in our invoices. This will enhance our speed and visibility to project actuals — creating one efficient solution for our subcontractors/consultants and our accounting team.”

Offset Strategic Services (OSS), another Huntsville GovCon that provides engineering services chiefly to the U.S. Department of Defense and its military operations, recently chose Unanet GovCon ERP so its employees could move away from paper-intensive manual processes to a largely paperless operation – securely – with GovCloud, an optional (and increasingly popular) feature with Unanet ERP GovCon that provides a cloud-based environment from Amazon Web Services designed and certified by the government under FISMA to the FedRamp high-impact level for systems holding sensitive data and supporting regulated workloads.

As the chief technology officer of the small company whose project workload and staff were about to become much larger, Lloyd Sanders of OSS knew it was time for the government contracting firm to find an ERP solution powerful enough to scale with it — and secure enough to protect the highly sensitive data the firm handles in its work on defense-related projects. Not just any ERP product would do, Sanders knew. It had to come with specific capabilities that would enable OSS to manage accounting and other key business functions during the coming growth spurt securely and efficiently.

“Peer threats like China are very good at stealing data, and the small business is their prey,” said Sanders. Thus the firm needed stronger security than the legacy commercial-based clouds systems it had been using to house its data so it could better handle prime contractor and compliance responsibilities. “You really want an accounting system that gives government auditors confidence you can manage as a prime contractor. Our previous solution was not the solution for our future oks.”

Unanet ERP and CRM solutions to fast-growing GovCon companies across the country. According to a recent annual survey of more than 1,100 GovCon customers, Unanet users are seeing a significant decrease in day sales outstanding (DSO) simply because of the reduction in errors that Unanet’s ERP solution provides. More than 14% of users reported a DSO of 15 days or less.

For more information, visit unanet.com/erp-for-govcon/overview/