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laying the foundation for business growth

 

Cedar Woods creates the framework to drive operational efficiencies and build on greater digital transformation.

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Project Snapshot

Cedar Woods

Location:
Perth, Australia

Industry:
Other Sectors

Project Challenges

An outdated and no longer supported finance system being used

The Solution

A system that integrates with other technologies already in use with the ability to scale

Results

A decentralised system that leverages automation to improve forecasting accuracy and improves efficiencies

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About Cedar Woods

Established in Perth in 1987, Cedar Woods has grown to become one of Australia’s leading property developers with a portfolio diversified by geography, price point, and product type. The company’s diversified product mix ranges from land subdivisions in emerging residential communities to medium and high-density apartments and townhouses in vibrant inner-city neighbourhoods and supporting retail and commercial developments. Cedar Woods epitomises a long-standing commitment to quality and creating vibrant communities where people live, work, and thrive.

TBU

Refurbishing legacy systems to build more modern developments

In the midst of a wider digital transformation program to achieve greater operational excellence, property developer Cedar Woods relied on an incumbent system that was outdated and unsupported by its vendor. The team needed to modernise its IT infrastructure to drive efficiencies across the business that would ultimately lead to greater earnings growth.

To achieve this goal, Cedar Woods needed a system and integration partner that would empower the company to scale with minimum impact to operations and costs. Additionally, Cedar Woods needed to consider its ongoing transformation and identify a solution that would integrate with its other systems to deliver on two key strategic priorities; operational excellence and earnings growth. The business was already using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as its customer relationship management (CRM) system. Therefore, the integration, governance, security, and resilience delivered out of the box with Microsoft solutions led Cedar Woods to decide to standardise on the Microsoft stack for its modernisation project.

Empired delivers a strong and secure framework

Cedar Woods worked closely with Empired to continually deliver on its ongoing digital transformation roadmap. With the support of Empired’s managed services, Cedar Woods has achieved increased governance, resilience, and controls to deliver a more secure and structured system.

Through its previous implementations and the ongoing support of the Empired managed services team, Cedar Woods has realised better audit capability around processes such as purchase orders. As a listed company, Cedar Woods is subject to numerous regulations and audits; therefore, it was important to build additional controls into its operations. Additionally, the company has decentralised a number of processes that were previously the responsibility of the finance team, including processes around procurement, forecasting, and budgeting.

By leveraging automation, development managers can now forecast projects more accurately, which is then automatically displayed against actuals and budgets. By decentralising these processes, Cedar Woods has been able to eliminate silos and improve efficiencies across the business.

Jimmy Lee said, “The benefit of decentralising these processes is primarily the increased speed of data, leading to the reduced potential for small overruns to become large problems as a result of projects going over budget. By eliminating the need to rely on finance to run reports on forecasts and actuals, project managers can now receive daily updates on project information, leading to increased visibility and control over projects and their respective budgets.”

“Cedar Woods will continue working with Empired as we continue to work through our digital and technology strategic roadmap. The relationship has been invaluable, especially throughout ongoing lockdowns as the teams worked seamlessly regardless of location.”

— Jimmy Lee, CIO

Reaching new levels with Empired managed services

Cedar Woods leveraged Empired’s Azure MSSP certification and cloud management platform to transform its overall IT infrastructure. With the support of the Empired managed services team, Cedar Woods has been able to achieve more automated management, optimisation, and cost control of its underlying IT infrastructure with processes being completed more quickly and accurately.

With the assistance of Empired working on various projects, Cedar Woods has transitioned to a cloud-based working environment, which performed seamlessly throughout the ongoing COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions.

Jimmy Lee said, “When office lockdowns hit, all Cedar Woods staff transitioned to remote working without a glitch at all. The support from Empired has helped Cedar Woods reach a position as a company where it can seamlessly switch people to working from home or the office, or any combination thereof, and staff value the flexibility of being able to keep working.”

Managing risk is also a key accountability for Cedar Woods management and the team was keen to see how Empired could decentralise risk as part of the managed services offering.

Jimmy Lee said, “Empired has provided continuity of knowledge through ongoing contact with the implementation team while daily service requests are handled by the broader managed services team. This gives a good mix of specialised knowledge spread across broad resources, which is comforting for Cedar Woods because it decentralises risk.

“Cedar Woods will continue working with Empired as we work through our digital and technology strategic roadmap. The relationship has been invaluable, especially throughout ongoing lockdowns as the teams worked seamlessly regardless of location. Empired and Cedar Woods worked closely and openly throughout the entire project, achieving a strong project governance structure and good project engagement across all levels.”

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