While every new lease adds revenue, it can also add complexity to a tower company’s operations. Drowning in documents and data, many organizations resort to purchasing piecemeal software applications for every component of their businesses.
If those disparate systems are not integrated or replaced with a single platform, those disparate systems will not produce a complete view of the financial and operational performance. Both the quality and speed of data will be challenged by constant reconciliation and synchronization processes that are manual and error prone.
A tailored ERP solution can help streamline process
Founded in 1942, Crowe is an accounting, consulting, and technology firm with deep industry expertise in many markets, including the tower industry. To meet the evolving challenges tower companies face, Crowe created Crowe Tower Accelerator, a tailored enterprise resource planning (ERP) software system that allows automated management of most business functions from a single application.
The x-axis on this chart tracks company maturity in the early to middle and late stages. The y-axis gauges the amount of technical debt, and each circle signifies software applications. As a company matures to middle life, separate software applications are added, increasing technical debt until a turning point occurs.
At that turning point, a company must choose between continuing to add custom-built software applications or moving to a single platform, such as Crowe Tower Accelerator. This move might reduce technical debt in the middle to later stages.
Inside Towers recently interviewed Luis Lopez Garay, partner in consulting and specialist in Microsoft™ cloud solutions at Crowe. He explained, “With our tower industry expertise, we understand how critical it is to keep accurate financial records and manage cash flow. That’s why we’ve created a tool to streamline companies’ processes.”
Partnership simplifies data collection and uses
Crowe partnered with Microsoft Dynamics 365™ to create a single, all-encompassing platform with a collection of cloud-based business applications for sales, field service, customer service, finance, supply chain management, and human resources.
“Crowe has been a Microsoft Solutions Partner for more than a decade because Microsoft offers an ecosystem of applications in which the underlying foundation is a common data model,” Lopez Garay said. “When all applications are on the same database, all your systems can talk to each other.
For example, the data created by a tower technician is the same data that the tower company will use to bill the carrier as part of the tower lease administration system and compute its target cash flows.
Crowe Tower Accelerator provides revenue management and accounting, ground lease accounting, optimization analytics, global management, a historical audit trail, and consulting.
Tower companies can generate reports to measure tower use, cash flow, performance, and risk. The platform helps companies maintain a history of each lease version and track who made edits with each new update. Crowe Tower Accelerator applications also work cohesively with other Microsoft software programs.
“The platform not only provides an extension of the business processes that are specific to the tower industry, but it’s also integrated into all of the other Microsoft ecosystems like Microsoft Dynamics 365™, Microsoft Teams™, Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft Power BI™ analytics,” explained Cullen Hunter, senior manager in consulting at Crowe.
Proper preparation fuels process
Gathering knowledge of the tower company and its needs is just as important as the quality of the software itself, according to Hunter. This multistep process helps Crowe understand the tower company’s requirements.
“One of the first steps in our implementation methodology is discovery and gathering requirements,” Hunter said. “We listen to the company. We spend time learning about their operations, and we make a requirements traceability matrix, where we list all their scenarios and requirements.” The matrix then becomes the basis for configuring, building, and deploying the solution, he added.
Crowe consultants have deep knowledge of the complexity of the tower industry as well as expertise with Crowe Tower Accelerator. “When we develop an ERP system for a tower company client, we augment our solution versus building something new,” Lopez said. “We know the questions to ask, we know the challenges in advance, and we’re able to bring speed to value.”
For additional information, reach out to [email protected], or visit: https://www.crowe.com/services/consulting/microsoft/towers-erp-solution.
Microsoft, Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Teams are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.
Learn more:
Luis Lopez Garay, Partner, Consulting
Crowe
+1 312 857 7422
[email protected]
Cullen Hunter, Consulting
Crowe
+1 616 752 4268
[email protected]
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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