American Engineering Testing (AET) builds a foundation on Dynamics 365

Headquartered in St. Paul, MN, AET serves clients worldwide from 19 offices in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming. AET works as “One Team,” collectively engaged in delivering unified solutions for its clients. When the firm embarked on its digital transformation to unify solutions internally by centralizing data and establishing a strong foundation for enterprise growth, AET chose Dynamics 365 as its bedrock.

Cleared for takeoff

Because they provide such a wide range of complex services throughout the life cycle of civil engineering projects, AET focused its innovations on field operations and kept its internal business processes relatively static over the last few decades. Brian Zwart, VP of Information Technology, jokingly refers to AET’s pre-Dynamics 365 era as the “wild west of Excel documents and paper time sheets,” with all back-office operations happening outside of a central system. Kate Marcotte, AET’s Chief Operating Officer, adds, “There’s no reason our internal processes couldn’t match the high standard of our technical work. We provide insights, expertise, and analysis to our customers, and with Dynamics 365 we can do that right here for our own employees with a modern, centralized system.”

Before Dynamics 365, AET’s data was fragmented, business lines operated with unstandardized processes, and the company’s outdated financial systems no longer provided meaningful metrics. Restricted visibility weighed the business down with limited views of project status and resource utilization. Technicians and engineers were burdened with paper timesheets that required memorization of codes to assign to each activity. Vital operations like payroll, project tasks, expense management, and equipment rental relied on paper spreadsheets shuffled through departments, taking up 40 hours a week, or the equivalent of one full-time employee, before being entered into AET’s legacy accounting system. The idea was that separating operators from data would allow them to focus on the job at hand and be better able to pursue opportunities for revenue. But in fact, separating the people who do the work from the data about the work led to an environment rife with assumptions and speculation, and ultimately, money was left on the table.

In 2021, AET began a digital transformation journey, implementing an integrated solution that included Dynamics 365 Finance and Project Operations (while still in preview). The firm looked to Dynamics 365 as the runway from which its business would take off, making its vision of growth a reality.

Paving the road to efficient resource management

AET harnessed the power of Dynamics 365 to centralize data, automate processes, strengthen financial reporting, and digitize project management, to streamline operations and make data-backed decisions, all with greater speed.

Project resourcing dominates AET’s back-office procedures. The company sends 200-300 technicians and engineers each day to roughly two sites each to perform dozens of different services.  Prior to Dynamics 365, dispatchers typically didn’t know until dispatch who would be assigned to a project, which activities they’d have to perform, or which location they’d travel to. Dispatchers used a lab management system, having nothing to do with resource allocation, to direct technicians to their next site. In some scenarios, teams who were not fully onboarded in the lab management system used a whiteboard. Technicians received assignments via calls or text messages and would either stop to write down their next location or hope they remembered the details. The process was opaque, unrefined, and difficult to manage.

Today, Dynamics 365 Project Operations makes scheduling transparent and easy. Dispatchers have a full view of each technician’s availability, and technicians understand their project load. Booking and scheduling board features connect the dispatching process to project tasks and resource requirements, and easily streamline project resourcing. Upon project completion, time, material, and expenses are automatically logged - in the old system, that information was entered manually, slowing operations.

Engineering time-saving processes

It isn’t just resource management that’s benefited from AET’s digital transformation. The efficiency gains across the company are impressive. It used to take technicians an hour each week to fill out paper time sheets, a combined 20 hours for administrative staff to compile the payroll data into a spreadsheet, and collectively 40–50 hours to enter it all in the legacy system - with half of AET’s current workforce. Dynamics 365 data entry and reporting automations save AET roughly 400 work hours every week and company managers have clear and actionable insights on demand.

Invoicing is significantly faster and more efficient too. Project managers used to rely on administrative or billing staff to print unbilled transactions for review. They wrote adjustments on the printouts and sent them back to the billing staff to update in the system, then reviewed the updated transactions and, when approved, returned them to the billing staff to finally send an invoice. The exhaustive process took at least a week. Now, integrated business processes allow stronger collaboration between service technicians, project managers, and the accounting team. Project managers review and approve transactions directly in the system and the billing team can immediately invoice the customer. Not only is billing faster, but the new system enables flexible responses to change orders and better tracking of proposals that deviate from the posted fee structure, which is resulting in increased revenue.

User friendly interface puts tools in everyone’s hands

Integral to the design of Dynamics 365 is simplicity for the day-to-day user. Intuitive interfaces for budgeting and forecasting, editable schedules, and user-friendly data patterns equip project managers with tools for better performance with greater ease. Before the new system was deployed, AET project managers didn’t engage with their project data at all, they simply handed invoices off to the finance department. They were never able to see their actual margins. But now that Dynamics 365 provides easy-to-use visibility and transparency in client and account records, project managers can access real-time data on project standing and invoice requirements on their own at any time. This type of key client insight bulldozes previous roadblocks to expansion. AET can now understand project distribution to appropriately strategize for growth. “We’ve known where we want to go, but with Dynamics 365 we know where we are, so it’s easier for us to understand what direction we need to move in to get there” Brittany Wagner, Business Systems Analyst, AET.

That’s not the only way the company’s transformation is empowering employees. AET is excited to use evolving cloud applications like Microsoft Power Platform to harness in-house citizen development skills for customizations and support. Brittany Wagner, Business Systems Analyst, explains, “At AET we’re all a bunch of doers, so it’s nice to be able to be in charge of our own destiny.”

Zwart sees this shift, from passive receivers of data to active creators engaging with data, as something that goes beyond project managers and the IT department. “Microsoft is helping our company embrace continuous improvement through new features, functions, and release waves. There’s a mindset shift that goes with it. We can continuously adapt, and get better, as we grow.”

Building a more certain world with more visible data

Data transparency and accessibility are driving process improvement, standardization, and optimized, strategic decision-making. At the executive level, accessible data secures the foundation for scalability, with the senior leadership team better able to think proactively and strategically about growth for the business and its employees.

AET’s core value, One Team, guides its commitment to using data to drive conversations, strengthen challenge areas, and support teams’ success. With institutional knowledge now global and siloed data now universally accessible, decisions are grounded in quality data rather than guesswork or assumptions.

What lies ahead

Since the implementation of Dynamics 365, overall business performance has been better. But for this dynamic engineering firm, “better” has never been good enough. AET’s leaders envision building on the secure foundation Dynamics 365 has established.

In the short term, AET plans to further optimize data visibility, reporting, and invoicing, with new Project Operations features like Billing hub, and to ensure employees are fully benefiting from the value that Dynamics 365 offers. Planning is underway on a custom app based on the Field Service mobile app in which technicians can interact with bookings, time, material, and expense entry through the Power Automate mobile app.

Longer term, the company is excited to align with the Microsoft roadmap and looks forward to evolving the business by fully embracing new features as Dynamics 365 evolves. Its sights are set on using AI (including Copilot) across platforms to optimize time and talent to continue growing and expanding its expertise while working together to build a more certain world.