Unlocking Greater Efficiency with Unified Tech Infrastructure: Prime Infrastructure Holdings, Inc.’s SAP Business One Success Story

Prime Infrastructure Holdings, Inc., popularly known as Prime Infra, is Filipino businessman Enrique K. Razon’s infrastructure arm. Its current focus is on the ownership of infrastructure firms across four sectors—construction, energy generation, water, and waste. Its aim is to develop efficient and environmentally sustainable infrastructure assets that facilitate the delivery of essential services to communities, thereby elevating quality of life.

In the future, Prime Infra hopes to expand its investments into other industries and emerging markets. The aim here is not only to diversify the company’s portfolio but also to elevate the quality of service it’s able to provide to communities around the world. To this end, it needs strong technological infrastructure to support efficient, streamlined operations across all its subsidiaries—and it’s found a dependable partner in the ERP solution SAP Business One.

Here’s an in-depth look at Prime Infra’s ERP journey so far and where it looks to be headed in the future.

Leveraging ERP Technology for More Streamlined Operations

Since its inception in 2017, Prime Infra has prioritized socially relevant infrastructure investments that can support communities’ most vital sustainability needs, such as waste management and access to clean water. Naturally, such lofty goals require strong technological infrastructure to support them, and company leaders have been well aware of the challenges inherent in managing a growing group of companies without it.

Without a common ERP system, keeping track of business processes and financial information across the entire group would be a difficult and unnecessarily time-consuming task, especially given the volume of transactions and information involved. Under a siloed setup with only basic off-the-shelf expenses-tracking, it would basically become impossible for Prime Infra to stay abreast of all its subsidiaries’ activities.

By the same token, the company was also well aware of the resources they would need to accomplish their business objectives. In particular, they required a standardized business management solution that enabled smooth workflows, efficient data management, and consolidated reporting. This would enable Prime Infra companies to process their financial transactions seamlessly and also provide the entire group with a unified, secure source of information to work from. Fortunately, SAP Business One not only fit the bill but provided many more convenient functionalities besides.

As is the case for any booming business in the Philippines, staying on top of compliance requirements issued by the BIR was one of the most salient challenges related to managing Prime Infra’s many subsidiaries. The company was clearly in need of a BIR-compliant Computerized Accounting System (CAS) to efficiently handle day-to-day record-keeping, annual income tax returns, and a wealth of other financial reports. To this end, business software developer ANSI recommended a custom computerized accounting module it had developed for integration into SAP Business One. This add-on, designed expressly to assist businesses with BIR compliance, turned out to be just the solution Prime Infra required to level up its accounting functions. 

After deliberation, company leaders determined that they would implement the SAP Business One HANA system across all existing and future companies under the Prime Infra group. Its implementation roadmap revolved around keeping the system simple, cost-efficient, and suitable for a hold-co environment. The primary target was to have all companies under Prime Infrastructure Holdings, Inc. operating under the SAP Business One environment from January 2021 onward.

Productive Developments Draw a Promising Roadmap for the Future

Since implementing SAP Business One, Prime Infrastructure Holdings has experienced many more efficiency gains besides those initially hoped for. For one, they have seen marked improvements to data management and transaction processing, both at company level and group level. Payment processing lead time is now down from over one month to less than three weeks. Online forms and electronic approval workflows have also served to boost productivity companywide, particularly as SAP Business One’s cloud-based nature allows employees to perform their work from anywhere without being tied down to specific on-premise computers.

Now that a common platform and master data have been established, Prime Infra anticipates that they will be able to roll out SAP Business One to new companies that join the group with ease, whether these are holding companies or operating companies. The company is also eyeing a possible upgrade in the future from SAP Business One to SAP Enterprise, which will only further expedite their agenda to bring sustainable and useful infrastructure to communities all over the world.

Meet Your Business Goals with Support from ANSI and SAP Business One

The many challenges inherent in overseeing the operations of multiple subsidiary firms, as exemplified by Prime Infra, will be familiar to any holdings company. Without the proper tools to tackle these challenges, parent companies can rapidly lose track of their subsidiaries’ activities and contributions to the shared goals of the larger group. Cutting-edge ERP solutions are the key to keeping operations streamlined and performance high as the group grows.

Reputable and competent providers are also a must to fully leverage the capabilities offered by state-of-the-art software. With over thirty years of experience in the industry and manifold awards to show for it, ANSI is one of the best partners for Philippines-based businesses in need of ERP systems and other business management solutions. Get in touch with ANSI today and we’d be more than glad to show you how the latest technology can beef up your operations and help you achieve all you set out to do.