The Birmingham, Alabama-based Drummond Company, a private company started in 1935, is primarily in the business of mining, purchasing, processing and the selling of coal and coal derivatives through their mining operations in Alabama and Colombia.
Directly, or through joint ventures, Drummond’s Real Estate division owns significant land positions in California, Alabama and Florida, where it is currently developing four highly desirable residential golf and country club communities: Rancho La Quinta, California; Oakbridge, Florida; Liberty Park, Alabama; and their newest, Andalusia at Coral Mountain in South La Quinta, California. Ranging from 700 to 4,000 acres, these properties boast one or two championship golf courses designed by the likes of Robert Trent Jones, Jr., Jerry Pate and Tom Fazio, fully modern clubhouses, and luxurious homes, villas and condominiums.
Software Hodgepodge Creates Significant Challenges
With the growth of the company, Drummond realized they would need a solution to integrate their three different operations – golf and country club; residential community; and design centre, where home buyers can purchase home furnishings. With their current procedures, Drummond continually had to deal with significant inefficiencies stemming from the use of multiple software products by each business operation. Having so many different systems made operations cumbersome and required lots of duplicate data entry.
“This resulted in us having multiple member databases which could easily end up containing different data on the same member,” says Lori Pillatzke, Accounting Manager at the La Quinta and Andalusia Country Clubs. “And because some of the products couldn’t do inventory, payables or receivables, we had to add even more software to handle member billings and other accounting functions,” she adds.
New Club Drives New Approach
Prompted by the start of its newest development project – the Andulasia property in California – Drummond decided that it needed a new approach to managing real estate operations and accounting activities.
“We didn’t want to install the same hodgepodge of software at Andulasia, so we started to look for something we could implement corporate wide, yet run centrally on a single server for easier maintenance and support” explains Shimizu. “Ideally, we wanted a single, integrated solution that could handle club operations and accounting, as well as construction accounting, across all our properties,” he adds.
Jonas Meets Drummond’s Ideal Scenario
After going through a formal and detailed vendor/product review and selection process, Drummond chose the Club and Construction Management products from Jonas Software
“Although we were hoping to find a single system that would cover both the club and construction areas, we quickly realized that this would be highly unlikely,” says Jeff Shimizu about the vendor review process. “So when we discovered that Jonas was virtually the only vendor that could address both areas with a fully integrated solution, they popped quickly to the top of our list.”
The Drummond team visited several Jonas customer sites and contacted a number of Jonas client references across the U.S.A to get their opinion on the software.
“The positive feedback we got from their customers – covering both technical and functional issues – was very influential,” explains Shimizu in support of their final decision to choose the Jonas solution.
Implementing Jonas Centrally
Drummond chose to implement a single instance of Jonas centrally, rather than on local servers at each property, each club would access the application running in the data center via the company’s wide area network.
Rancho La Quinta was the first property to begin using the Jonas Club management system. Installation was timed to coincide with its off-season so that staff had time to focus on the training and getting comfortable with the new system. Sessions were conducted by Technical Training Associates (TTA), the Jonas reseller that handled the implementation of the Club Management software and training of the Drummond staff.
The sessions included training – based on using live data and training scenarios reflecting La Quinta’s real, day-to-day operations and accounting transactions – combined with real configuration tasks that were helpful in actually setting up the system. Using real data to configure the system as part of their training was very efficient for their busy staff.
Big Benefits Piling Up
Immediately, Drummond’s implementation of Jonas began to yield significant benefits in many key areas.
“Unlike with our previous POS system, we can now do detailed member billings without having to upload the information to another system to run the statements,” says Pillatzke. “We also like the way Jonas improves accuracy and saves time for the accounting staff by automating recurring payables and journal entries and automatically calculating staff overtime as part of providing a single, consistent staff time recording process across all departments.”
With the Jonas integrated system, staff no longer have to struggle trying to remember different charts of accounts or reconciling data across multiple systems. And by eliminating duplicate data entry, Jonas has enabled staff to improve the accuracy of the data and save a lot of time, enabling them to accept much more responsibility on a day-to-day basis – without Drummond having to add more staff.
Bright Future with Jonas
With a single instance of Jonas running centrally in their data center, Drummond’s previous remote support problems and costs have been eliminated, and upgrades are fast, easy and far less expensive.
“Technically speaking, the new system has taken us from ‘zero to 100’, and we’re very impressed with the system operation and support” exclaims IT’s Shimizu. He goes on to say that, “With Jonas, we’ve seen that the data and financial reports and GL are all good; so we now have the backbone in place to support the final phase of our implementation,” claims IT’s Shimizu.
The Drummond team continues to explore how to leverage all the technology the Jonas system has to offer, including its Web functionality, it’s Clubhouse Online portal, and additional components such as the Statement Services Module, for improved member billings, and the Equipment Module, which offers advanced depreciation and amortization capabilities.
“Overall, we’re really pleased with the Jonas software and the help we’ve received from both Jonas and TTA,” says Pillatzke. “It’s the consolidation and integration we get with Jonas that are key – we simply don’t have time to bounce back and forth between multiple systems to do accounting and financial management.”
“Even though some of our requirements were quite tough, Jonas has met them all as well or better than expected; and I expect that to continue,” adds Shimizu. “Technically, I’m very pleased with them and quite confident we made the best decision by far when we selected Jonas,” he concludes.