‘The team at Fortes Milestones is flexible and pragmatic. That suits us.’
xxllnc develops smart and scalable software solutions for government and semi-government. Through multiple acquisitions, the company grew rapidly. This brought challenges in the areas of administration, planning and invoicing. The need for a solid, uniform basis for project administration was growing. In this customer story, Wolter Kreun (COO) and Maikel Stolmeijer (FieldOps employee) tell why xxllnc chose Fortes Milestones and what the solution delivered.
A solid foundation for project administration
Wolter: “As a govtech company, we develop scalable software for governments and semi-governments. We support processes such as case-oriented working, data integration, taxation, social affairs and spatial planning. In the past three years we have acquired several companies. With that you also have to deal with different administrative processes and systems. We wanted to harmonize these and were looking for a robust foundation for our project administration.
During our search, Fortes Milestones was suggested. Of course, we compared several packages, but Milestones stood out by a mile.’
Wishes and requirements
Wolter continues: “We had a hefty list of requirements. Multi-administration was crucial: managing multiple administrations in one database is not possible in every system. In addition, single-sign-on was high on our priority list. With almost 400 employees, managing inflow and outflow is important. Fortes built this specifically for us.
In addition, Milestones has an advanced planning module. We have ten teams with different types of projects and we can easily accommodate all those projects in Milestones.’
Smart coupling between Milestones and Visma.net
Maikel: ‘A hard requirement was the integration with Visma. We use Visma for contract invoices, Milestones for project invoicing, budget monitoring and capacity and time planning. The systems work seamlessly together. We manage customer data in Visma and this is automatically synchronized with Milestones.
With project invoices it works the other way around: those go from Milestones directly to Visma via a smart link. Everything thus automatically ends up in our central accounting system.’
Migrating by yourself, with guidance from Fortes
Wolter: “Because we were dealing with a lot of acquisitions, we wanted to do migrations and implementations ourselves as much as possible. We were really only looking for an advisor to fall back on. Fortes guided us in this perfectly. Consultant Berry Zwaan provided valuable input and ensured that we could independently migrate all acquired companies to Milestones. All deadlines were met.
More control and transparency
Maikel: ‘By implementing it ourselves, we learned a lot and are in control. Since we have been using Milestones, invoicing, customer requests and project data are much more transparent. Project leaders get insight faster and we can support them better.’
Efficiency and one way of working
Wolter: ‘Milestones provided xxllnc with considerable efficiency, both in terms of cost savings and staff deployment. By standardizing processes – for example, by no longer using separate time registration codes per team – we now work according to one uniform approach. That provides valuable insights and far fewer exceptions.’
Flexible and pragmatic
Maikel: “I liked that Fortes was present at our kick-offs and could answer questions directly. The Fortes team is accessible, flexible and pragmatic. That fits our culture. We are a fast-changing organization, and Fortes can switch quickly.’
Tips for other organizations
Wolter concludes, “Switching to Milestones? Just do it! Just make sure your back-office processes are set up properly and avoid exceptional price agreements. The simpler your working method, the better the data quality. And enlist the expertise of Fortes: their guidance was of great value.’