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Moving money and high-value assets is a fact of life in any plant department, but how do you do so without straying on to the wrong side of the law?
Handling large amounts of money is practically the norm for plant managers in this region. Secondhand machines are constantly changing hands – and how many times have you heard stories about people coming into machinery dealers in the back of beyond and purchasing high value brand new kit with suitcases of used notes?
Additionally, it is often the way to have to pay suppliers of parts and workshop specialists with cold, hard, money. You’ll also get short shrift from some smaller contractors, such as one-machine crane hire firms if you try and pay them by any other method.
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However, money flowing in and out can expose the plant manager to risk: Apart from the obvious threat of theft, the plant manager can also unwittingly expose himself to allegations of money laundering, especially when paying for contractor services, rather than tangible goods.
It is for this reason that many site managers have brushed up their book-keeping skills with the aid of computers. One such person is Graham Larkin, the plant manager of the JV consortium that built and is currently finishing the Dubai Metro.
We caught up with him a few months ago, and he described a software system that had helped when working on a previous job in Africa: “In a previous job in Eritrea, we did a survey [of the software available] and the government picked this one”.
The software in question is from a UK-based firm called TAG. In it, the program, a variety of ‘modules’ are interlinked and these contain values about the equipment being monitored.
Using the program is not too difficult for a trained operator. At the JV, there are two staff who work the database. Larkin explained; “If, for example, there is an issue for a part to a machine, you have got issues by work order, then that will show in the bold print all the open work orders, that will show all the machines being serviced. Select this work order number, and then directly issue parts to that work order number. So if we were to go back in a couple of weeks time, we would see that.”
He added, “We could go right back to the beginning of the project and track every machine and every cost… If we’d have used it from day one!”
He explained that if he were to do the project again, then even more integration would be useful: “There is also a purchasing module which we didn’t buy as the company already had its own purchasing software. This was a bit of a pity as we would have been able to track everything. If we were to do this again than we would do that.” Out of interest, the purchasing software that the JV uses it the popular ‘Timberline’ software package.
“When we have visits by the engineers, they were very impressed with the record keeping because it is what they wanted to see.”
Q&A
By the nature of his business, Steve Barritt from Jebel Ali auction house Ritchie Brothers has to deal with large sums of money as well as high value machines coming in from all corners of the world.
We caught up with him shortly after the house set a local record by selling a crane for US $1.7m
You have a lot money flowing in and out of the organisation all the time. How do you control that, and keep in with the various financial authorities?
That’s actually very easy, as companies associated with the US stock exchange means that we use SOCKS. That means all our cash flows through a main office in Graieda, in Holland. Obviously, we do have some cash come into us, but we send it straight to the banks. We endeavor to send money back to customers by bank transfer so it can be followed.
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