Murphy Company

Murphy Company is a premier national contractor designing, constructing, and maintaining mechanical systems for the commercial, industrial, and institutional markets. After starting as a two-man plumbing shop in 1907, today Murphy Company employs over 300 salaried workers and 1,000 union craft workers in the pipefitter, boilermaker, plumber, sheet metal, HVAC, and laborer trades from its headquarters in St. Louis and regional offices in Illinois, Colorado, and Wyoming.

When Murphy came to DataServ, they knew they wanted to optimize their Accounts Payable (AP) employee experience and productivity. One of the biggest challenges for Murphy, and across the construction industry, is finding skilled professionals, especially in finance and accounts payable roles, who can manage the complex job costing process. Job costing refers to the tracking and allocating of expenses like materials, labor, equipment, and overhead for a construction project. It helps firms stay on budget, make smart decisions, and spot cost-saving opportunities. But keeping up with detailed tracking and constant updates can be difficult, especially when vendor and subcontractor invoices start piling up. Poorly managed invoices can throw off cost calculations, delay billing, and cause cash flow issues.

Construction job costing demands expertise in project accounting, a skill that’s often hard to come by. Even when you have someone with the right qualifications, they may end up spending a lot of time manually processing invoices and tracking costs, increasing the risk of errors and underutilizing their talents. At Murphy, too many employee hours were devoted to manually processing and routing invoices. They wanted a solution that would enable touchless workflows, while also enhancing visibility and providing real-time status updates and analytics. At the same time, they needed to scale their AP organization to support growth, new acquisitions, and increasing product and service complexity.

Before teaming up with DataServ, Murphy had invested in two prior AP projects in an attempt to automate their complex processes, but each system came with a higher price tag and less-than-optimal results. Due to these negative outcomes, Murphy was highly skeptical of any proposal for AP optimization that they investigated. They had also gained invaluable education and lived experience. After careful consideration, they ended up initializing DataServ’s QuickStart​ Solution, Single Sign On, and AutoVouch​ ™ to truly automate the matching process, which was taking too much of the AP team’s time.