Lancini Looks to Grow Securely

Overview

Lancini Property Group (Lancini) is a multi-award-winning property development and management organisation. Over its four decade existence, the Queensland-based group has diversified from its initial focus on residential construction, into retail shopping centres, commercial offices, homemaker centres and industrial properties.

Lancini is driven by its mission to create places and opportunities for communities to thrive and grow. It has broad expertise to identify, develop, construct and manage high-quality precincts, and has cultivated extensive relationships throughout the construction sector.

Challenge

In recent years, Lancini has expanded significantly, constructing developments across Queensland. This expansion has seen Lancini working with hundreds of contractors and sub-contractors on a wide range of projects.

With this growth has come the need for the Accounts Payable function to also scale up. The AP team is responsible for maintaining a Vendor Master File comprising nearly 500 suppliers – a figure that is steadily rising as Lancini embarks on new developments, seeing a steady stream of new contractors and sub-contractors being onboarded each month.

Not only has the AP team seen a significant increase in workload, it has simultaneously had to strengthen its internal controls in response to the ever-rising risk of malicious activity. Cyber criminals regularly target the property and construction sectors by manipulating the banking data in supplier invoices.

Whilst Lancini’s robust internal controls have always ensured it blocks any attempted malicious activity, the leadership team also understood that as the business grows, the risks are likely to escalate. Lancini needed a tool that would ensure it remains protected from the threat of invoice manipulation as it undergoes rapid expansion.

Approach

In order to meet this challenge, Lancini turned to Eftsure.

Eftsure’s unique database, comprising over 80% of actively trading Australian corporations, enables Lancini to verify outgoing payments to its suppliers in real-time. This helps Lancini achieve assurance that it is always processing payments to legitimate contractors and sub-contractors, secure in the knowledge that banking details in invoices have not been manipulated by cyber-criminals.

Given Eftsure’s role securing many leading Australian property development firms, it makes sense for an organisation such as Lancini to also collaborate with Eftsure. It ensures Lancini benefits from the collective supplier knowledge of the broader Australian property development sector.

Result

With Eftsure sitting on top of its accounting processes, Lancini was able to derive immediate benefits:

• Labour saving. Eftsure helped Lancini slash the time it takes to onboard a new supplier. Lancini estimates that onboarding times have been cut by over 50%. As Lancini grows and onboards large numbers of new contractors and sub-contractors, this represents a significant labour saving. It means that Lancini can continue to grow rapidly without the need to hire large numbers of additional staff for its AP team. It also means that existing AP staff can focus on other priorities.
• Business continuity. As any organisation grows, it’s important that it doesn’t become overly reliant on a handful of individuals who possess critical business knowledge. To ensure business continuity in any circumstances, it is important that such knowledge is readily accessible by other appropriate staff members. By using Eftsure as a platform that aggregates essential data on all its suppliers, Lancini is ensuring that it will be able to seamlessly maintain business operations in the event of any future AP staff turnover.
• Risk mitigation. Given that the Australian construction sector is a frequent target of financially motivated cyber criminals, property development and management firms such as Lancini are on the front line of the threat. Whilst Lancini’s strong internal controls have ensured that they have never faced a successful attack, as the organisation grows, the risk is likely to escalate. By implementing Eftsure, Lancini is ensuring it remains one step ahead of the cyber criminals.