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What was the challenge?
Our client supply British Army accommodation and working facilities across Aldershot and the whole of Salisbury Plain training area. They’re currently working to provide housing for thousands of troops and their families returning to the UK from West Germany.
Under a NATO agreement, 4,500 soldiers and their families must return from West Germany by the end of 2019. Our client had the mammoth task of constructing homes and facilities in time to house everyone.
As their Project Controls Manager explains, this is a non-negotiable deadline;
“This is an unusual contract in that this is an extremely tight programme. We cannot be delayed. We have to deliver on time or servicemen and women will arrive on Salisbury Plain with nowhere to live.”
With a construction project this complicated and the build of 150 buildings to manage, being able to understand what’s happening on the ground at all times is critical. The team brought in data collection product, Viewpoint Field View to move management of the project from paper to handheld tablets.
However, Viewpoint Field View is not a reporting tool and it wasn’t able to show them exactly where they were at any given moment on any particular building.
With 150 buildings, manual Excel spreadsheet reporting was impossible. Which was why the team called in Sempre.
How did Sempre become involved?
The Project Controls Manager and his team met Sempre at the Viewpoint User Conference in London.
To test Sempre’s capabilities they asked us to create a demo ‘snagging’ report, identifying the final tasks to complete the construction of a building – using the data from five tablets that had been used for gathering data on-site.
The manual process had been to handwrite a list, type it up as a Word document and then email it out for responses; a task that could take three people a week to complete with calls and emails back and forth. The same activity was rife with potential risk as manual manipulation.
The Sempre team was quickly able to create a report that could be run in seconds. As their Project Controls Manager reports,
“In 24 hours they had captured everything that we wanted and asked for, accurately. That was a light bulb moment for us. We realised that this is the way the entire project should be run.”
What happened?
After the initial demo-project, our client’s team extended the use of Field View with Sempre Analytics reporting to over 90 tablets issued to every single engineer and site manager. The company’s external contractors also adopted it.
By automating forms, daily site diaries, daily site checklists and plant checklists the company has been able to radically improve the flow of information and communication; taking reporting time from days to minutes.
One of the early project wins was being able to stop a particular recurring snag in its tracks.
As their Project Controls Manager explains,
“We were able to narrow it down to a particular problem on a particular type of building, right down to a particular gang of bricklayers that were repeating the same mistake. It was phenomenal. We never would have spotted it without Sempre. If we’d just let it run, it would have just occurred 70 times, causing us to rebuild and delay, with massive costs.”
Now the company can visualise data in a way that anyone can understand. As their Project Controls Manager says,
“Now we can print out a visual report on the noticeboard in the canteen, that shows what’s happening in production and productivity as well as where each team is on the schedule and where our issues are.”
What was the outcome of the project?
Working with Sempre has increased the speed and efficiency of the construction process, saving considerable money, time and effort.
As their Project Controls Manager explains;
“On the old system, it would take me three or four hours, with phone calls and emails to create a progress report on each building. With 150 buildings that’s months and months of work I can now do in minutes. Putting together a monthly progress report to our client would take100 times more effort, time and money without using Sempre.”
Another important benefit to our client and his team is the absolute confidence they and their management team now have in the data, “We now have 1000% trust in it.”
Automating manual processes has given the project with Sempre savings of at least £250,000.
And with the ability to spot and prevent problems occurring time and time again, the real benefits and cost savings are incalculable.
It’s also become an important selling tool for the company,
“A lot of clients haven’t seen reporting like this but, once we show it to them,
they use it as a benchmark for everybody else they do business with. It gives them a degree of confidence that we know what we’re doing and can identify issues that may be of concern early on.”
Our client now firmly believes that smart use of analytics will change the future of construction.
What they said
"Viewpoint Field View and Sempre would be the go-to choice for any project like this; we haven’t seen anything else that comes close to them. They’ve done a huge amount with us to make sure that we were getting the solution that we required."
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Kurt Geiger