If only there were more days in the week ...

It’s an email from the IT manager. He is switching the company over to a new system.

A collective groan goes round the office: the tried and tested systems are going and everything will take twice as long as it does now.

No doubt there were one or two Midas employees who felt like this in 2003 when the firm decided to install Union Square’s Workspace information management system. Maybe there still are.

But there are also some happy converts. The QSs have gained two days a month each and site managers are nearly a day a week up.

Midas’s information was in a state. Everybody had their own databases: the QSs had one; the estimators had another. Contracts managers had their own little lists.

“Like a lot of companies that have grown, a lot of our data was all over the place, and we wanted to rationalise and distribute it,” says Midas’s IT manager David Beaton.

He considered a few different options, such as project extranets and advanced accounting software, but settled on Workspace because it is a system which has grown organically.

Others have been created by buying several different IT companies and stitching them together, says Beeton. Workspace combines a corporate database, document management and an intranet/extranet.

Having decided on the system, the next question was: slow introduction or big bang? Beaton is a (fairly) big bang man. Having trialled Union Square in a limited way on one large project, just using the functions of project management, extranet and document management, Midas decided to go for it, naming the system Alchemy (Geddit? Midas, Alchemy).

IT people talk about “killer applications”, which sounds very sexy. Not necessarily. Beaton sold his idea of a group-wide database by flagging up two immediate benefits to the masses: having a centralised telephone database linked to telephone system and being able to check that there were no clashes in the team when booking holidays.

Guinea pigs

The potentially sceptical QSs were straight in there. Because they quickly discovered that by switching from a heavily paper-based reporting system to an electronic one they saved two days a month in preparing the management accounts.

But what about site managers? Perry Osborne volunteered his team as guinea pigs. He is operations manager on Midas’s JobCentre

Plus projecct, the government’s refurbishment of more than 1,000 former JobCentres and social security offices. “I am one of the people who find it quite exciting in the early stages,” says Osborne.

Osborne’s crew of 20 site managers range in computer literacy from able to, well, somewhat less able. It sounds like they had a bit of a tough time at first. Alchemy allows them to file away emails in project folders so that they can be stored with other project data. Great idea.

Unfortunately, when Osborne and his team first started using this function, it was quite time-consuming to do the actual filing bit.

“We get 70 to 80 emails a day,” explains Osbourne. “For each one, we had to go through the process of putting the email into a working files folder and then assign attributes to it, like where it was going to be stored.

with alchemy, information exchange is very quick. It’s all held in one place. we all have access to it

perry osbourne, midas

“You do get quite proficient at it but it was very time consuming. Now we are testing a click and drag use of the email. You open it, drag it to the project list and hey presto! it’s in Alchemy.”

The team is finding that there are other benefits too. Spread around 150 sites, Osborne’s site managers used to rely on emailing documents and information to each other.

Now, he says, “we don’t need to have the meetings like we used to. We are exchanging information in a smarter way.

“With Alchemy, information exchange is very quick. It’s all held in one place. We all have access to it in the office or out on site.”

Previously new drawing revisions went out by email, often crashing the email system. Alchemy informs people when a new revision is in, with a link to where it is stored.

“We know that whatever drawing is available on Alchemy is the latest one. That’s probably the biggest step forward, to not have that delay,” says Osborne.

Alchemy is bad news for Yellow Pages. According to Osborne, site managers in the past might have had to resort to it if they couldn’t track down colleagues who had contacts with reputable firms in the area. Alchemy stores information on all the company’s supply chain, rated between one and 10 on quality and performance (anything below five is there to say “don’t touch with a barge pole”).

“It’s a big thing to know we are dealing with a bona fide and professional supply chain,” says Osborne. “And it also allows us to manage how much work they are doing for us.”

For the site managers, all this organised information should mean power. “If there’s a query over a subcontract order we can look at it immediately,” says Osborne. Even the estimator’s dark arts can be revealed. That information is kept separately from the live project data but the two are linked.

Electronic handover

“Rather than having a full-blown handover meeting where every bit of information is presented you can now have an electronic handover. Key documents are automatically imported, should you wish to have a look at them. Previously it was a case of physically going and tapping on the estimator’s door and asking him to find the file.”

Even dealings with designers have been improved with an automated RFI (request for information) system which flags up when a response hasn’t come back by the demanded date. “It helps us to manage ourselves, it’s a bit of an alarm clock,” says Osbourne.

All good stuff. But does this add up to the day-a-week saving mentioned earlier? The best is yet to come according to Osborne’s site managers, who are “raving about” an electronic requisition system they are trialling. This enables goods to be ordered electronically, and ticked off electronically when they arrive on site. Osborne reckons this saves them “a good eight or nine hours a week” by removing the need to fill out forms for each stage of the process.

David Beaton says this flexibility and the ability to influence future developments, alongside other users, is one of Workspace’s strengths. Development will continue, with the next push looking to increase electronic trading with Midas’s suppliers.

So Alchemy is improving the Midas touch, at least in Osborne’s part of the business.

But what about the cost? Midas won’t reveal any figures, but Beaton says it is “not as much as you think. I have heard about other groups spending £0.5m to £1m. I don’t think we are approaching that.”