Leading UK building contractor Haden Young saves cost with Genero deployments
London, England – January 2nd, 2007 — Haden Young, a part of the £4.9 Bn, 27,000 person strong Balfour Beatty construction group and an acknowledged leader in building services contracting, have adopted Genero as their fundamental application development tool for both modernising legacy applications and developing new ones to streamline their operations.
“I set out to replace my legacy applications, but quickly found I had a state-of-the-art platform for new development. I have computerised many manual processes that in this industry can only improve my competitive edge. Without Genero, I would never have got round to them,” said IT director, Mike Colquhoun.
Building Site Progress Returns
A case in point is the Site Progress Return application. As with most modern organisations, Haden Young operate a system of bonuses based on achievements against a set of performance targets.
Traditionally, site foremen have submitted highly complex A3 timesheets, which required a lot of extrapolation of the required data and manual alignment with objectives to ascertain bonus levels.
No longer. Foremen are now issued with PCs into which attendance and timesheet information is entered with performance achievements, against targets held by a central database. Defined user roles enable authorisation, and the data is passed through the ERP system with the timesheet and bonus details directly to payroll.
The replacement of the old paper based system by the new integrated application has removed large amounts of costly and error prone paperwork, and has been welcomed by the users, and the system is now being rolled out across the company.
Variation Management
All of this left Haden Young vulnerable to uncharged variations. They took advantage of the speed and power of their Genero development platform to develop a new, standards based system that now holds all information in a single database, and makes it accessible to their users with literally a single click of the mouse.
All variations, even minor extras, are now entered onto the system, with notes if required, and pass through three distinct stages. Speculative changes are entered as ‘Noted’, then pass into a ‘Submitted’ state, with final authorisation before being passed into the‘Accepted’ state. The information thus gathered updates the central ERP system with which the laptops of the remote users synchronise.
These are just two examples of the genuine business benefits Haden Young are realising from exploiting the power and versatility of the Genero development suite.
