Easy does it

Site secretary Sue Stacey has made her first foray into the electronic management of site documentation.

Fronting up Holloway White Allom's construction team, Stacey is working on a £4m refurbishment of a listed building just off Sloane Square in London.

When asked to provide a snapshot of the volume of site documentation needed on this size of project, Stacey flicks through the EasyDoc software on the laptop to show the current position: 551 drawings have been compiled, follow-up work has generated 1,191 versions of original drawings; and 10,563 copies of the variations have been issued to the parties involved in the project.

"It was up and running in no time at all," she says of the system.

Mark Hailey, Holloway's design co-ordinator for the site, says: "Site document control, when managed with this software tool, takes 50% of Sue's time. On the old paper-based system, we'd need Sue working full-time on document management, and a second helper when pushed. Typically, we'd call on the planner or manager of the site to help, someone who's employed to do other things."

Holloway has an annual turnover of more than £40m and a management buyout was completed on 5 November last year that took the company out of the John Laing Group.

High quality refurbishment

It specialises in the high quality refurbishment of listed buildings in conservation areas, with most of its work in London and the Home Counties.

There is some new build; during the past five years this has accounted for 25% of Holloway's turnover. Most projects fall within the £500,000 to £10m mark and before the arrival of EasyDoc, almost all documentation was managed traditionally.

"On smaller schemes, which were the majority of our jobs, we worked with sheets of acetate paper, making various drawing revisions with a pencil and rubber. Perhaps on just one larger job a year we would keep an electronic drawing register; one example is the £10m Said Business School in Oxford. The problem was that this route needed a full-time, trained person to operate it.

"The paper system used for the rest of the schemes was manual and there were no double checks. It was a chance conversation with Martin Griffin that led us to EasyDoc.

"We mentioned that we were having a problem. Architects and others would all issue drawings. We'd have to log them on arrival before deciding who needed to get a copy - that could be external, to subcontractors and consultants, or internal, to the surveyor, for example.

"Every time someone had to write an original letter saying 'Dear Sir, Please find enclosed...' which, even with mailmerge, was labour intensive."

Which is where Finedata managing director Martin Griffin steps in. Griffin is a programmer and systems designer and has 12 years experience in construction, engineering and document control systems.

Much of this time was with John Laing's IT support team on several projects including Portcullis House.

"This is not a paperless system, but one that needs less paper," says Griffin. "The bigger players, such as BIW and Coins need permanently available Internet or leased-line connections for their solutions, and as diggers go through cables occasionally, this isn't always possible. As EasyDoc works on a laptop, desktop or network and does not require communications, it avoids that risk. Also on small jobs, you can't justify the cost of the telecoms needed by more sophisticated electronic solutions."

EasyDoc costs £450 for the software plus £85 for telephone support. Of the 13 clients that have bought the system, almost all have had just 20 minutes training on the phone before being up and running, says Griffin.

EasyDoc is an electronic register. Dates of receipt and dates of distribution are all held in a central point which, when kept in a laptop, has the advantage of mobility.

"Typically, the laptop follows the lifecycle of the project," says Griffin. "The first drawings are often put into shape - and into the laptop - by a guy working in a hotel room or from the back of his car. Then, as the scheme moves forward, the heart of operations moves to a portacabin and the laptop moves in with it.

"During the mid-project phase, you start sharing information, something that EasyDoc allows for. Then when it's all over, you send the laptop back to headquarters to close out the project, downloading data to settle claims and provide for archiving.

"The beauty is that EasyDoc can move about. On a new project, the laptop would initially be in the hands of a planner or estimator, then moving to a site administrator or junior planner, before moving on to the QS at the end."

Some users have opted for an alternative method of usage with the EasyDoc software being loaded into the office computer for centralised access rather than held on a laptop.

Holloway pioneered EasyDoc on a £1.2m project on a private house. There were two elements to the scheme: one was all refurbishment, while the other called for an element of new build.

"Since then we have insisted on using the software on all jobs of £100,000 and above," says Hailey. "That's eight, most of them now being part-complete. You buy the package as a one-off overhead, then take it from one project to the next."

HBG heard about EasyDoc and has about 20 sites working with Griffin's solution, opting in one case for the "big brother" version known as DocsPro.

Other users include Gleeson, Manchester-based architect AFL and northern building group Houlton. Fit-out player Styles & Wood has taken five copies.

Target users

So who are the target users? Griffin points to contractors that are still using paper, together with those that have switched to Excel spreadsheet but find that it is not the complete answer.

Griffin says: "For some, this is the answer, for others it provides a stop-gap solution.

"Over the past 10 years, construction industry firms have invested in systems that get increasingly complex, with many finding that the decisions they made were not well guided." n