Online collaboration made easy

A collaborative workroom or project extranet is an electronic network linking a number of different individuals or organisations for the purpose of exchanging information in digital form. Such networks have the opportunity to significantly improve the way the construction industry works and reduce the likelihood of mistakes and disputes, which are the biggest causes of waste and inefficiency in construction.
As early as 1999, at the Chicago Summit on the Future of Engineering Software, leaders from organisations such as Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, GSA and Bentley agreed that "within three years, no new engineering project of any consequence will be initiated without the use of a project web or extranet".
However, four years later, in the UK construction industry at least, the take-up of this technology is still in its infancy. Small- to medium-sized contractors are reluctant to embrace the concept, often owing to their perception that these systems are prohibitively expensive, difficult to use, and only within the reach of the very largest companies.
Cost savings
But this is not necessarily the case. Making use of collaborative technology to manage the flow of information on a construction project will contribute dramatically to cost savings.
For example, most systems allow for the sharing of documents, drawings, schedules, specifications and many other forms of data via a universal cross-platform viewer, eliminating the need for all parties to commit to licensing the originating software. With secure e-mail and discussion forums providing instant communication with the project team, meeting and travel costs will shrink dramatically.
Also, the expensive task of distributing hard copy documents can be eliminated, while paper and printing costs will be reduced as material will be printed only by those persons actually needing to make use of it.
It is clear that these tangible benefits alone will provide savings for the majority of construction projects, yet the intangible savings in time and risk can pay for the extranet many times over.
Using a collaborative system will cut down the time taken to generate, track and file documents, and will enable quick and efficient searching through both live and archived information.
In addition, automated document distribution will ensure that all members of the project team have access to the most up-to-date versions of the various project documents so that mistakes generated by someone working from an old document or drawing are removed and more people are able to contribute to the design and supply chain. And where mistakes do happen, the audit trail generated by the system will provide a reliable record of all communications and help avoid the likelihood of costly litigation.
CJ Collaboration
Today there are a number of hosted extranet solutions on the market, the newest and most exciting of which is CJ Collaboration (www.cjcollaboration.com), the product of a joint venture between premier UK construction industry newspaper Contract Journal, and 4Projects, the leading provider of extranet and collaboration solutions to world-class clients.
The aim of the new venture is simple - to break down the current barriers to entry to collaborative working so as to enable more firms to save time and money by improving their project management processes.
CJ Collaboration offers a powerful subset of the tools developed by 4Projects to support the full lifecycle of a construction project - from feasibility to planning and design, through the various bid, execute and build phases, and into operation and ongoing monitoring and facilities management. These tools are currently being used extensively by 4Projects' blue chip clients such as Carillion, Sir Robert McAlpine and Taylor Woodrow.
Up to now, project extranets have been priced as a percentage of project costs - typically around 0.5%. Unfortunately, even though the expectation is that this cost should be more than made up for by savings in the running of a job, this pricing model has still deterred a large part of the industry from committing to online collaborative working.
CJ Collaboration breaks from this tradition to offer a much more economic, storage-based subscription model, with an entry point of just £200 per month for transfers of up to 150 megabytes.
The system is simple to use, too. 4Projects' systems are renowned for their ease of use, with the vast majority of users requiring little or no training. The clear, concise screens and help-and-support-on-demand contained within CJ Collaboration ensure that new team members with no prior technical knowledge can begin to collaborate almost immediately.
And there is no need for complicated installation procedures to be carried out by trained IT staff as CJ Collaboration is provided on an ASP (Application Service Provision) basis, with everything being accessed and processed over the internet.
By harnessing the power of the internet in this way, CJ Collaboration is able to provide cost-effective information management facilities to organisations of any size, at any location, and at any time of the day or night.
Collaboration for all
The combination of the innovative business models now being adopted by suppliers such as CJ Collaboration and the cost benefits are dramatically changing the landscape of online collaboration. These cost benefits include: savings in distribution and printing; efficiencies gained through instant communication and dissemination of information; fewer mistakes resulting from the use of outdated documentation; and the reduction of risk consequent on maintaining a robust audit trail.
The deployment of project extranets is no longer the sole prerogative of the big corporations and every size of firm is now able to take advantage of a method of working - the benefits of which far outweigh its costs.-