Come together

On-line collaboration tools should be a no-brainer for the construction industry, yet their take-up has been slow. Rebecca Froley asks why, and takes a look at some of the offerings available.

It ought to be an easy sell: a tool that promises to make collaborative working faster, simpler, and more cost-effective. Given the complexity of most construction projects – numerous people from different disciplines, multiple companies and diverse locations, all coming together for a fixed time to complete a single finished product – the need for successful collaboration is clear.

But, at least until recently, the construction industry has been slow to take up the solutions on offer from modern technology, with one of the lowest IT spends of any business sector. Even among users of this website – obviously used to accessing information on-line – opinions were split 50/50 in a recent poll that asked respondents whether or not they felt on-line collaboration software could help them to win work.

What goes on

The anti-technology lobby may need to reconsider their opinions if they don’t want to get left high and dry by passing up on solutions that could have given them a competitive edge. The tide is changing. Clients are increasingly demanding tighter controls and greater transparency with regard to the management of project information.

In Proving Collaboration Pays, a UK study carried out earlier this year for the Network for Construction Collaboration Technology Providers (NCCTP) by the independent agency Benchmark Research, 74% of the clients questioned said they would be more likely to use contractors who had experience of on-line collaboration. A further 68% didn’t just think it preferable; they said they’d insist on it. The Strategic Forum’s 2012 Construction Commitments clearly sets out its stance on the matter: "IT-based collaborative tools and communication technologies will be exploited".

Given that 98% of those surveyed for the NCCTP research said using on-line collaboration systems had brought them benefits, what’s holding others back, and what are they missing?

Tell me why

"What we find is fear of change," says Neil Huckle of Dochosting Data Management, whose document management system is used by companies including Persimmon Homes, Jackson Construction and Totty Construction (the latter two now part of ISG).

Choosing to implement a full-scale collaboration tool can mean a big initial investment of time and money, and some companies, particularly SMEs, are put off from trying the available options as they can seem too generic or expensive. Dochosting’s solution was to offer a simpler system focusing on document management, with a pricing policy based on volume of usage, allowing companies to try out the product on a low-impact project to see if it fits their needs.

One customer, according to Huckle, was "anti-technical" when it first started using the product, but within 18 months the company was running its entire drawing management process on-line. "It’s like Star Trek for them; they’ve gone from one extreme to the other!"

Coming from a reprographic background, the Dochosting solution concentrates on drawings. In addition to audit-trails and notification of new documents it offers benefits such as an interface with reprographic systems and the ability to create custom ‘tender-sets’, so that different batches of documents can be printed off for different users according to their needs. Reduced print costs can even pay for the cost of the system. The company is also drawing up plans to provide a link-up to the National House-Building Council’s drawing database.

A day in the life

True on-line collaboration systems like those from 4Projects or Causeway Technologies go much further than document management. In addition to providing an on-line environment – or extranet – for storing project information, so that the same documents can be accessed from a single source by everyone working on a project, wherever they are located, a wide range of features may be available.

These vary depending on the product, however, they commonly include:

• Notification of new documents available, and decisions awaited, by e-mail, extranet ‘in-trays’, or text message;
• Management and tracking of document approval processes, providing a clear audit trail of who has read what, and when, which can help resolve disputes should they occur;
• On-line document mark-up, versioning control and document history;
• The ability for all parties to view any document within the extranet, regardless of whether or not they have the software in which it was originally created;
• Query and action tracking modules, especially useful for stages such as snagging;
• Project calendars and personal diaries, so that users can keep track of the progress of the whole project, and their own key tasks;
• Contact directories;
• Custom-variable levels of access and permissions for each user;
• Full document search facilities;
• ‘Offline’ modes, allowing users to synchronise overnight and then work offline during the day.

Eight days a week

The benefits of having "one central trusted source" for project information, according to Causeway’s Andrew Woolstone, are massive time-savings, because everyone in the project works to a "consistent" set of instructions. This minimises the risk of rework, and helps to streamline communication, reducing the need for meetings, phone calls and high volumes of e-mails. Causeway’s product even plugs straight into Microsoft Outlook, providing tracking and search facilities for project e-mails.

Woolstone, Causeway’s principal consultant, is also the company’s representative on the NCCTP, and believes that as companies grow to more than 100 staff, they should seriously consider investing in collaboration software, because of the cost and time-savings it can bring. He acknowledges that there is a "change process" to go through during initial set-up, but says that teething troubles can be minimised by "recognising that time is needed to think out and plan for the change".

Construction may even have benefited from its reluctance to jump into bed with collaboration technology when it first appeared on the market. While take-up in other markets, such as the communications and pharmaceuticals, has been quicker, Woolstone says those coming on board within the construction sector now can benefit from the advances tried and tested by others, such as digital signatures.

Tell me what you see

So, is the tide turning for on-line collaboration within the construction sector? Have you used on-line collaboration tools? Have they helped, or hindered your business? If you’ve never experimented with the technology, what put you off? The cost, concerns about managing changes to working practices, or just the difficulty of knowing how to start choosing the right solution to meet your company’s needs? Perhaps you are just starting to implement a collaboration system for the first time. Contract Journal would like to know about your experiences.

E-mail rebecca.froley@rbi.co.uk with your comments. We hope to publish some of the findings on-line at www.contractjournal.com in about a month’s time.

What's on the market

Some of the online collaboration tools on the market include:

Asite: www.asite.com

BuildOnline On-Demand: www.buildonline.com/en/index.php

Causeway Technologies: www.causeway.com

Dochosting: www.dochosting.co.uk

Microsoft SharePoint: www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/

4Projects: www.4projects.com

CJ Collaboration: www.cjcollaboration.4projects.com/

The Network of Construction Collaboration Technology Providers (NCCTP) at www.ncctp.net provides links to further construction-specific products within the UK.

[Contract Journal, 27 September 2006, p 30]