SymTerra’s managing director, Sarah Crawley, spoke with PBC Today at Digital Construction Week about how SymPlan can help site teams meet the requirements of the Building Safety Act and encourage innovation on-site
Why is connectivity so important to project managers?
Frequently, we encounter a situation where there is a program or plan assigned to each project, but unfortunately, it lacks proper connectivity. This raises the question of how to establish a seamless connection right from the foundation.
So much of the currently available software is focused on top down, there’s very little that’s bottom up.
What I mean is that there’s ‘the plan’ and then there’s ‘what happens’.
Having worked on site myself, I’ve come to realize that everyone tends to remember recent events and activities, such as what happened last week or who performed certain tasks the week prior.
However, when it comes to retrieving information from two months ago, it becomes apparent that such details are neither recollected nor documented, rendering them practically non-existent.
Post Grenfell and The Building Safety Act, that is not going to be tolerated anymore.
Legislation asks that we need to start recording all this work, but there’s no system that connects it to site and allows all the different subcontractors to easily record their works against that activity, per the golden thread.
How does SymPlan increase efficiency?
SymPlan provides Project Managers with the bird’s eye view of all site data across the supply chain to feed into project reporting – scheduling and workflows – with a level of accuracy and timeliness never-before-seen in construction to reduce time waste and errors from project reporting.
This means that by the end of a month on your project, you won’t have to invest countless days in making phone calls to various individuals, piecing together information from different sources across multiple systems and formats, and dealing with various client reports reaching your main contractor.
The process of searching for information becomes a frantic scramble through emails, Excel files, or any available piece of paper that hasn’t been misplaced. On smaller projects, this can consume one or two days, but even with a full team on mega-projects, it can easily devour an entire week.
Moreover, by the time this information reaches the intended recipients, it becomes obsolete, lacking real-time updates.
What kind of projects has SymPlan been used on so far?
We’ve found that infrastructure has been further ahead and more open to new digital solutions.
Where we’re looking to advance the most is in the mid-market, as there’s so much opportunity there. They’re waking up to the fact that it’s 2023 and we have all these amazing digital tools on our phone, but sometimes it feels like what we use in construction hasn’t moved out of the mid-nineties.
What makes SymPlan stand out in the market?
People are fed up with tech that has been reviewed and implemented with people that don’t ever set foot on an active site, or that fails to be compatible with the way works are delivered. There’s this mistaken belief that on-site workers aren’t digitally savvy but it’s just not true- we all have smartphones now. It’s about creating a tool that people actually want to use, which is why SymPlan’s bottom-up approach has seen real appetite and huge uptake.
The site teams do want to document and record as they work and not be rung up by their managers asking, “What happened yesterday, can you dig up that photo, what happened in that WhatsApp group?” – they are there for change.
With organisations like Kier, we have seen the sites utilising SymPlan innovating and driving change. That’s when it sticks and where the real value comes in.
Kier Rail started delivering a new contract for Network Rail Works Delivery, involving the renewal and upgrade of railway DC Traction Power cables across the Wessex Route. The workbank for this scheme is vast – 3 Lots, each covering a specific railway route, each containing over 300 individual work locations.
They used SymTerra to allow their project teams to capture, leverage, and maximise information from site, who were delivering works across 1000+ locations to track progress as part of a high output volume programme.
It has resolved the digital adoption problem by starting at the point of work, building a user-friendly and time efficient information pipeline from site. This immediately improves visibility and commercial defensibility as well as providing automated reports and project insights for the whole project team.
You can learn more about the multiple applications and capabilities of SymTerra software here.
