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Essentially Affordable Living

Editorial Type: Case Study     Date: 01-2016    Views: 3020      







CONJECT’s information management package, conjectPC, proves a 'game changer' for Essential Living, a supplier of affordable property rentals in London and the South East.

One of the biggest issues in residential construction is the price of affordable accommodation in London and the Home Counties - unless you are a Russian oligarch or cash rich overseas investor looking for a secure investment in these uncertain times. If you work in the capital and can't afford to buy as a consequence of the high prices, however, you will also find that renting somewhere to live is pretty horrendous as well.

However, as remarkable as it may seem there will soon be an opportunity for young professionals to find somewhere to rent in the London area, provided by Essential Living, a well-capitalised developer which aims to offer a European style model of renting in the UK. Essential Living aims to rewrite the rules on rentals by building and operating a portfolio of affordable, large scale, professionally managed rental developments. Their immediate plan is to construct 5000 apartments across London and the South East as part of a £1Bn development programme over the next 10 years.

All other things being equal, if you want to provide affordable accommodation without compromising on quality, and to deliver it on time and within budget, then you need to establish a supremely efficient working environment, with all risks accounted for and working processes improved.

ESSENTIAL LIVING
Construction Director Ray Theakston, charged with the task of procurement and delivery of Essential Living projects, was asked to identify areas within the company that could be improved and made more cost effective. In order to deliver projects simultaneously, he recognised that all AEC data - designs, documents and drawings - would have to be shared with external contractors, enabling them to create the detailed design packages that the construction teams needed. Project members needed to find and ascertain the status of documents and drawings, and which folders and emails they related to.

Essential Living also had to retain control and consistency over brand design standards, as deviations from them, such as may occur with paper-based information management solutions, lacked accuracy and accountability. Theakston remarked, "Without a structured approach and system we would be faced with a disarray of folders, duplication of work and the potential for errors and mistakes."

Theakston also recognised that with the lack of an accurate means of reporting, it would be difficult to assess the true progress of a project by piecing together design and progress reports from individual contractors. He decided that a collaboration system was required that was capable of managing workflows between architects, contractors and the supply chain, and provide a real-time view on the status of a construction project.

With this in mind he evaluated three potential suppliers, assessing their IT infrastructure, functionality, ease-of-use and reliability. Having found that conjectPC, a web-based tool developed by Woking-based CONJECT, scored highest on all counts, he proposed it to other members of Essential Living. It was readily accepted because several Essential Living team members had used it successfully in the past.

In July 2013 an enterprise deal was signed to use the Tendering Document, Workflow, Standards and Defects management functionality of conjectPC, supported by extensive reporting facilities. This would provide real-time results on the status of design packages, bespoke processes, outstanding actions and supplier performance.

SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
Configuration of such systems is normally handled by the CONJECT implementation team, who had mapped out Essential Living's internal processes and information management requirements. The software was set up to manage collaborative design and engineering processes, and to dovetail into Essential Living's own bespoke workflows, creating a project information management template, which could be used for each individual project.

Projects were set up as Project Zones within conjectPC, with drawing and design folders associated with each. Supply chain members were created in the system as users, and were assigned rights which allowed them to see project data relevant to themselves. To make it all run smoothly, courses and workshops were set up to acquaint project members with the software, and a training guide, unique to Essential Living, was created.



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