Case studies / Project Efficiency
Engineering firms like GD Partnership, based in Eynsford, Kent, are the backbone of the UK’s construction and building landscape. They provide much-needed design solutions that are practical, economical and buildable. Its twelve employees work exclusively on large-scale retail projects with a strong focus on the construction of supermarkets and large grocery fitouts. Despite its size, the practice has to deal with a very large amount of email and project data on a daily basis. IT Manager Aaron Djajasaputra and Structural Engineer Pawel Partyka, explain how Newforma Project Center has proven to be the ideal solution for smaller design and construction firms like themselves to stay on top digital operations, no matter the amount of project data.
Treating emails almost like formal letters is paramount to the practice. They very often contain crucial design and build information and are even being used for decision-making processes and change orders. The only way to ensure this essential data not getting lost was to find a way to archive every single email alongside all other project information. A task that proved to be a harder than expected. “Despite our best efforts, project emails always sat at the side lines, being separated from all the other data.”, Djajasaputra explains. Emails were regularly kept in individual inboxes and thus only made available to one specific person.
In their search to find a solution to conquer information management, Djajasaputra and his team had been vying more than 20 applications, without success. Only when a new employee shared positive experiences about Newforma Project Center, did they finally discover the right system that helped them overcome those tedious data management challenges. The true PIM solution offers a very simple email filing process alongside powerful deep search capabilities. The latter enables users to quickly locate, access, manage and share any information even if it sits within a specific file, an email or its attachments. Djajasaputra explains: “With Newforma’s indexation tools we were even able to make old and archived files discoverable. It offers better and more elusive insight into the entire project intelligence of our business.”
One of the biggest advantages GD Partnership sees in Newforma Project Center is the market-leading usability. “To file an email to the project and therefore making it available to the whole team, you virtually only have to use drag and drop or make one simple click.”, Pawel Partyka explains. When searching for files users can perform a powerful keyword search to locate emails or other project files within seconds – all within one centralised dashboard. Manually browsing through dozens of project folders for specific information is no longer needed. Staff members also don’t have to investigate who on the team has processed or shared which information with whom. Project Center keeps a record of every file transfer including its underlying metadata.
