Based in Essex, Optimise Group Ltd carry out a range of commercial Electrical, Mechanical and Fabric contract work. Having worked in the industry for many years, Optimise Group’s Senior Management team felt that the construction industry had not moved forward with current technical advancements. This prompted them to create a company that utilised innovations and forward thinking, not just from their management team, but throughout the company – hence the name Optimise.
The Challenges
Being able to monitor the performance and profitability of projects in real-time can be key to better decision making, which in turn can contribute to enabling growth.
Reporting on projects for Optimise Group had historically been a manual, time-consuming process, which meant critical data was not always readily available to the management team when they needed it most.
This lack of visibility across the team was slowing down decision making and potentially holding them back when looking to commit to larger projects.
As well as poor visibility and analysis, they had cumbersome manual processes in place which drained valuable time and resources. For example, on-site managers and employees had historically recorded and submitted their timesheets manually using a mix of both paper and email, and whilst being time-consuming, prone to errors and lost data, this method was manageable until their volumes really began to grow.
Now managing a sizeable number of timesheets per week, the finance team were aware of a growing need for some form of automation to handle both the on-site and office-based elements of the process.
The Solutions
In late 2021 Optimise spoke to Eque2 about their full Construction Manager software, as well as their Labour Timesheets for Construction Manager app, a solution which enables multiple employees or individual site managers to enter and submit timesheet data from their own mobile devices.
By 2022 Optimise Group had migrated their entire job costing processes over to Construction Manager and had also rolled-out the Labour Timesheets app across their business.
Once their employees had transitioned over to the new Timesheets solution, and the management team were up to speed with Construction Manager, the benefits felt were significant.
Business Impact
Reporting on project performance and profitability was historically a spreadsheet-based process, which was labour-intensive, time-consuming, prone to human error, and didn’t enable the much-needed collaboration the team were looking for.
The speed and availability of reporting and analysis that Construction Manager has brought to the team has given them the confidence to make real-time decisions around taking on larger projects.
Senior Project Manager Lee commented, “We’ve saved around 50% of the time it used to take us to prepare our project profitability reports, which means we now have the flexibility to make decisions quicker as we know exactly where all our projects are at. Everything we see in our reports are a true reflection of how the job is performing”.
Lee added, “As managers we can now generate our own repots in minutes, which in itself helps to drive growth as we can be out on-site driving more jobs because we’re no longer reliant on that 11 o’clock meeting to see how we’re performing”.
The introduction of the automated, app-based Timesheets process has also provided a tangible ROI, the benefits of which the team continue to feel on a weekly basis.
Accounts Manager Sharon explained, “Where our previous process of manually collecting and entering their timesheets would take us a lot of time, the mobile app has saved us a full working day each week. It’s literally given us that time back to focus on other things, which is great”.
