Founded in 1987 by Tony Carson, TEC Construction is one of the South West’s leading family-run construction contractors, with a mission to provide the best in construction quality, customer service and craftmanship.
Challenge
TEC Construction had been using the desktop version of Construction Manager successfully for many years, and as their business needs grew and changed it soon became apparent that they were outgrowing their existing solution as well as the environment on which it sat.
Chairman Tony Carson explained, “Since we first began using Construction Manager our business has almost tripled in size and our needs had changed significantly, especially around our reporting requirements. From a commercial standpoint we needed much greater analysis and cost management.” Tony added, “In addition to this we were also server-based, with large amounts of data being stored and maintained locally. There was a real desire to move away from that way of doing things.”
They were also beginning to experience system and network performance issues which the JNC support team identified as symptoms of the growing volume of data and transactions they had accumulated. Their local infrastructure was clearly beginning to struggle under the increasing demands that were being put on it.
Having also previously fallen victim to a malware attack which took out their main server and exposed the vulnerability of their existing infrastructure, it was clearly time for a change.
Tony commented, “You don’t realise how much you need your IT until it’s not there!”
It was in March 2022 during discussions with the JNC support team that Tony and his team were first made aware of JNC Construction Manager Cloud.
Solution
It was clear at this stage that adopting a fully cloud-native solution would provide the enhanced reporting, analysis, and performance they needed to grow as a business, as well as deliver the much-needed security and futureproofing they were looking for.
Following a demonstration of JNC Construction Manager Cloud in March 2022, the decision was made to make their move to the cloud. Tony commented, “The migration process was very smooth as we were already accustomed to using JNC Construction Manager, however the benefits of migrating to the cloud were immediately apparent as the new system has much greater functionality, and the information we need is now available in seconds, which has had a huge impact on overall productivity.”
Business Impact
Tony estimates that they have seen a 20-30% improvement in operational efficiency as a direct result of their migration to JNC Construction Manager Cloud, largely driven by the robust performance of the cloud-native solution as well as the automation of previously manual processes.
Tony commented, “Applications for Payment is a smart piece of kit. We can record the application for payment to make sure that it is certified by the contract administrator, so we’re tracking that now as opposed to relying on the contract administrator to reply within a specified timescale.” Tony added, “This means I have full visibility of which applications are outstanding, un-certifiable, certified and applications which have been invoiced, and that is a really useful tool to help me manage the business.”
Adopting Construction Manager Cloud has also opened the door to further automation through the introduction of new solutions to handle greater tasks across their estimating and job costing processes.
Tony explained, “I think what it has done is give us the confidence to look at the additional solutions you have available. We had paper-based processes for POs, timesheets, applications for payment etc, all of which we’ve now been able to automate.”
Tony added, “We’re also now adopting the estimating system, and the key driver for that was desire to move away from the large number of manual spreadsheets we relied on and the potential for human error that came with that. We’ll be able to fully track our estimates as full budgets in JNC Construction Manager Cloud, giving us real visibility of budget against actual, and end-to-end control of our projects – I’m really looking forward to that!”
