Lever arch villains

You’re a site manager yet it seems like you spend half your time filing. Reams of paper and a mountain of lever arch files fill your site office. And when it comes to the end of the contract, the document head office is screaming for has somehow got lost .

If this situation sounds all too familiar you could do worse than follow the example of London-based contractor Haymills. It has developed its own system for cutting down on the amount of paper used on site through the use of technology.

Glenn Williams, a project manager for the £100m-turnover contractor says the genesis of the project was to ease the flow of communication on site and from site to head office. “The company has just gone through a restructuring and all our construction and project managers are now site-based. So we needed to have the office infrastructure on site. There were also difficulties finding information at the end of projects, with correspondence getting mislaid and a lot of management time being wasted on administrative tasks. A typical project produced 52 lever arch files worth of documents, which also costs a lot to store.”

The system took seven weeks to develop, and takes between a day and a day and a half to install. Haymills decided to trial it on St Anne’s House, a £2.9m refurbishment in Croydon for P & O Property Holdings, which was completed at the end of last year.

All site paperwork, such as the site diary, contacts, requests for information (RFIs), faxes and confirmations of verbal instructions (CVIs) are held electronically on a server on site. At the end of the project the information is written onto CD Roms for storage. All the computers on site and any remote workers using laptops are connected to the server through a Local Area Network (LAN).

Faxes are read directly into the network using a Symantec program called WinFax PRO, and can also be sent by computer. Any paperwork that does arrive at site is scanned-in so that everyone on site can have instant access to it. The system keeps a full audit trail of all emails or faxes sent, cutting out on the need for keeping a file’s worth of confirmation slips. The site is also linked to head office via an ISDN, so all the paperwork can be sent there electronically.

All this doesn’t come for free of course, but the costs are affordable. The LAN cost £2000 in hardware and software, and the set up and management costs for the system were £400.

I wouldn’t go back to using paper. Any site I work on in future will have to have a system like this, it makes life 10 times easier

Peter Kemp, who was the site manager on St Anne’s House, explains a typical situation and how the system has helped him. “Using paper, if I wanted to send off a CVI to the architect, I would have to fax a copy to them, file a copy and send one to head office, wait for the confirmation and file that, wait for the architect’s response and file that. And if I wanted to look it up again, I had to go through several files of paperwork. Using this system I can do all that by email. The CVIs are kept in a folder on the system and it only takes a couple of minutes to find what you are looking for as they are all headed and dated. It takes the filing away from the site manager and really does make my life easier.”

“We’ve had a few gliches with it,” he says, “but nothing that couldn’t be sorted out in half an hour. We can phone the IT department at head office and talk through problems or if it’s serious they will come out and fix it. But there are people on site who can sort out most of the problems that crop up.”

Despite the fact that Kemp had never been near a computer, he found the network easy to use. “I’m not technically minded, but I had no problems getting used to the system.”

No turning back
Terry Smith, a project manager for Haymills says: “I wouldn’t go back to using paper. Any site from now on will have to have a similar system to this, it makes life 10 times easier.”

Smith adds: “The professional team on my next job is based in Ireland. So instead of communication between us taking a week using paper, I can have it in five seconds.”

Haymills project manager Glenn Williams says it is ready to take the next step by eliminating paper drawings. For the next project, a £5m theatre for Horsham District Council, a drawings viewer will be added. This will have a knock-on effect further down the supply chain. “Our subcontractors will have to use Autocad to work on this project,” says Williams. “For some of that means buying the program and training workers, but they are keen to make the changes.