Fulcrum Consulting improves access to data and information sharing between offices
Fulcrum has placed an order in the region of £125,000 for Workspace with Union Square Software for business management software. The business management software will be rolled out to all Fulcrums’ 150 employees to improve management of data and access to project information from remote offices. Fulcrum is a leading international firm of Consulting Engineers with 6 offices covering Europe and the Far East. They are specialists in the field of sustainable engineering development and their portfolio of work spans commercial projects, schools, colleges, public buildings, housing and urban regeneration.
Fulcrum started noticing problems in their management of data as the business grew. ICT Manager Michael Ocran explains, “Network shares worked well when the company was small but as we grew and opened up offices internationally we found that as a way of managing data it was not nearly robust enough. The speed of access to information when remote from the head office was very slow and users had difficulties in finding project related documentation.”
Finance Director Richard Shennan drove the search for a new system. “The goal was to find a document management system to organise our file stores into something more robust and searchable. Once we saw Workspace we realised that it was capable of delivering not only this but also provided everything we needed to run our business in one place. It was the clear winner in a comprehensive review of the available solutions”
Workspace is a web based Enterprise Portal that has been developed specifically for the construction industry as a simpler way of filing, managing and accessing project documentation including emails. Ocran comments, “The amount of emails we have to deal with on a project is enormous and our methods for filing, actioning and archiving them is cumbersome. Currently users forward emails to a project email addresses, emails are then renamed and added to the project file store by an administrator. This is clearly very time-consuming for the administrators and project staff can be unsure of where their emails have been stored. With Workspace the process will become “self service” and emails will be filed by the recipient directly from Outlook into Workspace. This will bring significant time savings and enable the administration staff to focus on more valuable activities.” Shennan adds, “Workspace will enable storing of emails against a project alongside all other project documentation and support full text searching of every email, something that was not previously possible. This will increase employee’s awareness of a projects status and enable us to respond better to our clients needs.”
Workspace will increase collaboration and information sharing between offices by centralising all the company’s information in one place, Ocran sees massive benefits in this beyond simple sharing of information. “Currently we are running with a server in each office, which from both a management and security perspective is very difficult. Workspace will centralise our systems and give us confidence that no one will gain unauthorised access to data.”
Shennan concludes, “The Workspace product is comprehensive in its functionality, we have purchased approximately 80% of the product and expect to see significant improvements in the way we manage and access data and in the management of contacts, opportunities and live projects. Union Square have considerable experience working in the construction industry and we look forward to working with them on the project.”