In just 4 weeks, Keross helped a global Engineering firm take control of it's most important resource – it's people.
Providing clear visibility over the mammoth task of allocating resources across its numerous projects has improved resource utilization by 6%. It has improved site productivity and significantly reduced the amount of time spent on resourcing and reporting.
Keross was approached by one of the world’s top professional services firms in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction sector and part of a global group of companies based in Canada. Being a services firm, its largest cost is its people. As such, being able to manage its global workforce efficiently and effectively continues to be its main driver of success.
With many projects either committed, in the pipeline, delayed or extended at any one time, the firm was spending at least one full day per week to manually manage its people using spreadsheets, HR and accounting software to produce a monthly report. Even so, the firm was still unable to see, in real time, where each actual staff member was allocated or committed in future without a great deal of work.
Without real-time visibility over its people, pricing new work could only ever be based on the likely requirement for staff with generic pricing per resource, leading to far-from-accurate pricing for new jobs. And with winning work based on such loose assumptions, the chance of eating into the small industry margins exposed the company to great risk. In addition to the problem of getting pricing wrong in the first instance, the firm was having difficulty managing staff productivity because it could never be sure if everyone was in the right place at the right time. It desperately needed more insight over its people.
Without a real-time and unified view of its largest cost component, it was exposed to challenges such as low staff utilization, understaffing should an existing project be delayed or overlap with another job, unbalanced workloads as some projects struggled while others were overstaffed, cost overruns when more expensive staff filled roles, as well as the questionable allocation of staff to jobs that could afford more resources.
Because of this reactive approach to resource management which took weeks and many man-hours to report, there has been a clear lack of ownership of staff utilization by the firm’s leaders. Controlling the business’ largest ongoing cost was so often left to guesswork.
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In just one month, Keross developed “Resource Manager” to operate alongside the client’s existing IT landscape. Keross helped the firm to unite its legacy systems including CRM, governance, finance, HR and Gantt Chart software to support the process of managing and monitoring its human resources and costs when delivering its projects. The new “Resource Manager” tool offers the multinational organization a structured approach to managing staff productivity, while consolidating all staff supply and demand criteria in a single, real-time dashboard.
With the new solution in place, Team Leaders and Project Managers are able to draw on a pool of available staff members for any given project - searchable by name, trade, experience, grade, cost and location. Real cost data is then immediately pulled from Finance software to accurately forecast a project’s cost, with the ability to play around with different staff to assess impact on a job’s margin. Staff productivity is monitored in real time on dashboards, to allow managers to plan and proactively manage programs from anywhere in the world. And management reports are available to track overall utilization and team profiles.
This global Engineering firm manages over 500 people across approximately 30 multi-million dollar projects and uses staff from it's offices across the globe as well as subconsultants and specialists. Up until now it has been working in a reactive environment when it came to it's people.
Competitors quoted 24 months for partial scope delivery. With Ikon, we delivered an end-to-end digital project & portfolio management solution in 8 months.
Gavin Britton, Digital Portfolio & Products Director, Atkins
Business Impact
The global engineering firm now has a crystal-clear picture of its staff at all times, and how they can be best utilized to maximize revenue and minimize waste across its hundreds of projects around the world.
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