Work management – What’s in your cupboard?

by RIchard Smith

You know the feeling; you own the latest mixer, bowls, trays and scales, and fancy baking your favourite sweet treat for your work colleagues – chocolate brownies! You start measuring out the ingredients only to find that you’ve got the wrong flour! You could try to wing it – sure, the brownies may be a bit more ‘cakey’ than usual but how many people would notice?! However, you’re proud of your baking abilities and refuse to settle for anything less than perfection – it would be better to put everything back in the cupboard until you have what you need than to continue knowing the results will not be favourable.

The same is true of a Works Management System.

At SWS Group we’ve often used the phrase “the system is like a cupboard – you can only get out what you put into it”. What we mean by that, is that if you want to bake the best chocolate brownies you need to have already stocked the right ingredients in the cupboard so you can use them.

It doesn’t matter what you want to report on, if you don’t have a well-stocked (and in date!) cupboard of data you’ll find it difficult to compile any effective reporting – and what data you can muster together for a report risks being shown up to be flimsy at best. Better to have no information than risk showing data that was out of date 6 months ago.

CORONA and SwIMS both continually capture information behind the scenes whilst the teams are working, and both enforce structured workflow. For instance, using the excavation measurements we’re able to suggest how much materials will be required for backfill and reinstatement. If you have preferred suppliers set up, we can also let you know who to call and the lead time for collection / delivery! You may say that we’re set up for ‘home delivery’, bringing useful data to your door every minute of every day.

By simply using the system as intended, your staff are constantly building up a large data set that allows dissection in many ways, identifying things like volume of excavation, reinstatement and SLG location. This information can be mixed in with the commercial information to provide accurate CvR reporting per job / person / region / gang.

Whatever you’re looking to do with the information recorded from the mobile workforce as well as the office-based teams, the most important thing is that the information recorded is correct and readily available. No matter which of our systems you are working with, data is something that we have in abundance with minimal work required to display it and interpret it.

Some say ‘the toppings make the cake’, and with a works management system the same is true. We have lots of ‘toppings’ to accompany the system. Already mentioned is how we’re able to assist with backfill and reinstatement requirements; with our Stock management and forecast module it’s easy to identify which items have been sent to each job, and knowing when items need to be re-ordered helps you keep control on the value of stock you hold. Then our Asset management module can be used to log inspections, additional work and whole-life cost analysis.

So, whichever cake you desire, whatever ingredients you need to take out of our cupboard, you can be safe in the knowledge that we’ll have it in stock and ready to go.

 

For more information on our products and how we can support your organisation, please contact us at sales@sws-group.co.uk