Introduction
Since the beginning of its partnership with Causeway in 2013, Kier Highways has been using Causeway's Maintenance Management solution to digitally transform its field service operations and connect the entire highways maintenance process.
Through a fully integrated suite of products, Causeway has delivered value into key areas across the business, connecting critical processes and data points within job cost control, business reporting, pre-contract and scheme bidding, job management and scheduling, and asset management systems.
Implemented from a standing start across seven different contracts as the end-to-end operations system, and subsequently implemented across their Utilities business, the solution has enabled Kier Highways to streamline key processes, extract richer data for reporting and business intelligence, reduce abortive visits, and improve process compliance.
Customer Information
Customer Name: Kier Highways
Industry: Highways
Causeway Solution:
Causeway Maintenance Management
The Challenge
Kier Highways (formerly EM Highways) reviewed its business systems strategy in 2013 in light of strategic growth requirements and the need to digitally transform the operations across its highway’s contracts. Following the review, the company found that its bespoke system was not fit for purpose, and that it required a scalable, end-to-end solution.
After the successful implementation of Causeway’s solution across seven contracts, the company was acquired by Kier Group in 2015 to become Kier Highways. Consequently, the company needed to consolidate both its strategic highways contracts and the local authority highways contracts it had inherited from the acquisition.
This demanded that Kier Highways would be able to:
- Leverage economies of scale with a single solution across all highways contracts.
- Reduce the time taken to produce monthly Cost Value Reconciliation (CVR) reports and client-specific reports.
- Reduce the costs of inefficient and laborious processes.
- Improve transparency and auditability within the business for improved compliance.
- Consolidate and ensure consistency in financial reporting
The Solution
This enables a seamless integration with everything from clients’ asset management systems, to ERP treasury systems and works order management. The solution connects key operational areas.
Connecting to asset management systems:
Proven integration with leading asset management systems resulting in a single system required to progress work through its lifecycle.
Pre-contract estimating and scheme bidding:
Improves accuracy and reduces cost across the tender process to improve your profitability.
Planning and scheduling:
Map-based scheduling with data layers provides the tools to optimise the workforce.
Job cost control:
Automatically capture and manage all associated job costing information.
Mobile data capture and job management:
Mobilise your workforce with a powerful job management platform for digitising paper forms and job packs.
Connection to external client systems:
Open integration with any client system eliminates rekeying of job information.
"After looking at a number of alternatives, we realised very early in the process that Causeway's solution was going to be a great fit and that we were going to implement the whole solution, from cradle to grave."
Joe IncuttiActing Group Managing Director
The Outcomes
Improved workforce productivity:
Proactive scheduling capabilities have enabled Kier Highways to anticipate problems, eliminate abortive visits and optimising the field workforce. Kier Highways uses advanced planning and skillsbased schedulingto manage the mobile workforce more effectively, maximise gangs’ time in the field so they can complete more jobs, and minimise disruption to the network. Intelligent scheduling functionality, combined with mapping technology and telematics enables all maintenance jobs to be displayed graphically on a map and colour coded to indicate priority in line with client KPIs.
Improved process compliance:
Causeway’s electronic workflows ensure that best practice is consistently followed and any information Kier Highways captures is auditable, compliant and always complete. The system automatically issues permit requests to the relevant issuing authority and integrates with mobile apps and handheld devices so that Kier Highways’ gangs can access critical information from any location. The company now uses defined workflows when collecting information for DCP / Third Party claims and a tracking tool that enables detailed monitoring of each incident’s progress.
Reduced costs:
Every paper form used was previously costing Kier Highways approximately £13 to process. Causeway has enabled the company to replace almost 2,000 paper forms a month with electronic forms that have been customised to be almost indistinguishable from their paper equivalents. This alone equates to over £300,000 in annual savings.
Improved business insight and reporting:
Kier Highways can now access insight from historically siloed systems in a single customisable view. This has enabled the company to save approximately 3–5 days of work per month on manual client-specific reporting, which is now completed across all contracts at the click of a button. Causeway has also improved Kier Highway’s CVR reporting: by aligning value and cost in the system, Kier Highways can easily review the profitability of each of its work activities.
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