Document Management Case Study : Alfred McAlpine Alfred McAlpine Infrastructure Services is one of the largest and most progressive construction organisations in the United Kingdom and leads the way in the provision of multi-disciplinary building, civil engineering and infrastructure services, incorporating design-and-build and property development services.
Some recent schemes include the Alfred McAlpine Stadium in Huddersfield, the JJB Stadium in Wigan, the outstanding Eden Project in Cornwall , the Wythenshawe Hospital , and many road and rail projects.
Alfred McAlpine recognised the benefits to be gained by introducing a document management application to improve its archiving procedures and to provide electronic images for use by, firstly, site management and, more recently, head office support service staff. The key driver was to reduce cost and inconvenience in using a manual process to archive and retrieve contract documentation. Alfred McAlpine undertook a major review of electronic document management systems. It selected three suppliers, from an original list of twelve, to implement a pilot system under the guidance of a Divisional Working Group comprising a cross-section of senior management responsible for all aspects of document management within the company.
The pilot systems were evaluated over a period of twelve months and major benefits were identified from this project, including:
- Improved document retrieval
- Improved working practices - consistent and defined workflows
- Improved control through "action tracking"
- Reduced meetings
- Reduced distribution of paper
- Storage space released
- Ease of compliance with QA requirements
- Marketing advantage
- Improved financial performance and better decision making - information being more readily available
- Direct savings - photocopying, postage/delivery, no "manual" archiving
Following the completion of the pilot Alfred McAlpine chose the Laserfiche™ product as the system of choice for document management within the company. A corporate deal was signed between Alfred McAlpine and Crusader Technologies for a 1000 user Laserfiche™ solution.
Laserfiche™ replicates the traditional paper filing system, which has made its acceptance into the business fairly straightforward. Incoming and outgoing documents are scanned, optically character read (OCR) and indexed to an agreed database template. The snapshot module that has been included in the corporate deal allows for electronic documents (such as e-mail) to be captured directly into Laserfiche™.
The growth of Alfred McAlpine has been spectacular. Not only has turnover dramatically increased, but profitability has grown fivefold during the last 5 years. The company places a great emphasis on using Information Technology (IT) to support this growth, and the use of the Laserfiche™ product is a prime example of how Alfred McAlpine uses third party software to support its IT strategy.
Peter Ling, Alfred McAlpine's IT Manager, said: 'As with all IT developments, we set up a working group to focus on document management systems and decided to pilot 3 products from the original list of 12. A 5-user Laserfiche™ licence was installed at our River Etherow Flood Alleviation Scheme. It was quickly seen to be a flexible application and Crusader Technologies made sure that the installation and training was both timely and comprehensive. Laserfiche™ is now deployed to over 1000 users in the UK and Crusader support over 30 locations, both construction sites and permanent offices. In summary, Crusader Technologies are one of the best software vendors we have ever dealt with. They are always prepared to go the extra mile to satisfy us as clients and we see the Laserfiche™ EDMS product as key to our continued success'.