Case Study
Industry
Construction
Location
United Kingdom
Size
10,000 plus employees
“harmon.ie has significantly boosted our teams’ adoption of SharePoint, which has improved how we share project information which is so vital in an industry like construction”
Shipra Sharma
Business Analyst at Kier Group
Summary
Kier Group plc used harmon.ie to improve user experience of collaborating and managing information in Office 365. Kier migrated from several legacy systems, which meant a change in process and culture was needed when it came to storing and sharing information.
harmon.ie helped Kier Group enable seamless integration with SharePoint, Outlook, and Office 365. This transformed their complex information management process from many systems into a single, streamlined and secure platform.
About Kier Group
Kier Group plc renews the places where we work, live, and play. They operate across a range of sectors including defence, education, housing, industrials, power, transport, and utilities. A sector leader in the health and education markets, with key capabilities in civil engineering and design and build from small works to major projects. Constantly juggling these multiple projects, Kier Group are always on the lookout for ways to improve how they work.
The Challenge
The construction industry is made up of tight deadlines, low profit margins and even less margin for error.
Kier Group’s building projects are rife with lots of moving parts. Up to date information, which is easy to find, is essential to completing time sensitive tasks.
Multiple legacy systems were causing document chaos, information overload and information silos that were preventing Kier Group employees from doing their best work.
The Solution
Kier Group needed to find a way to simplify how information was organized and shared across the business.
Kier embraced SharePoint – a single, evolving, and scalable platform. But to get the most out of it, they added harmon.ie, which helped bring SharePoint and Outlook together for the construction company. This has simplified how Kier employees can store, organize, and manage the vital information for their many projects.
Using harmon.ie has enabled everyone, from office-based project managers to on-site engineers, a faster, more flexible way of accessing critical information in SharePoint.
This translates into higher productivity, less wasted resources and better rates of project success.
harmon.ie: helping turn SharePoint into a construction must-have
harmon.ie enabled Keir Group’s use of SharePoint and Office 365 to evolve. Turning the default business technology into a flexible solution that was perfect for the construction industry. harmon.ie provides:
- A better way of managing emails and other crucial documents from building project stakeholders, both internal and external.
- The ability to search, tag, and filter docs on SharePoint sites directly from Outlook making critical information easier to communicate both on or off-site.
- Safeguards against data leakage which could compromise a large building project.
harmon.ie enables Kier Group to evolve their information management
The harmon.ie solution has enabled Keir Group with the means to make the information across the business work harder and go further. In an industry where small margins are the norm this could be the difference between project success and failure. Using harmon.ie has been a big influence on the evolution of processes for Kier Group since migrating to Office 365.
Enabling Deep Work with Office 365 at Kier Group
When information is made available at the click of a button, it enables better concentration on the tasks at hand. This leads to Deep Work; the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task that yields a higher value, such as fixing a fundamental flaw to a building design. When it’s easier to access everything in one client, it’s easier to concentrate because context of work is not lost from switching between apps.
The Results
Kier Group has benefited greatly from the seamless integration with Outlook and SharePoint. Now they can open links to project information they need without having to navigate to another window. They can use Office Web Apps directly from the harmon.ie side bar, and search, tag and filter documents on SharePoint sites directly from Outlook. It makes keeping track of all the moving parts of a building project easier to manage and to complete on time to budget.
harmon.ie provides the scaffolding between Office 365 and SharePoint
With harmon.ie, employees can capture the content they need, classify it so makes sense later, and store it in a way that makes it easier find. It means, for example, an architect on a project can discover the content they need when they need it, and easily share that content with the engineering team and a problem can be fixed or an alteration made.
Kier Group employees across the company can find, manage and share what they need – all from a single interface. They can drag and drop documents from Outlook to SharePoint and organize by project, by team, or type of information, such as planning permission, safety certificates, or equipment checks without having to even open the browser.
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