St George is a member of the Berkeley Group. Established in 1976, Berkeley Group are now London’s leading mixed-use developer and a FTSE 100 company. The company has built more than 19,600 homes in the last five years, across London, Birmingham and the South of England. Berkeley Group is made up of six autonomous companies, including St George, which has been responsible for shaping much of the modern development along central London’s riverside, delivering high quality new homes where people aspire to live.

Before:

• Process inefficiencies caused by pen and paper systems
• Duplication of work
• Delayed communications to contractors
• Poor tracking of projects

After

• Able to resolve issues quickly and mitigate risk
• Clear visibility into projects
• Increased productivity through less paperwork and duplicated work
• Better control on costs
• Easily able track status of project tasks
• Decreased site management time

Challenge

Whether it be rural housing estates or luxury apartment builds the same challenges resonate throughout the house builder market. Like many contractors in the construction industry, St George had yet to digitise numerous processes across the construction process. This meant teams in the field were working with manual processes for planning, drawing checks, sign-off, health and safety, snagging, and more. Masses of snag lists, for example, were being written by hand. This created the potential for lost data and increased follow up tasks manual efforts to record vital project information, such as, scanning, photocopying and duplicating work. Among these efforts: needing to email copies to the contractor as well providing the original hand written copy. It was clear St George had process inefficiencies causing avoidable low productivity rates.

Solution

St George selected Viewpoint Field View™ to replace these manual processes with a powerful, yet easy-to-use digital solution. Field View is a cloud-based and off-line mobile solution that streamlines field tasks and automates workflows for quality assurance/quality control, safety, project delivery and handover. Field View enabled St George to move to paperless processes and eradicated all the issues that are associated with the traditional pen and paper approach.

Field View allows users to take photos and record snags in real-time, and send directly to contractors and/or the back office, improving the management and monitoring of tasks. Field View allows customers to have one central view of the status of all tasks, hence why project management collaboration and efficiency is instantly improved.

Results

St George transformed their productivity and project delivery by adopting a paperless system, hence why St George Project Director Colin Draper recommends using the product. “I can’t see any reason, no matter what scale of project, why a house builder wouldn’t be using Field View,” he said.

Compared with previous manual methods, St George immediately improved its productivity by having the ability to capture all the information needed in real time, such as taking photos and recording snags. Once the data was captured, St George could send the information straight to the specific contractor, which saved valuable time, a process which previously would’ve taken place back in the office. The contractor would then use Field View to close off tasks meaning they were all tracked and available to monitor by St George within the single Viewpoint solution.

“It’s easier to control the program, easier to control costs, and it’s easier to track snags being closed out,” Draper said.St George are looking to expand its usage of Field View to see how the company can get even more value from the product. Going forward Draper said the company will utilise the product for health and safety forms, planning, drawing checks and sign off for contract parts.