Key Elements
- Extranet with multiple portals for individual global entities
- Efficient management of complex engineering documents with version control
- Staff database with skill and experience matching for engineering projects
The brief
The organisation was finding that they were suffering from inefficiency and potential non-conformance because engineers could not easily access group-wide best practice documentation.
Complex engineering work was documented and held in local systems making them invisible to those in other departments or other international design offices. Management were approving procedures and calculations to be used as best practice guidelines but these could not be easily communicated to technical staff and there was no version control over these documents.
The solution
Achorda developed a worldwide extranet to provide a central hub for all employees to access project documentation.
A CRM was built to hold the contact details and technical competencies of all employees, both contract and staff.
An integrated online document archive was added with folders for best practice and for each individual project. Project documents could then be securely edited by the team and released for wider consumption or ranked as best practice by senior managements.
A sophisticated search engine was added based on Microsoft’s Full Text search engine allowing searches across custom fields associated with each document as well as keywords found by scamming content.
The result was a tool that enabled a once-diverse group of technical talent to work more efficiently as a wider team, getting more value out of technical work than just the project it originally related to.
It also enabled project teams to be built from subject matter experts around the globe rather than just the local pool of talent known to the project manager using the competency matrix held in the CRM.
