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Overview
A raft of strategic acquisitions over the years has helped this client grow into the $7 billion engineering, construction and maintenance giant it is today. That “jigsaw” business strategy left the octogenarian company with a fragmented, costly and inefficient IT infrastructure, which the company decided to centralise and standardise starting in 2012.
“Due to the acquisitive nature of the company over the years, converging the disparate IT systems of the acquired businesses presents some extraordinary challenges and not just from a technological point of view, but also from a change management perspective,” explained the Chief Planner.
With around 19,000 people, across more than a thousand of the firm’s own offices and client sites in Australia and New Zealand, as well as a few operations in the Pacific Rim, Southern Africa and South America. Its 2,200 clients are in the communications, mining, rail, technology, transport and utilities sectors and some of the big names it works with include Rio Tinto and Bechtel.
Project Details
INDUSTRY
Construction & Infrastructure
APPLICATION
Oracle Primavera P6
SOLUTION
PrescienceAdvantage® Training & Technology Services
The Challenge
Once the Australian mining boom was over, the company needed to focus on other areas of the business and was driven to make cost savings and to increase client retention. They set about improving the level of trust existing clients had with the firm. The first step towards that goal was to improve the visibility and transparency of client projects by removing the siloed approach to project management methodology that had come about due to its acquisitive strategy.
The company had already started the process of standardising enterprise software to Oracle’s JD Edwards Enterprise Requirements Planning (ERP) system, which is a huge transformation process that is ongoing. The next important step was to consolidate its numerous Oracle databases and then to standardise its project planning, scheduling and controls processes and procedures.
“By improving the visibility and transparency of our projects, we have built a greater level of trust with our clients, which has led to better relationships and a lot of repeat business allowing us to buck the trend in what is a pretty challenging market.”
