Case Study
”Nothing gets missed” Accurate time tracking ensures consulting engineering firm, Projects & Designs Engineers, always deliver on time and on budget.
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Michelle Nicol, Chief Storyteller, Tidy International Michelle is a copywriter, trainer and brand storyteller who helps businesses tell their story through words that attract attention. A former BBC journalist, she loves nosing out a great story and sharing her writing expertise through training and workshops.
Famed for its long sandy beaches, top surfing spots and almost 300 days of sunshine a year, Australia’s Gold Coast and the metropolitan area around Brisbane have long been hugely attractive places to live, work and visit. Consulting firm, Projects & Designs Engineers, are well placed at the heart of this growing community with their structural and civil design and engineering business. We speak to contract administrator Stefi Larranaga about how they deliver projects that keep customers coming back.
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t takes a dedicated team of structural and civil engineers and drafting technicians with many years of industry experience to carry out the highly detailed projects undertaken by Projects & Designs Engineers. Their work drawing up plans, submitting applications for Council project approval and overseeing construction on numerous site visits, combined with a customer promise of guaranteed turnaround times has earned them a reputation for delivering on time and on budget. So, it’s important that they keep track of their time, as Stefi Larranaga explains: “As soon as I receive a job, it goes straightaway to TidyWork - that’s how we start allocating time. One of the reports that we use a lot is the project statement. That shows us our time and milestones and other things like how much we invoice, how many hours we spend on drafting and engineering time, if we have meetings, how much time we allocate to that. We look at every
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single time on the job.” Managing workload from quote to completion Projects & Designs Engineers work on a wide variety of residential projects ranging from high and mid-rise apartments to luxury residences and commercial properties used for child and elderly care. They recently completed work on a house that sold for $A 27 million. With such large budgets and crucial deadlines, Stefi explains how every minute managed in TidyWork counts: “By allocating time into TidyWork rather than using spreadsheets, there’s about 10 hours’ time saving a week between the whole team since using TidyWork. We have been using it for more than 4 years. We use it to allocate the time of full-time employees and external subcontractors who work remotely.” Accounting for every minute It’s the expertise of the engineers
and the time they spend working on projects in the office and on clients’ sites that’s the keystone to the business of Projects & Designs Engineers, so it’s important that nothing is missed. Stefi explains: “We make sure that we invoice everything. Because we are a business, we should be profitable. And if you don’t keep track, if you don’t look at the time, it’s just it’s not going to work.” “Before in Excel it was hard to track. So that’s why we like TidyWork. You can see if you’re spending too much time on a job. You can see how the job’s going, if it’s profitable, if it was quoted too low in comparison with the time they’re spending on it.” With such large engineering and construction projects, it’s almost inevitable that not everything will go exactly to plan. Stefi says it’s important that they use software that adapts to their needs and can help them account for project changes: “Our structural and civil engineers design to the best of their knowledge and to comply with Australian standards
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