Going beyond information management as a contractor

ALEC's labour onboarding tracker reached a point where Andy Boutle no longer needed to run it. The people doing the work maintained the records themselves. The tracker was one of several uses that grew from ALEC's decision to build its information management resources as connected data.

Executive summary

ALEC tested a BIM execution plan and an information delivery plan on one Saudi Arabian project before building an IM Hub of reusable resources aligned with ISO 19650. By November 2023, Andy and his colleagues had applied connected tables and controlled contributions to labour onboarding, newsletter production and requests to software partner Revizto. Shared values could be reused across project resources, while departmental views gave colleagues a place to supply their own information and act on pending work. The labour tracker ran without Andy's day-to-day involvement, and marketing operated newsletter collection and approval while he contributed his team's content. Co-building, configuration support and clear responsibilities underpinned the work. The tracker met an immediate need during an enterprise-system rollout. A further use, assembling prequalification packs through a custom PDF export, was still in testing.

At a glance

Andy's approximate counts in November 2023 concerned two separate groups:

• Labour tracker: about 20-odd contributors entering onboarding data.
• Newsletter: 40 or 50 content ambassadors across projects, departments and related businesses.

The results

HR teams could identify and complete pending onboarding tasks

ALEC's employee relations and government relations teams shared the work of onboarding agency labour. Job offers, visa applications and start dates had been managed in a large Excel tracker. Several people contributed, but colleagues struggled to see trends across the data.

Andy helped scope and build the replacement with the people who would use it and support from Morta. Picklists supplied business units, trades, nationalities and agencies. Uploading a job offer recorded its upload date, and colleagues completed the other date fields as onboarding progressed. A script used the completed fields to calculate the current status.

Action views then filtered the records needing a particular task. Employee relations could find pending signed job offers and attach the document. Unrelated columns were locked. Government relations had a corresponding view for its own contribution. Each team could see what was outstanding and complete the relevant fields in the shared record.

Once the process was running, Andy no longer needed to operate it. The colleagues who had helped define the work maintained it themselves.

Now I literally have nothing to do with it.

Andy Boutle

Reporting served a different need. A read-only view grouped records by status for colleagues checking progress. A Power BI dashboard embedded in Morta showed weekly starts and scheduled arrivals. Sites could use those arrival dates and numbers to prepare for the people coming in.

Marketing collected material and received the approver's decision

ALEC's monthly internal newsletter drew on projects, departments and related businesses. Previously, marketing emailed its content ambassadors, asked for completed forms and brought the submissions together manually.

The replacement used forms for five types of news, including project updates, achievements and milestones. Contributors supplied the story, relevant details and supporting images or links. Submissions entered a table that marketing could review through its own views. An email notification pointed marketing to new material to use in the newsletter.

Approval followed once marketing had prepared the page. Marketing attached a preview and selected the relevant project or team, which identified the approver. The approver received a link to the preview and returned an approval status and comments. That response triggered an email back to marketing with the approver's decision and any requested amendments. Supplying a story and approving the prepared page remained separate steps. Andy was the approver for digital construction, while marketing ran the process.

ALEC and Revizto kept each request and response together

The digital construction team used another table to manage requests to Revizto. ALEC entered the request, category, supporting images or video, and its priority. Revizto could comment, ask for more detail, set a response status and provide an estimated release date where appropriate.

Each party had a view with its own fields editable and the other party's fields locked. ALEC could explain what it needed, and Revizto could respond alongside the request. Both teams could read the exchange in one record, replacing a conversation that would otherwise move through emails and spreadsheets.

Prequalification testing assembled the sections a client needed

Prequalification packs had required manual assembly of the information a client requested. That might include company details, project experience, plans, insurances or certificates. ALEC's test put the material into reusable sections, with a person responsible for keeping each section current.

A colleague preparing a pack could give it a number and description, then select the resources requested by the client. The test assembled those sections and supporting PDF content. A separate custom PDF export placed the resulting package in a table, ready to send to the client. Maintained sections supplied the material, and the selection determined which combination the client received. The process was still in testing and had not gone live in November 2023.

The challenge

When Andy joined ALEC from the UK, the information management team already had experience delivering large projects. It lacked a defined, centrally organised set of resource templates. The latest project's documentation became the starting point for the next one.

Personal spreadsheet work and a shared process have different needs. Excel can support an individual's ad hoc work without becoming the file colleagues pass between them to complete different parts of a process. Andy's vision retained that personal use and moved collaborative plans, trackers and exchanges into systems and databases.

He wanted unstructured information to become the exception. Drawings would be annotated views of models carrying little contractual weight, and software would make the IFC model-exchange format easier to use. Internal email would be used less. Task teams would keep delivery plans current because they understood their value, without repeated prompting. These ambitions guided the work.

The solution

Test a project, then build a reusable hub

ALEC tested a BIM execution plan and an information delivery plan on a new project in Saudi Arabia. The experience gave the team a basis for developing its IM Hub templates. For a new tender, it could create a hub in Morta, duplicate the resources and adapt them to the job, starting from the tested structure.

The hub organised the resources ALEC needed as the lead appointed party. Capability and capacity assessments were still handled outside Morta. The team could build through Morta's interface, with Python knowledge useful for additional logic and automation.

Reuse source values across project resources

A value stored in a source table can be reused in other tables through a join or a selection. ALEC's related tables supplied its execution plan, information requirements, delivery plans and responsibility matrices. Red lines on Andy's map represented joins, and blue lines represented picklist selections. These relationships let the information management team bring an existing value into another resource without typing it again.

Task teams still needed to supply their planned deliverables during the appointment phase. ALEC gave each department a contribution view of its task information delivery plan, or TIDP. Commercial quantity surveyors could add deliverables through a view already grouped and filtered for their team. A read-only overall view brought ALEC's TIDP together. Shared values could be reused, while the department supplied the work it intended to deliver.

Check incoming deliverables against the delivery plan

The task plans rolled into the master information delivery plan, or MIDP. That combined plan gave QA/QC and document control a record to check an incoming deliverable against. Andy wanted them to confirm that a deliverable was listed before accepting its upload into the common data environment. If it was missing from the plan, his proposed process was to reject the upload and address the omission. Planning would then inform the checks at delivery.

Morta sat within ALEC's wider technology stack. Connections to Aconex and ACC Docs supported tracking of information status and upload dates. A new connection could also bring issues from Revizto into Morta. Further uses depended on access to more of Revizto's data. These connections brought information from other applications into the hub while those applications retained their own roles.

The implementation

Building with another colleague shares the knowledge needed to configure and maintain a resource. Andy recommended starting with a small use case, testing it and working with at least one other builder. Python knowledge was useful for additional logic, and he encouraged teams to find that knowledge within the business.

The labour tracker and newsletter process showed how the department doing the work could take responsibility for it. Andy helped establish the resources with colleagues, then the operating teams maintained records, responded to tasks and managed approvals. He encouraged other departments to build their own resources with support.

Wider use also needed IT involvement. ALEC was customising a new enterprise resource planning system, or ERP, while the labour tracker met an immediate need. Some processes still handled in spreadsheets were expected to move into that system. Andy had encountered the risk of local builds interfering with planned applications and data architecture when IT was unaware of them. Involving IT let the teams account for how those systems were intended to work together.

Before and after

About ALEC

ALEC Engineering & Contracting was working in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia when Andy gave this presentation. The examples covered its information management and digital construction work alongside workflows involving HR and marketing.

What's next

Prequalification still needed testing before launch. The labour tracker also had to sit alongside the ERP rollout and its intended ownership of business processes. Andy's next steps for wider use were to develop other builders, involve IT and support departments in taking responsibility for their resources.

Watch Andy Boutle's presentation.

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