Summary
What do you do? Describe your company.
Lozinger-Marazzi is the Swiss subsidiary of Bouygues Construction. Its area of activity includes the development of sustainable neighborhoods and urban areas, the construction of residential buildings, the renovation of existing buildings, and the construction of hospital complexes and industrial structures.
Losinger-Marazzi needed to give project managers on the field an harmonized tool to follow their projects and provide managers with macro reports on these projects.
Already using SharePoint 2013, Losinger-Marazzi decided to upgrade to SharePoint Online and use BPA Quality together with Power Automate and Power BI.
Challenge
What was your problem, and what challenges prevented you from easily solving the problem?
One of the challenges faced by Losinger-Marazzi was the unruled multiplication of project documents, with no saving of reference documents. For every construction project, managers used their own documents, and modified them according to their needs. Projects opportunity and risk analysis were performed on Excel files stored on a file server. This made it difficult to compare and report data. Furthermore, no responsibility was established for creating new documents or amending existing ones.
With the idea of process and documentation harmonization, Losinger-Marazzi wanted to improve the management of construction projects. Each project had a separate folder on a server, with no rule for naming or structure. Losinger-Marazzi wanted each project to be a dedicated site with the right documentation and reporting tools. Ideally, a project workspace should be automatically created when a project is launched, with strict naming rules. Data for reporting should be extracted from those project workspaces and displayed for managers in a separate site.
Losinger-Marazzi also wanted to improve the way their processes were being shared with collaborators: once using the Qualigram software, they found this tool not flexible and collaborative enough. They needed to have a process map easily accessible, linked to the relevant quality documents and with explanations to understand these processes.
Strategy
How did you implement the solution? How long did it take? What new challenges did the implementation create?
The collaboration between Losinger-Marazzi and BPA began in July 2017 with a Proof of Concept for a project on SharePoint Online named AGILITY. This 2-phase project – process map and projects – was supported by the Quality and Lean Management departments.
The POC helped Losinger-Marazzi to finalize their specifications and convince Bouygues Construction in Paris to go for SharePoint online and modify their IT infrastructure.
The first process-mapping phase went into production in mid-March 2019.
This part included 3 components:
- the replacement of the existing Qualigram software: the process diagrams were stored in SharePoint and displayed on a webpart page
- the creation of a quality document library: documents got a formatted reference and were linked to the right step in the process map. They were assigned to owners in the different company departments. Approval and permission workflows allowed contributors and approvers to keep these reference documents up-to-date.
- the access for the different company departments was harmonized through dedicated welcome pages for each department.
The second phase of the Agility project is still under construction. This phase includes:
- the provisioning of construction projects: SharePoint will be used to store the main project properties (client, amount, start date and due dates…) and project steps. The project progress will be assessed with checklists. This part will be accessible to project managers only.
- the provisioning of dedicated workspaces – based on a site template – for each project created, using Power Automate.
- the creation of project management reports, using Power Automate and Power BI.
Results
What results did you gain from BPA Solutions – both anecdotally and measurably?
- Workshops have been organized and Agility was presented to the entire company. The number of reference documents dropped significantly to about 150, and a new reference format has been created to replace the older Qualigram reference.
- The first part of the project was live after 2 months and the project owner already noticed a great adoption of the tool and a very positive response.
- Company managers are showing a great interest in the second project phase.
- New projects have been mentioned and could be added later: objectives and indicators (Power BI), risk assessment…
