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Kier Support Services (KSS)
Kier Group is a leading construction, development and service group specialising in building and civil engineering, support services, private house building, property development and the Private Finance Initiative. The Group employs over 9,000 people worldwide and has an annual revenue in excess of £2.1bn. Kier Group operates through five main divisions, each focused on being best in its class. Activities span building, civil engineering, open-cast mining, facilities management, residential and commercial property investment and PFI project investment.Challenge
Kier Support Services (KSS), a division of Kier Group plc, was seeking a means of integrating its Building Maintenance IT systems, including their contractor system and finance system (both Oracle databases), in order to deliver improved efficiencies and cost reductions. Other solutions providing potential integration across the total infrastructure include the KSS mobile operative solution, operative scheduling system and other non-building maintenance systems.
Solution
Eden was selected as an integration platform as the business needed to be able to source and re-purpose data from disparate sources in order to improve service levels to predominantly public sector clients. Having invested in Civica's Servitor solution, KSS was seeking ways of enabling all its systems to 'talk together' intelligently and to deliver meaningful services and solutions to end users.
It was immediately apparent that Eden, as a codeless platform would provide a more than adequate seamless integration platform as well as an application development environment that required no developer input, post set-up.
Key metrics included improved service levels, improved levels of control, management information, a measurable return on investment as well reduced costs in outsourcing solutions integration requirements, and the ability to provide new services to the business.
KSS is having to manage a disparate range of infrastructures and applications across the building maintenance and facilities management operations; these included industry standard finance packages, call centre and CRM applications, as well as Servitor from Civica. The requirement was that these need to 'talk' to external client systems including Orchard and IBS as well as solutions from Anite and Northgate Information Systems.
Any integration solution was going to have to readily enable the building of highly usable interfaces, in very short timeframes, in order to meet the requirements of the business. Such interfaces and new services needed to be brought to the business with confidence and speed. Time to value ratios were key to competitiveness and underpinning the business's ability to win new business in a competitive market place.
Result
When Civica first introduced Eden to KSS it was as an integration toolset that would enable Kier to access and re-purpose data from all the various databases across the business. It has become apparent to KSS that Eden provides so much more than just an integration middleware platform. Kier has been able to greatly enhance the company's packages offered at tender for new contracts in the market. The key point being the ability to 'go-live' in such a short time.
In addition, KSS has been able to bring in house the ability to develop new applications using the Eden Orchestrator. This has given the business control over prioritising deliverables and the timing of them. "Much of the previously outsourced work, which was costly and taking too long to deliver, is now delivered by the KSS IT team in tens of days rather than tens of weeks." says Martin Jowitt of Kier."
This has given us a sense of control in the business and significantly improved service levels," Martin
continued, "In addition we have made good progress to achieving ROI within months and the additional benefits of using Eden are increasingly apparent; we expect to deploy Eden more and more across the group. "
"We are going to be a user of Eden that will be testing its scalability, because every time we find a need in the business, the question that crops up is 'Can Eden do that?'". Martin told the Datadialogs team.
Security, scalability and support are just some of the things Kier is looking to Datadialogs help with going forward, as they win more and more contracts because they have been able to transform the service levels offered to clients by using Eden to build the integrated services required.
"Eden from Datadialogs has lived up to the description I heard at the recent Eden User Group: 'It is the first technology where its uses and deployment is limited only by the users' imagination.' That is proving to be so true for us at Kier." said Martin Jowitt.
About Kier Support Services
Kier Group is a leading construction, development and service group specialising in building and civil
engineering, support services, private house building, property development and the Private Finance
Initiative.
The Group employs over 9,000 people worldwide and has an annual revenue in excess of £2.1bn.
Kier Group operates through five main divisions, each focused on being best in its class. Activities span building, civil engineering, open-cast mining, facilities management, residential and commercial property investment and PFI project investment.
The Construction Division comprises a UK-wide network of regional contracting business and major projects expertise in the UK and overseas. Support Services provides a full life-cycle service for buildings in both public and private sectors including reactive and planned buildings maintenance, grounds maintenance and a host of other services. In addition there is the highly successful private house building and commercial property interests and an infrastructure investment division specialising in the delivery of Private Finance Initiative projects.
The offering of in-house expertise, coupled with key strategic alliances and business units, present Kier as one of few organisations able to offer complete solutions for the delivery of a wide range of innovative schemes.
Kier Group plc
Tempsford Hall
Sandy
Bedfordshire, UK
SG19 2BD
Reference
www.kier.co.uk
