Webb Yates Engineers is an award-winning 30-strong structural & civil design practice with offices in central London, Birmingham, Bristol and Dubai.
Andy Yates, Director of Webb Yates Engineers and Rob Delahunty, Associate Director discuss how clients have changed recently, how Webb Yates have adapted to this and how the changes have contributed to their growth.
"Everything’s in one place now. All the consulting information and all the financial data is combined together. It’s great to have everything organised now. It helps us to stay on top of things. Projects, clients, time, financials."
1. Expecting more for less
Client budgets are under pressure, perhaps permanently now. They have to prove clear value to their own organisation.
They intended to build a new bridge costing £3.5million. Instead we designed an elegant, lightweight solution costing £1.4 million.
2. Increased technical demands
In structural design there is a constant stream of new materials becoming available – you need to be the master of them. Nothing stands still.
3. Greater openness to wider collaboration
Clients increasingly want their service providers to see the bigger picture and come up with solutions to wider issues.
4. Programme is king
Shorter programmes and quicker response times require efficient communication and the use of the right technology.
“We’ve grown from 7 to 30 people in just under 5 years. Our clients are typically building contractors, property developers and private clients.
“We manage a large number of projects at any one time. We have approximately 300 jobs and quotes on the system, with about 200 live.
“And they represent a very wide variety of project sizes. Length of projects can range from a single day to two or three years.”
• We are more creative and innovative in our engineering designs than others, as a point of difference.
• We make a point of looking to improve the overall project for the client, rather than blindly following the mechanics of the brief.
We come up with solutions that meet what the client is trying to achieve yet might be far more economical for them, or more efficient, simple or beautiful. Or all of those.
• We do design-led engineering here. We employ a collaborative approach and encourage staff to challenge the design of other designers in the interests of the project. Our design teams have become less compartmentalised. The Webb Yates philosophy is that high quality projects can be delivered through efficient collaborative working.
• We deliver what is called Clever Engineering. Good solutions have a certain elegance, as in nature.
• We are continually investing in technologies to improve the efficiency of the business and the designs produced.
“We had a previous system which had been designed for architects and engineers but it had severe limitations:"
“We accepted its weaknesses in the early days when we were small in size. But there are 30 of us now, so we knew we needed something much better. We looked at several systems. Our requirements included:
“We chose Synergist because it met the requirements.
1. “Everything’s in one place now. All the consulting information and all the financial data is combined together. It’s great to have everything organised now. It helps us to stay on top of things. Projects, clients, time, financials.
2. “When a client challenges an invoice we now don’t have to wade through a thousand emails to find the one that has a bearing on it. Everything’s in one place.
3. “It has given us the opportunity to rethink some of our processes, which has been valuable. We have a very varied scope of what we do here, but Synergist is a big system with the flexibility to offer us fresh ways of handling them. And it lets us create custom fields, which is great.
4. “One particular benefit is that we can create fee proposals on one screen. That wasn’t possible in our previous system. It’s another example of pulling everything together.
5. “We like the mobile app. Our engineers are often on the road, so it’s easy to do timesheets and enter expenses while travelling on the train, for example.
6. “Acceptance by the team has been good. We were a bit worried at first, but it worked out well. We set up data views for each of the engineer teams so they can quickly focus on just the projects they need. It’s flexible like that.
7. “Some things are phenomenally quicker now. Example: when we create quotes for one airport client we need to give them target costs which previously entailed fairly elaborate spreadsheet work. The spreadsheets were problematical because everyone created theirs in different ways. Now it’s handled by the system.
8. “Another benefit: being able to quickly see the fee value of future work and the timescales involved. This greatly helps planning.
9. “It’s very useful to be able to immediately see things like:
“It would have been very hard to extract all this sort of data in our previous system.
10. "Having the system automatically email reports to us is another big win.”
Things are very positive for us at the moment. We are growing quite rapidly. Synergist’s scalability is a reassurance.
“The data we are now capturing is allowing us to be more strategic in bidding for projects. This helps us keep a balance in our workload and forward plan to drive the business forward.
“We’d like to add that the help desk support from Synergist has been very good. When necessary you can give them access to your screen remotely so they can see the same data you’re working on and talk it through right away.
“On-site training, by Anna Root of Magnifeye / The Agency Works, was also good. She worked hard to understand our processes, which was appreciated.”
Whatever your business looks like – 10 to 500 people, design to digital to consultancy –
Synergist can be shaped to the way you work.
See it for yourself.
Synergist consultants, Agency Works, will be in touch to arrange your bespoke demo. Their experience working with hundreds of businesses means they can help you work out what's right for you.