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.
Helping Webb Yates Engineers to evolve with client expectations
Webb Yates are an award-winning structural and civil design practice, offering a collaborative, enthusiastic and responsive service with an efficient, innovative and creative design approach.
Webb Yates Engineers needed to find a system to help them become more responsive to the ever-changing needs of clients in their industry. They discovered Synergist worked perfectly in tandem with the way they worked...
Agency type: Structural and civil design consultancy
Services: Structural engineering, civil engineering, building services, sustainability
Size: 30+ people
Location: London and Birmingham
Andy Yates
Director at Webb Yates Engineers
The problem
Changing client demands leading to leaner ways of working
The company found that client expectations were shifting, with budgets under more pressure. They also found a need for increased leanness from clients, and this was reflected in a desire for streamlining their own processes and systems.
In the ever-evolving world of structural design, tighter budgets and timescales require engineers to work on multiple projects simultaneously, often with overlapping programmes.Shorter programmes and quicker response times require efficient communication and the use of the right technology.
“We had a previous system which had been designed for architects and engineers but it had severe limitations. The reporting was poor, some data had to be entered twice, and certain aspects still had to be done on spreadsheets.”
Invoicing was also handled separately, with no link to Sage accounting, and it was hugely time consuming come month end.
“We accepted its weaknesses in the early days when we were small in size. But there are more of us now, so we knew we needed something much better. We looked at several systems.”
Requirements included:
• Comprehensive and integrated
• On-premises solution
They didn’t want our data stored on remote servers. Data security is very important to the team and their clients.
The solution
A system that works in partnership
“We chose Synergist because it met the requirements.”
“Its entire process and functioning is clearly designed for our type of business – it works the way we work.”
Small and large projects have different requirements in the business, and Synergist accommodated these. Plus, it offered the scalability Webb Yates were looking for to grow.
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.
Andy Yates
Director, Webb Yates Engineers
The return
Flexibility, visibility and scalability
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
The mobile app has been popular, especially for engineers who are often on the road, making it easier for them to complete timesheets and enter expenses.
“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.”
“Another benefit is being able to quickly see the fee value of future work and the timescales involved. This greatly helps planning.”
The team have also found it useful to be able to immediately see things like:
• Missing timesheets, to identify gaps straight away
• Last week’s timesheets and last month’s time and expenses logged to projects
• Invoice analysis. Running that report just before the month-end has proved really useful
“It would have been very hard to extract all this sort of data in our previous system.
“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.”