Program Management News

Why Hydra was chosen for Cementation Skanska
Any project portfolio management solution had to be open and transparent, and easily operated by the company’s resource management team. Cementation Skanska chose Hydra from Hydra Management Limited because:

• Hydra could model dependency between resources and projects
• Hydra can produce trustworthy management information
• Hydra is a user friendly system and is simple to use
• Hydra gave assurance that resources would be accurately modelled and not overloaded
• Hydra provided a flexible range of different types of resource (both labour and machinery) to be defined and scheduled effectively
• The openness Hydra provided, together with its ability to integrate with other Cementation Skanska systems was unique
• Hydra has a short implementation cycle and delivers quick wins

Cementation Skanska Business Systems Manager, Andrew Mothersele commented, “Pre Hydra it wasn’t unusual to doublebook resources. This led to a massive amount of re-working and a waste of valuable time. Five people allocated resources for five different locations - a process we knew was highly inefficient and prompted us to seek an intelligent system to plan and allocate resources properly,”

Hydra Management Limited’s team of consultants and Cementation Skanska managers worked closely together to define the most effective resource management process for a pilot. Once completed, live data was loaded and two detailed reports were produced. This presented the resource team and business area managers with the exact status of jobs and resources in a specific format.

Says Mothersele: “These reports help us decide where to best allocate resources across seven business areas within the UK and support senior management’s future decisions with clients, showing whether a resource-rich job can be scheduled on a particular date.”

Hydra Manager was implemented within Cementation Skanskas’ Bentley Works division, allowing managers to create and manage over 250 labour and plant resources.

Mothersele continued: “Hydra provided us with a specific auto timesheet approval function to reduce and simplify the work. This has led to huge efficiencies in managing our non-human resource. For example, if one person was to complete the hundreds of timesheets, it would take days. The auto timesheet solution does this for us in just 30 minutes.”

Hydra is creating efficiencies in other areas of the business too. It currently provides the company’s core resource team with full visibility of work in progress. This has increased the utilisation and decreased the conflict for resources. The team is now better able to plan and manage holidays, training courses and mandatory/scheduled maintenance and servicing of plant. By managing staff more efficiently, Hydra has also helped Cementation Skanska to reduce the company resource pool, and the ‘idle time bill’, which can be a significant cost incurred by the company when labour resources are not utilised effectively.

Mothersele concluded: “Hydra has proved to be a great asset to our resource team and resulted in a much leaner and more efficient resource allocation process. With more up-to-date information on projects and a more accurate picture of what resource is available to us, we have found that Hydra has assisted in increasing our total plant utilisation by eight per cent. And we had 10 per cent more plant!”

Hydra Management today continue to work closely with theCementation Skanska team to ensure continued benefit and expansion to other areas of the business and to increase the utilisation of the company’s resources in other areas of the Cementation Skanska organisation.