GPR: Working with Remote Access Ability

Land Development and engineering consultancy, GPR Consulting, has mobilised and empowered its work-force by migrating project data to the 12d Synergy software platform. This gives employees real-time access to critical project files anytime, anywhere, and enables team collaboration.

The Challenge

With a small team of six – comprising of design engineers, drafts people and project engineers – GPR has operated a “high attentive” and quality services model to differentiate itself from much larger companies. Since being established in 2009, GPR’s directors have complemented the standard of its land development and engineering services with clients to maximise ongoing value through project lifetimes.

Despite the quality of its services, GPR was reliant on manual processes to track documentation and manage workflow which reduced the productivity of its employees, particularly when working away from the office.

Due to the large amounts of data GPR produces – often in excess of two gigabytes per project – the VPN resulted in a poor response rate. Even a 10 MB file would take several minutes to open, and then that much again to save.

GPR were going about it the old-fashioned way by copying projects onto hard drives at the end of each day before they went home. The staff would work on their project at home, then copy the data back onto the server the next day.

“This process was costing us all around one hour per day, so it became less and less viable as our business grew. Another drawback was that I couldn’t easily ensure that the data on my hard drive was in sync with everyone else’s in the office” – Geoff Pratt, Design Manager, GPR Consulting.

Remote Access a Flexible Solution

GPR adopted 12d Synergy to address their remote access and data management issues. Staff are now experiencing a more flexible working environment by being able to access their files from anywhere.

With 12d Synergy, data and documents are cached on their local computer when first accessed. If there are no interim changes, 12d Synergy will work off the local copy of the data on the computer without having to download it again from the server.

Working off a local copy is faster and reduces the traffic between the computer and the server, resulting in a better user experience. 12d Synergy also ensures that users will always be working off the latest data.

Improved Collaborative Environment

In addition to enabling remote access capabilities, GPR is leveraging 12d Synergy’s revision and version control to create project and data audit trails. GPR is now able to quickly make “what-if” changes and rewind these on demand without impacting project delivery timelines.

Thanks to integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook, GPR’s workforce is able to collaborate more effectively.

“Communication is key in managing projects” said Pratt. “We wanted everyone to be aware of client instructions, design changes and project status with easy access to all correspondence relating to the project.”

With 12d Synergy, all email correspondence, task allocation and job lists are contained in a central repository, granting staff granular visibility on the status of all projects. GPR management is able to determine who can access and edit data to ensure confidentiality and integrity of projects.