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With over 50 years’ experience, RPC Land Surveyors is a New Zealand cadastral surveying firm. Spread across two offices in Mount Maunganui and Auckland, there are twenty staff utilising equipment and techniques to deliver exceptional value to all their clients. Founded in 1982, the company specialises in all aspects of land developing including surveys (topographic, civil, construction, and drone), land development engineering, and resource management planning. Whether a small-scale infill development or a larger scale high-rise development project, RPC Land Surveyors offers a full range of services.
Before a CDE was implemented…
RPC were utilising Microsoft Excel spreadsheets which proved to be inefficient and time-consuming. The search functionality with this method was extremely limited where only the street addresses could be used to find the correct project. However, if you were searching only one major road, there could be many projects at that address and the team had to sort through manually by street number. On average it took around ten minutes to find a job. Everything quickly added up and cost RPC approximately NZD $25,000 a year and 200 hours lost in billable time.
And after…
12d Synergy has definitely improved our offices’ performance. We’re no longer hunting for files, wasting time, and getting frustrated. Even admin staff can quickly find emails, plans, and photos. It’s been awesome!
Challenges RPC Faced:
- Locating and managing hundreds of files and documents across their offices
- Maintaining an organised and standardised structure for all their data
- Providing seamless collaboration and work-sharing for all their team members
- Maintaining version control to eliminate double data entry
Faster Access to Job Data
RPC spent around 200 hours annually searching their Excel spreadsheets for the correct job data. The company needed a system that was fast and provided easy access to all their files and documents.
12d Synergy’s Spatial Search provided a smarter way of searching through all their job data. Each project can be associated with a street address, a specific location on a map. To search, users can zoom into a region and search for jobs in that area or draw a rectangle to search for all jobs in that section. Jobs can also be searched by dropping a pin or typing in a specific address. Results are displayed visually on a map. Time spent searching has been cut by 95% and now approximately only 10 hours is utilised for this task.
Central & Standardised Location
Before 12d Synergy, RPC saved all their data on File Explorer with no set structure. Finding the correct information was a time-consuming task and posed a huge risk for the company. They needed a data and document management system to improve their offices’ performance.
12d Synergy brought a central and standardised location for all their data. All emails, documents and files are easily accessible through a single source of truth. RPC’s folder structure and job templates were standardised with permission controls set, tasks associated with different jobs, and template files created.
Streamlined Collaboration
Since there was no central location where all staff could access, collaboration was inefficient. The network drive was slow and unreachable outside the office. This made it difficult for surveyors, who had to request files to be emailed to them out on-field which often create duplicated files.
With 12d Synergy, RPC’s collaboration amongst team members is overall more seamless and effective. If staff are out of office, other colleagues can easily take over. Communication between team members is also much more productive. If a client rings up and the person responsible for the job is unavailable, data or files can be easily found by another team member and an update can be provided.
Full Version Control
With an archive of over 7,300 jobs, RPC has a huge amount of data and information stored. Along with an unorganised system the amount of data was considerably larger due to duplicated files. The business needed a system that provided full version control to avoid unnecessary rework.
12d Synergy’s single source of truth means that’s only ever one version of a document in the system. With the job management software Abtrac integration, jobs are automatically created – complete with folder structure, tasks, contacts, attributes, and templates. This has eliminated error-prone data entry per job for RPC. Together these features provide full document and version control.
“12d Synergy, our CDE is great; we’re saving time, money, costs and resources trying to hunt for files. I’ve had a few people talk to me about 12d Synergy, and I’d definitely recommend it to other surveyors. Everyone enjoys using it.”
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