Download Consulting Firm Set to Streamline Project Management, Maximize

Microsoft .NET
Customer Solution Case Study
Consulting Firm Set to Streamline Project
Management, Maximize Resources, Drive
Profits
Overview
Country or Region: Australia
Industry: Engineering
Customer Profile
SMEC is an engineering firm that supplies
services around the world to government,
international agencies, and the private
sector in physical and social infrastructure,
urban planning, and environmental
analysis. It has 1,500 staff and an annual
turnover of more than A$100 million.
Business Situation
SMEC wanted an integrated enterprise
system that would manage and streamline
its business processes to help the
company win business and staff projects,
manage engagements, and streamline
financial operations.
Solution
SMEC implemented an integrated business
and project management system based on
Microsoft® .NET technologies along with
Active Directory®, Microsoft Exchange
Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server™
2000
Benefits
 More effective data management
 Improved contract win rates
 Streamlined project administration
 Ability to scale to meet future needs
“We’ll save time and money and win more business.
That’s a natural progression of having better
information systems.”
Dennis Harris, General Manager ITC, SMEC
When your business spans the globe and involves the project
management of physical and social infrastructure that literally
changes the course of rivers and lives, you can leave nothing to
chance. Operating on such a profound scale means Australia-based
consulting firm SMEC needs efficient, reliable, and secure tools to
manage its diverse projects and manage the flow of information
across the firm. By leveraging Web services and Microsoft .NET
technologies, SMEC has integrated its information systems to
improve effectiveness across the spectrum of its activities. The firm
will have a single source of intelligence for automating and
managing every aspect of its project-focused business, including
bid management, engagement delivery, customer information,
resource management, and project accounting. SMEC expects that
productivity gains and increased revenue will soon follow.
“The system will give our
staff the tools they need
to manage an
increasingly complex
business and contribute
to SMEC’s competitive
advantage.”
Situation
Alastair McKendrick, Chief Financial Officer,
SMEC
Privatized in 1993, SMEC is now a multidisciplinary consulting firm. Its services
include investigation and analysis, project
design, project management, construction
supervision, program design, capacity
building, and training. At any one time, its
consultants are involved in a variety of
projects—anything from a suburban freeway
in Australia or electricity supply in Iraq to a
coal mine in Bangladesh or clean drinking
water in Mozambique.
SMEC was established by the Australian
government in 1970 to retain and apply the
people and experience of the Snowy
Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme to various
aid projects around the world. The hydro
scheme—which ran from 1949 to 1974—
remains the biggest engineering project ever
undertaken in Australia and one of the
world’s great engineering achievements.
SMEC is regularly listed among the most
successful Australian suppliers of services to
the World Bank and the Asian Development
Bank. It has offices in most Australian capital
cities and in its major markets in Africa, the
Middle East, the Pacific, and throughout Asia.
Since its sale to staff ten years ago, SMEC’s
fee revenue and staff numbers have tripled.
SMEC has also expanded its presence in
Australia and overseas, developing a network
of offices and subsidiaries. However, General
Manager ITC, Dennis Harris, says this growth
and structural change placed considerable
strain on the company’s processes, leading to
the decision to introduce a totally new
integrated business and project management
system.
“The main catalyst for the upgrade was that
we have 1,500 people in 40 countries, and
70 percent of our revenue comes from
overseas, but we had no viable IT
infrastructure other than an old UNIX
accounting system that had passed its use-by
date in the mid-90s,” Harris says.
He continues: “We had inadequate email and
local area networks that in many cases had
grown from project sites and developed into
regional offices. They were managed locally,
so they got little attention, and the whole
thing became a risk to the company. There
was no overall management of information
and no central place where you could go to
find marketing material, historical material, or
information about the company.”
“That became a business issue because the
company had grown rapidly, and we had
plans to grow further, especially in our
international business. But we didn’t have the
system to achieve that. After a couple of false
starts, we decided to implement a corporate
information system based on project
management. After all, project management
is what this company does,” he adds.
Solution
SMEC invested in a system the company has
dubbed SMECNet, developed in partnership
with Epicor Software and Professional
Advantage. Well aware of the risks inherent in
the introduction of a comprehensive business
management system and the need for
planning and preparation, SMEC’s Chief
Financial Officer, Alastair McKendrick, says
the new system is designed with SMEC’s
specific business needs in mind.
“The system will be introduced in stages
through the network of business units and
legal entities,” says McKendrick.
SMECNet has been designed not only to
accommodate SMEC’s current needs, but
also to anticipate the firm’s documentation,
communication, and information needs for
many years to come. It will become the
operational foundation of SMEC’s business
and ensure efficiency and security as the firm
continues to grow.
Professional Advantage won Platform
Solution of the Year at the Microsoft® Partner
Program Awards for its work with SMECNet. It
provided the technology infrastructure for
SMECNet, which is a Microsoft .NET
connection software application.
Jonathan Klug, Director, Professional
Advantage, says: “Having a customer with
such a professional approach to a project
helped us to ensure it was a success.”
SMECNet currently has more than 1,000
users, with about 500 of them outside
Australia. One of the major requirements of
the project was to provide various methods of
connectivity. Depending on the bandwidth
available, many SMECNet users have to log
on from remote areas and may only have dialup connections.
The project uses multiple Microsoft
technologies: the Microsoft Windows Server™
2003 Standard and Advanced Editions
operating systems (part of Microsoft Windows
Server System™ integrated server software),
SQL Server™ 2000 Standard and Advanced
Editions, the Exchange Server 2003
Enterprise Edition communication and
collaboration server, Internet Security and
Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000, Office Project
Server 2003, Active Directory® directory
service, Operations Manager 2000, and
Window® SharePoint® Services.
“The project went to tender, and we
investigated the market,” says Harris. “We
got seven realistic responses, and every one
of them advocated Microsoft .NET. They
offered no alternative. It was Microsoft .NET,
Web services, the Internet, SQL Server
[2000]—a pure Microsoft solution.”
He continues: “Epicor was one of two
companies at the time that had redeveloped
their products to a .NET architecture, and
they were in front by some way. They came in
with Professional Advantage, who designed
and delivered an infrastructure based on a
Microsoft platform.”
“It was a complete change in the culture of
this business. We have people who would
rather be in boots and padded jackets
moving the Khyber Pass six meters south
than do anything else. The previous system
was essentially paper-based, but now we
want these people to use a laptop to record
their time and plan their projects. It’s a
challenge,” he adds.
The nature of SMEC’s work means some of
its offices—such as those in Tanzania and
Papua New Guinea—are located where local
telecommunications prevent useful access to
the Internet. This is a situation over which
SMEC has no control. Harris says SMEC knew
there would be parts of the world where its
new system would not work, but as
telecommunications infrastructure in these
countries improves, so too will the
effectiveness of its new system.
Benefits
McKendrick says: “This will be a significant
change in the way the company conducts its
business. However, with the introduction of
SMECNet, we expect to have more flexibility
and better organizational responsiveness to
meet the future challenges of global growth
and increasing competition.”
“The system will give our staff the tools they
need to manage an increasingly complex
business and contribute to SMEC’s ongoing
competitive advantage,” he adds.
More Effective Data Management
Not only will SMECNet replace SMEC’s
current financial management system, it will
also provide the company with more effective
data management and analysis and allow it
to retire a number of offline project
management and reporting systems. These
legacy systems required users to update
information and manipulate data manually,
which was time-consuming and prone to
costly human error.
“We see that the investment will pay for itself
simply through access to general knowledge
about the company and how [technically]
projects have been done in the past,” says
Harris.
He continues: “For example, if we’re building
a dam in Africa, and we had completed one
before in Cambodia, we can now get that
information to the right people at the right
time. This will help us grow the business.”
While much of SMEC’s work is with the
development community and aid agencies,
more and more of its business is with private
companies that expect streamlined
performance from contractors. Harris says
electronic project management, having
information online, and being able to access
and create data in real time will allow SMEC
to manage its data more effectively and meet
client expectations.
“We’ll save time and money and win more
business,” says Harris. “That’s a natural
progression of having better information
systems. For example, Windows SharePoint
Services is the world’s best-kept secret. It’s a
terrific service, and we’re getting a lot out of
it.”
Improved Contract Win Rates
Harris says: “The expected benefits are
largely to do with marketing. We are a
diverse company running many offices in the
developing world, and we are growing rapidly.
The greatest burden on our people overseas
is keeping up with our marketing and putting
together proposals. That process involves
finding out what has been done before. We
had no efficient way of doing that. There
would be pieces of paper spread all over the
world and no easy way of knowing what was
available or what we had done.”
He continues: “You would have to find the
right people, ring them, hope they were
available, and find out what they had done.
The greatest benefit with this new system will
come from the availability of that information
online. It will be organized and easy to find,
and we will have the ability to present it in a
corporate format.”
Streamlined Project Administration
Changes within SMEC have made project
planning and management a critical business
issue for the firm, which at any one time can
be working on up to 500 projects across
many countries.
The new business and project management
system will allow SMEC to become a realtime, Web-enabled organization across all
business functions, including business
development, project planning, job
management, billing, and finance.
SMEC will have better insight into how it is
performing, from client acquisition and
project planning to delivery and accounting.
The solution will enable SMEC’s project
management staff, no matter where they are
located, to simultaneously review the latest
information relating to the company’s
projects, communicate in real time, and
improve review and response times. The
result will be reduced duplication, better
consistency, and streamlined project
administration.
Ability to Scale to Meet Future Needs
Harris is confident the new system will scale
to meet the firm’s strategic vision of
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft
products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in
the United States or (905) 568-9641 in
Canada. Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access information
using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Professional
Advantage products and services, call +61
(02) 9919 8900 or visit the Web site at:
www.pa.com.au
For more information about SMEC products
and services, call +61 (02) 6452 0222 or
visit the Web site at:
www.smec.com.au
Document published December 2005
Microsoft .NET is software that connects
people, information, systems, and devices
through the use of Web services. Web
services are a combination of protocols that
enable computers to work together by
exchanging messages. Web services are
based on the standard protocols of XML,
SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to
interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
“Everyone here knows what our issues are as
a business, and we can all see the end
game,” he says. “We work in an industry
where it is important to find any competitive
advantage and where managing growth is
vital. So, in implementing a system such as
this, the entire thinking of the company has
changed. Having said that, we’re all pretty
excited about where we are headed.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products
and services, providing the ability to quickly
build, deploy, manage, and use connected,
secure solutions with Web services. These
solutions provide agile business integration
and the promise of information anytime,
anywhere, on any device.
“We thought that someone else would have
done this before and knew what it was about,
but we discovered that our issues are unique
and that we are at the forefront of such an
application in our marketplace anywhere in
the world. We did not necessarily want to be
on the cutting edge, but this was the only
option we had to achieve what we wanted to
achieve, without substantially greater
investment.”
For more information about Microsoft
.NET and Web services, please visit these
Web sites:
www.microsoft.com/net
msdn.microsoft.com/webservices
Software and Services
Hardware
Products
− Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Enterprise Edition
− Microsoft Internet Security and
Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000
− Microsoft Office Project Server 2003
− Microsoft Operations Manager 2000
− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Standard
and Advanced Editions
− Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Standard and Advanced Editions
 Technologies
− Active Directory
− Microsoft .NET
− Microsoft Windows SharePoint
Services
− Web Services


© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case
study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO
WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft, Active Directory, SharePoint, Windows, Windows
Server, and Windows Server System are either registered
trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the
United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are
property of their respective owners.
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