NG Bailey has been on the path to standardise and assure planning quality across its Engineering and Rail divisions. Excellence is important across all their divisions, which also includes IT, Offsite Manufacture and Facilities Services. They use Powerproject as one of their standard planning tools in Engineering, and they turned to Elecosoft when they needed guidance on how the product could be used to set and maintain planning quality standards.

NG Bailey were pulling together a Planning Policy and Standards Manual which will include planning guidance on all the refreshed business management processes and useful resources such as template programmes, progress reports and standard work breakdown structures, which can help to integrate other functions such as design, procurement, off-site manufacturing, quality control and commissioning.

The programme, which completed in February 2017, has already launched NG Bailey’s NVQ level 3 planning apprenticeship and training scheme, to instil good practices even more widely across the business.

Even though the peers in the team were highly experienced Powerproject users, they had never created a template programme in before. So they turned to Elecosoft for guidance. They had already run a couple of recent training sessions around Earned Value Management and the 4D BIM capabilities in Powerproject, but now they needed more specific support.

Elecosoft’s consultancy team were able to help. An initial conversation on the phone provided lots of advice on things to look out for, but it was decided that a day’s consulting time would be well worth taking. Elecosoft’s consultant brought along a useful guidance document on how to build templates and outlined the process to go through. Elecosoft provided plenty of instructions and clear screenshots – and were able to listen to what the team at NG Bailey needed.

Because Elecosoft’s consultancy team have done this process of standardisation with other clients before, they know all the pitfalls to look out for, and could advise and guide NG Bailey. In the words of Planning Manager Kevin Bingham, key member of the team: “There’s definitely value in a relationship like this – especially when you make the decision to standardise processes and upskill practitioners.”