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Toward Successful Implementations
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September 3 - 7, 2007 by Susan Smith
A weekly summary of recently published AEC product and company news, featured downloads, customer wins, and coming events. Brought to you by AECCafé.
Each week AECWeekly Review delivers to its readers news concerning the latest developments in the AEC industry, along with a selection of other articles that we feel you might find interesting. If we missed a story that you feel deserved to be included, please contact us! Questions? Feedback? Click here. Thank-you!
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Welcome to AECWeekly!
AECWeekly is a news magazine featuring important industry news profiles, a summary of recently published AEC product and company news, customer wins, and coming events. Brought to you by AECCafe.
AECWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Announcements, New Products, and Upcoming Events.
AECWeekly welcomes letters and feedback from readers, so let us know what you think.
Please send me your comments
Best wishes,
Susan Smith, Managing Editor
Industry News
Toward Successful Implementations
by Susan Smith
In the past few years, when asked what is the greatest competitor of the construction project management system, many people have cited the fax machine and email. That list of competitors might also be expanded to include Microsoft Excel and other office management tools.
Although project management systems are great technologies, the road to adoption has sometimes been slow. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that in some firms, there isn’t time to teach new technologies to users, in the midst of a demanding building and construction process. But what if some users could use their existing technologies and benefit from a new technology without the learning curve?
Customers have come to Meridian Systems with three top needs:
1. They need to differentiate themselves from their peers. Technology has become a need-to-have rather than a luxury item. Prolog continues to be successful in small to medium sized companies.
Proliance is targeted to the enterprise market. Their priorities are improving their project cost control. Best practices have been implemented and many companies are standardizing on one technology so the entire organization can apply their business processes.
2. Improving visibility across their business using business analytics and business intelligence functionality. With project data in a centralized data, the company is in a position to look at performance across a whole company.
3. Customers are interested in how they will be successful with their implementation. The Starter Pack that Meridian released this summer is a series of technical components bundled together to help accelerate implementations for customers. Sue Watkins, director of marketing for Meridian said the Starter Pack is in response to helping the construction project management business get a head start, using their experience in that field. “We saw what customers wanted to do in their configurations and so we decided to take some technology components, package them up, give them some preconfigured dashboards, workflows, a series of items that customers need. This way they don’t
have to pay to have these things developed from scratch every time they go through an implementation.”
A new technology trend Meridian sees is called composite or role based applications, a development strategy being endorsed by Microsoft, designed to help customers be more successful with their implementations. “Getting your end users to adopt is part of that success,” said Watkins. “A lot of companies are familiar with this big monolithic enterprise application and it gets implemented and that’s the way it is. Users have to adapt their processes to work with the technology and we have seen how that can really go wrong, and you can see a lot of customer resistance in that situation. The composite application strategy enables companies like Meridian to roll out
role based interfaces for different types of users.”
What this means is that rather than using the interface that comes with a product, the “role based” interface is tailored to someone’s task or how they might use the software. In a project team situation, there are many contributors, project managers and others who may only be contributing data into invoices. “Rather than having to train them on the entire Proliance system, we can give them office business applications that are smart documents that leverage the familiar interface of Microsoft Excel and they can use that to input their information,” Watkins said. “It essentially allows
them to connect in real time into the Proliance application and the data gets input and goes where it needs to go.”
You can find the full AECCafe event calendar here.
To read more news, click here.
-- Susan Smith, AECCafe.com Managing Editor.
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