Zap Piling’s Project Management System (PMS) relies upon Force.com for keeping projects on time and in budget

Full Case Study

Construction engineering company Zap Piling Pte Ltd. services Singapore’s building and construction industry, specializing in the installation of foundation works (e.g. bored piles and reinforced concrete piles).  It provides pile installation services throughout Singapore and India. It also recently entered the Indonesian market

Zap Piling numbers among the “Singapore 1000” most successful large corporations.  Its notable success can be attributed in part to a strong belief in leading-edge IT for driving forward business and operational excellence; in fact IT is an integral component of the company vision.

The Challenges
Operating in 20 sites around Singapore and regional operations in India and Indonesia, Zap Piling employs about 320 people in its head office and regional warehouses. With a PMS already in place Zap Piling wanted to combine that with a market leading technology that would give employees visibility into the real time progression of individual projects.

A major factor was the need to monitor costs, particularly in relation to raw materials such as concrete, which are subject to regular market price fluctuations.  Also of primary concern was the need for tracking the efficiency of the machinery used on site.

The Solution
Zap Piling quickly realised that a cloud-based data management solution in the PMS would give them the ability to centrally store and tap into information relating to customer projects. When compared with competitive applications for managing corporate data it became apparent that a hosted cloud application would be far less time consuming to develop and less costly to deploy, without requiring the ongoing services of a specialist to maintain.

The Force.com development platform from saleforce.com presented the ideal Custom Cloud service, providing the fastest route for Zap Piling to create a custom Project Management System application to meet its needs.

Force.com is essentially cloud computing for enterprises, offering companies the fastest and easiest way to build and run customised business applications. Because it’s delivered over the internet there’s no need to invest in extra servers and software.

Zap Piling customised a 30 user Force.com solution to assist with the management of resources, customers, products and suppliers. The project was completed in three phases, between December 2007 and April 2008. Phase one delivered project management capabilities, phase two the distribution and use of machinery, tools and consumable materials, and the final phase included the facility to manage manpower.

The Results
A critical advantage for Zap Piling is the ability to monitor project costs 24 x 7 from any of its offices. As materials fluctuate in price, Zap Piling employees have access to real time updates through salesforce.com that enable them to make the corresponding adjustments to current projects, to ensure they are delivered within budget.

Dashboards provide an up to the minute display of expenses and wastages via information that would previously have been unavailable to them until the end of the project, when it is too late to take action. Using dashboards Zap Piling has been able to achieve far greater visibility and transparency of all projects and the ability to compare project results with corporate KPIs. The company estimates that the ability to control costs through real time usage monitoring has already brought about a tangible increase in cost efficiency.

Processing costs is also less of a headache – a task that used to take the contract department 1-2 days once or twice per month has been replaced by a system in which costs are updated on the fly.

Furthermore, better monitoring of wastage and project costs is gradually contributing to more accurate quoting on upcoming projects – the more data available in the cloud (on soil conditions for example) the more precise Zap Piling can be in predicting the usage of materials.

Zap Piling is not only able to track the progress of projects but also the efficiency of the equipment assigned to each project. With all machinery accounted for in salesforce.com, the company knows the location of each machine at all times, who is responsible for it, how many hours it has been operational and how it is performing for example. Problems can be flagged up at the earliest opportunity, ensuring projects run at maximum efficiency with minimum delays.

Zap Piling