South Gloucestershire Council Property Services |
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South Gloucestershire Council is a unitary authority located north of Bristol and Bath. The 60 strong multi-discipline Property Services group undertake work for a range of internal and external clients. Their work is a mixture of time-charge, fixed fees and non-chargeable work. They had been using an in-house developed corporate-wide timesheet system before moving to Timemaster. Stephen Lucus, the Business Manager for the group, tells his own story:
"We were actually a Pillar site until we moved to an internally developed corporate-wide timesheet system. We very soon became aware that our corporate time recording system did not meet our business requirements within Property. We persevered with it for a while and started to look for an alternative."
"We had a very clear idea about what we wanted - an easy to use, Microsoft Windows based system to help us to manage projects, record time and invoice. We started looking at potential systems and narrowed it down to two. One of them was Timemaster. We invited them to come and give us a demonstration."
"We all liked Timemaster from the very beginning. It had a straight forward interface. Everything was broken down into folders. The timesheet actually looked like a timesheet and only projects you were actually working on could be selected. We all thought how easy it was to use. Orica agreed to come down for a second time to install an evaluation copy so we could show the rest of our colleagues in the office. We selected some sites from Orica's client list and asked for references and they were glowing! Soon after, we placed an order and we started to implement."
"Orica arranged the first implementation day. The morning was spent installing the application on our server. The afternoon was spent configuring the application and importing the staff records. I was left to enter the hourly rates. The second implementation day was spent setting up the templates from which the projects are created and entering timesheets."
"From these two days of training I was able to set up all our staff, our projects and train people how the enter timesheets. Staff found entering their timesheet very straight forward."
"Our final process was to generate the previously invoiced amounts. We did this by compiling a spreadsheet showing the expenditure for each professional discipline on every on-going project. The Orica support team wrote a data conversion program which allocated the previously invoiced amounts to the project stages. We were then able to generate brought forward invoices for all our projects. This put us in the position where we can now manage all our projects going forward."
"Timemaster has the real potential to free-up so much of my time so I can focus on other management issues. What really excites me is when I start to think about what it is going to do for the whole division . I can't wait to find out!"
South Gloucestershire Council Property Services use the following Timemaster modules:
• Timemaster
• Timemaster Project Management
• Timemaster Work-in-Progress & Invoicing