MPS celebrates 10th anniversary in Contract Change Management

David H Williams, Chairman of MPS, hosted a celebratory event in London South bank where he welcomed clients, staff, colleagues and friends: “10 years may not seem that long in some circles but in the world of computing and software development it’s a lifetime or even two life times. As you know our core market is Construction and our core service is Contract Change Management known throughout the Industry as CCM. CCM is an award-winning product – 3 times winner of the Construction Innovation award, designed originally to enable effective and efficient management of the NEC suite of contracts.CCM remains the original, the first, the most widely used, process system tool for NEC change management – simply the best.

"Our success with CCM has been recognised in 2010 with the IBM SoftwareGroup Platinum Award - Independent Software Vendor of the Year. As everyone knows and is probably experiencing, we live in challenging times. However, challenge means opportunity and innovation is the key to opportunity. Those companies that were successful in the late 80’s early 90’s embraced change. The success of NEC across the civils and infrastructure market sectors exemplifies that innovation. We have long felt that CCM could and should be available to serve other forms of contract in other construction sectors such as building where NEC is still not yet widely embraced. I am therefore pleased to announce that we do have available a generic form of CCM that can be tailored for use on projects using contract forms other than NEC. We have had 10 years of growth and success and look forward to continuing that trend. However, we need to be capable of entering new market sectorsand believe “Generic CCM” will provide the innovation and stimulus for future success."

The origins of MPS were professionals who had significant and worldwide experience as construction industry, information technology, project and process management professionals.The then objectives of the company were to deliver Business Performance Improvement through the Innovative Exploitation of Process Management, Information Technology and Software Solutions to the construction industry. To this day the company maintains its innovative enterprise ethic through business partnerships with technology companies such as IBM. An active participation in professional bodies, for example APM, ensures an awareness of good business practice. Joint research programmes with academia – The University of The West of England – enable a continuous access to future thinking on best practice.

An early decision by MPS, some 10 years ago, anticipated what is now a well recognised means of delivering business process support utilising the Internet. The terminology, as is the way with IT, has changed until today’s terms of The Cloud and Software as a Service(SaaS). MPS identified best practice, process improvements, quality performance and encapsulated them in a powerful, virtual infrastructure capable of deployment anywhere in the world.

A substantial investment was made in software development - ContractChange Management (CCM). The software platform is IBM Lotus Domino. Workflow and collaboration support are key elements in the service design. A Managed Service utilising the software, the internet and a portfolio of professional, training and commercial services is delivered to customers.These form the basis for the company’s original sales activities.

The CCM services are targeted at those companies who use the NEC form of contract in the construction industry. The CCM service is innovative in that it provided, an early model, of an On Demand Web Service based on a per user per period pricing model. It provides full electronic support to a user base across a widely dispersed client and supplier chain.Thousands of construction industry professionals from most of the large UK PM, QS, Engineering, and Construction companies have been managing projects with CCM since 2001.

These projects have managed over a million contract documents. A notable success has been the collaborative management of Early Warnings giving notification of new risks, and Compensation Events for notification of change. Client customers include EDF Energy, Highways Agency, EnvironmentAgency, Imperial College London, BBC Workplace, TfL, DEFRA, MetronetRail (LUL), Welsh Assembly Government, Christchurch International Airport,several Local Authorities, and many more.

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CCM system is delivered through anagreement with IBM for Server Managed Services. This agreement includes data centre, hardware equipment and software products, internet services, security and support services. Robin Wilkin, Operations Director of MPS said: “Management Process Systems is recognised as the established industry leader in NEC contract management systems. CCM has been used on hundreds of projects in theUK, and, although the NEC contract is used widely across the infrastructure sector, it is now being used more and more in the building industry.”