£400,000 IT revamp places RLB on cloud 9

Property consultancy Rider Levett Bucknall has appointed Union Square to overhaul its data management systems. The firm has ten offices in the UK and needed a new system to improve efficiency and access to data across the business. Rider Levett Bucknall is working on the £30m redvelopment of Edgbaston Cricket Ground.

Union Square will introduce 'Workspace', a platform developed specifically for the construction industry which will be used on RLB's new "private cloud" to improve data and document management. The company is expecting the system to pay for itself with improved efficiency gains within two years.

Ann Bentley, Operations Director at RLB, said: "Managing data and documents is a significant challenge when you have multiple offices and many staff working on-site with clients. We are always looking at ways to reduce our fees and provide better value to our clients. About three years ago we realised that we had a strategic need to address both our information and document management processes. The way we were working with our data was constraining our ability to drive efficiency and improve customer service. As consultants operating within the construction industry we manage significant volumes of data both for our clients and internally. We needed something far more robust, cohesive and scalable than traditional network drives, SharePoint, home grown databases and Outlook."

Ann continues: "We needed to centralise the control of our data whilst at the same time freeing up everyone's time to deliver added value to our clients; the potential to lose time looking for and collating data is immense. We can already deliver all the right information at the right time to the right people, we just want to do it quicker and with less effort."

Will Yandell, Director at Union Square Software, added: "We are delighted that RLB has chosen to partner with us on this project. In these uncertain times investment in the tools that both empower people and make them more efficient is the key to driving long term improvements in both service and profitability for the professional services sector. RLB has reviewed the market for Enterprise knowledge management systems and we are proud to have been chosen by such an established and high profile member of our industry. In our tenth year of operation it's a fantastic testament to the quality of both our technology and our people."