The customer

Kier is a name that has been synonymous with the best in construction since the 1920s and its roots stretch back to the late 1800s. Kier now ranks as a top UK contractor with a turnover in excess of £1.62bn.

Kier Build is the main contracting division of Kier. Operating throughout the UK, it undertakes contracts valued between £20m and £100m.

The challenge

For every construction project there is a massive paper trail. Documents need to be archived for both compliance and future dispute resolution. Every item of supplier and contractor correspondence and supporting documents, including as-built drawings, Health and Safety and operations and maintenance manuals and invoices related to the project, have to be retained.

Paper documents are delivered directly to the site where they are acted upon by the project manager and his team. Each site has responsibility for ensuring that documents are also catalogued and filed safely using the Kier Build standard project master file index structure for local retrieval. Electronic versions are then added to the archive to ensure it is complete.

Paying contractors and suppliers on a timely basis creates another challenge. Documents received on site have to be married up with invoices. Traditionally the accounts department would send copy invoices to the site for matching and approval. However, the sheer scale of documents being handled made this approach time-consuming.

Moreover, Kier Build needed to track documents throughout a project. Ensuring retrieved documents were returned to the files was arduous, leading to misfiling. It was difficult to ensure records were complete at the end of the project; in some cases the main knowledge holders had moved on.

Documents need to be stored for up to 15 years and as much as a container full of carefully filed paper records can be accumulated at the end of a contract. Should a dispute arise the right records need to be at hand but storing hard copy documents made this time-consuming.

The solution

Kier Build wanted to implement a two phase solution to completely overhaul its document management. Firstly, it wanted to convert its paperwork into an electronic archive, protecting the integrity of files. Users could then remotely access the files without the need to physically recall boxes.

Secondly, Kier Build wanted to capture documents electronically on arrival. Both paper and email delivery could then be combined and placed over a single platform. The Coordinator for each site could then access the documents and immediately apply index data and set up alerts so that everyone involved could see the electronic copy.

With these objectives in mind, Kier Build investigated scanning and content management systems but faced a dilemma on how to capture paper based records: should these be scanned on site, scanned centrally at Kier Build or outsourced?

After weighing up factors including practicalities, set-up costs and cost of ownership, Kier Build elected to outsource scanning to document capture specialists Stortext FM. "One of the key reasons Kier decided to outsource the scanning service was down to the fact that a service bureau operation is geared to flex capacity to meet demand thus ensuring that daily delivery of all received documents is maintained despite volume changes," explains Simon Ellis, Sales Director, Stortext FM.

The implementation

Upon project completion, records were delivered in containers to Stortext FM. Each file was dismantled and the contents scanned and indexed. Pages were then processed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to identify searchable text to refine searching criteria in the future.

The resulting images and text were combined into a PDF document and placed in the Stortext FM web hosted archive, Eclipse Online, from where users could access documents using a browser. Danny Mollah, Kier's Finance Administration Manager says: "Now that Stortext FM have scanned our project documentation, all we do is open Eclipse OnLine using a browser and search the archive from any location."

Following this initial phase, Kier Build has now progressed to scanning during the build process. Everyone in the supply chain is given a PO Box number address for all correspondence. Documents arrive daily at Stortext FM's Bedfordshire scanning centre direct from the suppliers and contractors. Mollah admits: "Getting them to send project documents to a PO Box has been a challenge," but adds "once they understand that this helps us achieve faster reconciliation with the invoices they send to head office, which in turn reduces payment delays, they were more than pleased to co-operate."