Belgian construction company improves international collaboration with Lotus Quickr

Construction projects require collaboration between many parties—from suppliers and clients to architects and engineers. When these projects are on a global scale, with contributors spread around the world, the complexity grows exponentially. Compagnie d’Entreprises CFE (CFE), one of Belgium’s largest construction companies at 4,100 employees, and its holding company, CFE, understand the value of tapping the best resources for projects, even if that means crossing national boundaries and finding better ways to collaborate.

The CFE IT team is no stranger to supporting a distributed workforce. With a presence in 10 countries from Europe to the Middle East and 25 companies within its construction division alone, Geert Van de Wielle, IBM Lotus manager at CFE, understands the need to introduce companies like CFE to technologies that help them work more efficiently.

With the number of worldwide CFE suppliers and clients increasing, exchanging architectural drawings and other project documents via e-mail was no longer efficient. E-mails would arrive in duplicate, and although recipients locally stored attachments, they were never certain that they were working off the most current versions. “CFE really needed a collaboration tool that would allow them to share a large number of documents in an easy-to-manage, highly secure application,” explains Van de Wielle. “And we wanted a solution that would cleanly integrate with our existing infrastructure.”

Having managed IBM Lotus Notes and Domino for messaging and collaboration since 1989, CFE knew that Lotus Quickr would integrate well, and that the company had the in-house knowledge to manage the application. “As soon as we heard about the Lotus Quickr document management and collaboration functionalities, we knew it was the way to go,” says Van de Wielle.

Easy-to-use Lotus Quickr lessens burden on IT department
With the help of IBM Software Services for Lotus, CFE implemented Lotus Quickr, and CFE was soon up and running with minimal help. The application is simple enough that CFE was able to practice the “train-the-trainer” principle: “We like to be able to train the key users within a company so they can support 80-90 percent of the issues that might come up. It’s only the other 10 percent of problems that come to IT, and we have had very few issues with Lotus Quickr,” explains Van de Wielle. This local support plan is vitally important, given that the number of users on a project can range anywhere from 20 to 100 people.

Using Lotus Quickr, project managers can start a new project or grant a client or partner access without waiting for IT—saving everyone’s time. Furthermore, no special software is needed on the client’s side to access Lotus Quickr. Any authorized person with a Web browser and Internet access can log into a Lotus Quickr workspace; users on the road can step into an Internet café and have instant access to current project documentation. “Not having to install software on the client’s side is a huge benefit for us,” says Van de Wielle. “The IT department can’t support every PC in the world.”

Van de Wielle and his team can’t secure every PC in the world, either—but now they don’t have to. Before deploying Lotus Quickr, CFE project teams tried sharing documents via a file server. However, granting access to suppliers, clients and other external parties put the data at risk. With Lotus Quickr, users access their workspace outside the firewall, and the traffic is encrypted with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This helps ensure the integrity of the documentation and also prevents the IT team from having to grant external users access to the private corporate network.

Integration with Lotus Notes adds value to Lotus Quickr
Lotus Quickr integration with Lotus Notes and Domino 8 has also helped to reduce the amount of time spent managing storage and backups. Like most modern companies, CFE depends on e-mail as a primary communication method. “Lotus Notes plays an important role in keeping our people connected and working together. Not only is it an important communication medium internally, both cross-country and cross-continental, but it’s also our primary communication method with suppliers and clients,” explains Van de Wielle.

However, users were also relying on e-mail to share large documents. “We’d have one person forward a 10 MB architectural drawing to five other internal team members. Suddenly that’s 50 megabytes that we need to store and back up for one document,” says Van de Wielle.

With Lotus Quickr integrated with Lotus Notes, users can still e-mail project-related documents, but there’s no need to forward the document to other recipients. Instead, an agent in the mail file copies attachments and e-mail content from internal mailboxes to Lotus Quickr. “We don’t have users forwarding huge files anymore. As soon as a project-related e-mail arrives, it is easily filed into Lotus Quickr to share with other team members,” says Van de Wielle.

Project teams save time and money while improving customer service
Lotus Quickr offers a variety of collaboration features, but it was the document management capabilities that initially attracted CFE to the product. “There are several software products that are commonly used in the construction industry to manage project documentation, but they are very expensive. Lotus Quickr gives us much more than documentation management capabilities and for much less,” says Van de Wielle.

Van de Wielle also anticipates that the return on investment (ROI) could extend beyond the initial purchase because project teams will no longer need to print architectural plans or mail them out on DVDs. “Some of our divisions spend a lot of money to print documents for large projects,” he explains. “In the future they could save time and money by just providing access to the project documentation.” For example, when CFE is accepting bids from suppliers, they could give the suppliers access to a project room where the appropriate plans are stored. Project managers would simply send an e-mail to the supplier to indicate where the plans are, and everyone would have the information they need within minutes.

The flexibility of Lotus Quickr also enabled CFE to improve its customer service by customizing project spaces. “We have a client located in Switzerland who ordered a construction project in Dubai. We can provide them with weekly—or even daily—updates of the project by posting photos on the home page of their Quickr space. So the first image they see is the latest state of their project,” explains Van de Wielle.

Clients appreciate having their own customized space, even if it’s as simple as placing their logo on the home page. “It’s so easy for the project teams to do, but it goes a long way to please the clients. They appreciate the fact that we’ve dedicated the space to their project,” says Van de Wielle.

Discovery of new features and benefits leads to expanded implementation
Putting a client’s logo on a Lotus Quickr home page was a surprisingly easy way for CFE to improve customer satisfaction, and it continues to find other features that can improve collaboration and project management. “Even after a year we are still discovering features we can use to develop new, more efficient ways of working,” says Van de Wielle. For example, some divisions within CFE are exploring project task management and calendaring features.

Another important capability is document management for large numbers of documents. Users can search for documents based on metadata, which enables fast retrieval. Currently a team is using property sheets to define various properties for different documents residing in 2,000 to 3,000 folders with around 400 GB of data. “The ability to manage these documents is very valuable,” says Van de Wielle.

While Lotus Quickr is currently only rolled out to a few divisions within CFE, other divisions are taking notice as they all face the same challenges of collaborating with international parties and managing documentation. “As soon as somebody sees the opportunities and the possibilities of Lotus Quickr, they want to start using it,” says Van de Wielle.

For more information
For more information about IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Quickr software, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/software/lotus