Aberdeenshire Council |
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Aberdeenshire Council is a unitary authority in the north of Scotland covering a wide geographical area. The Property department is responsible for developing and maintaining all Council owned and educational establishment assets and comprises over 100 multi-discipline fee earning staff. They currently use Timemaster to manage over 400 projects each year including invoicing of external and internal customers with over £3million of fees and all external consultant and contractor payments processed through Timemaster.
They had been using a non Windows time recording system up until 2003. David Clark , Principal Systems Development Officer for the department takes up the story:
"Whilst our old DOMS system had provided us with good service we needed a more modern system that would run on industry standard Windows operating systems using a robust database that would support remote sites due to our large geographic base. We chose Timemaster from Orica for two reasons; firstly because the functionality of Timemaster matched our requirements and secondly because we knew that Orica had a good track record of successfully converting other DOMS users over to Timemaster and we could not afford any down time".
"I had made quite a few add-on modifications to our old system, especially on the reporting side. Orica agreed to incorporate our changes into their system and true to their word; they appeared in the next standard release".
"We made the conversion over to Timemaster for time recording, fee invoicing and project management early in 2003. Since then we have also successfully implemented contractor payment production and approval using the Timemaster Contracts module. We had bespoke payment certificates produced and part of our payment production requires the surveyor to update spend forecasts for approval by budget controllers".
"Here in Aberdeenshire we have a number of projects which are funded from global funding pots, such as window replacement schemes, and conversely a number of projects which can be multi-funded from a number of sources. To enable us to accurately monitor all combinations we commissioned Orica to write a budget monitoring module, integrating budgets from the capital programmes with the Timemaster payments. We are currently testing this and envisage that it will replace all the capital monitoring spreadsheets, currently maintained by hand during this 2005/06 financial year."
"Having outsourced our contractor vetting processes to Construction-Line, our final phase is to implement the Timemaster Tender Management module, which again we are helping to specify and test. This, coupled with the Timemaster Workflow document production system will at last automate our entire project, tender and contract documentation for the whole department from a single database."
Aberdeenshire Council use the following Timemaster modules:
- Timemaster
- WIP & Invoicing
- Project Management
- Contracts and Orders
- Tender Management
- Budget Monitoring