Recent Posts
Archives
Categories
Advertisements
Just another WordPress.com site
Customer: Customer Size: 70 Customer Profile: Agility, flexibility and adaptability are not words typically associated with mining, engineering and project management, but Fox Projects is not typical. It is compact enough to act responsibly, but large enough to get the job done. Fox Projects, formerly known as SSP & Associates, was established in 1998 and has emerged as a world-class provider of projects management and consulting capabilities in the mining sector. The company is known for its tenacity, the capacity to accommodate changes in its environment, strong lateral thinking and complete commitment. Software and services: For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies |
Unified solution for efficient project management Competing in the mining and construction fields is not easy, but getting the project management disciplines and supporting mechanisms up to date allows Fox Projects to manage huge projects more effectively and productively. Situation The system was very costly and not user friendly, giving no insights into projects and difficult to use collaboratively. Maintenance and additional functional requests had to be done by expensive consultants giving no flexibility for self-maintainability. What was needed was something much more flexible which would handle everything from day-to-day reporting and operations, to tenders, document management and drawing office control, tracking and easier communication and collaboration with staff remotely. Solution Benefits Engineers can communicate with clients more easily as they can use a dashboard to log into the system to see where the project is and what the possible risks are that have to be mitigated. Fox Projects also chose Microsoft Project Professional 2010 rather than traditional costing and scheduling tools used in the mining and construction industry, as it provides better capabilities and is much more cost effective and using it in the solution context of EPM the whole project lifecycle can be managed through various mining and engineering disciplines and for everything from start to finish of the project – previously, it was only used as a scheduling tool – with this solution it can be used for costing and resources as well. Through this solution staff members have learned more of the capabilities of Microsoft Project Professional 2010 and productivity has multiplied. “We have decided to use an agile approach to the implementation with small iterations of work packages being implemented. This allows us the flexibility of implementing about 50 percent of our work onto this solution and making enhancements as we move through this process,” said Keir. “It should take us another month or so to get everything finalised and then we can continuously improve on this if required. “There have been no problems with the software and the staff members have found it easy to use. We know what ‘smarts’ we want to put into the solution so that we manage the projects correctly. Our partner FOXit is showing us how to do things the correct way. It’s a good partnership. “There are a lot of things that we have in mind to do, but we can’t do everything at once, because we still have to run a business. One of the things we are looking at doing is getting a server on which we can learn – we don’t want to use our actual system for that – we need something else to play on!” The company is in engineering procurement and construction management, so it works for mining houses on various projects. Taking a project from the scoping phase through to feasibility, execution and then to close-out. Workflow and approvals are vital and everything is part of a process, or procedure that can be built up very successfully in this solution and the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 capabilities make this easy to use and implement. Fox Projects will apply for ISO accreditation at the end of year and the new system of control will obviously help to produce the basis for the accreditation and enable Fox Projects to get the certification. This is important because it brings with it more credibility in the industry and blue chip companies require it. |
![]() |
![]() |
Recent Comments