cyril sweett

Imagine managing the simultaneous construction of major office blocks, residences and shopping centres located throughout the world.

This exemplifies a typical scenario at construction consultancy, Cyril Sweett (www.cyrilsweett.com), where every year the company is faced with the challenge of planning and delivering a large number of major projects on behalf of its clients. In order to manage these projects effectively and ensure work is completed to tight deadlines and within budget, Cyril Sweet has adopted Asta Powerproject from Asta Development. Cyril Sweett is one of the UK’s leading providers of construction cost management, project management and consulting advice. With a turnover fee of approximately £20 million, the company has supported clients on over £1.5 billion of annual capital investment in the last five years. Cyril Sweett has been involved in many landmark projects including Bluewater Shopping centre, HM Treasury and the Royal Opera House.

The Business Challenge
With huge sums of money invested in construction projects, clients turn to Cyril Sweett to help them identify from the outset whether or not a project is viable. An important part of this process involves the assessment of any time or cost risks that may affect the successful delivery of the project.

Once a project has commenced, the challenge for Cyril Sweett is to keep the project ‘on track’, to ensure that it is delivered on time, to the required quality and within budget. In most cases, this involves working closely with a number of different parties involved in the project – developers, funders, typically designers, main contractors and specialist contractors.

Cyril Sweett selected Asta Powerproject as it’s key project management system to help manage its portfolio of projects and services.

Each supplier needs to know what tasks they have to complete and by when. Cyril Sweett’s responsibility is to communicate the plans effectively and ensure that progress from each of the parties is recorded and reported back to the client at regular intervals. Any slippage can cost clients heavily and this can result in claims for compensation.

Asta has the Answer
To address these issues, Cyril Sweett selected Asta Powerproject as it’s key project management system to help manage its portfolio of projects and services. Asta Powerproject is an accessible and familiar project planning software tool with strong resource and cost management features. It is widely used in the construction industry.

A total of 15 Asta Powerproject licences have been installed by Cyril Sweett throughout the UK to enable the team of 20 specialist planners to manage client projects.

Calvin Payne, Associate Director at Cyril Sweett said: “Asta Powerproject provides us with a systematic and organised approach to managing every aspect of our construction projects. With its powerful project progressing and baselining capabilities, we can easily obtain a snapshot of where each project is, at any point in time.”

Every project handled by Cyril Sweett is subject to a degree of risk so the company is responsible for identifying and managing risks in order to meet the time and cost deadlines specified by the clients. Asta Powerproject provides Cyril Sweett with a tool to support the risk management process. Project planners across the company use it to test out different ‘what if’ scenarios in order to find the optimal solution to ensure project delivery, whilst minimising risk and maximising opportunity.

Claims Management
It is widely recognised that even in the best-run projects, there could be some form of claim from the contractor or the employer. Most claims have humble beginnings, which have been allowed to escalate through a lack of communication. It is at this point that the client, his team of consultants and contractors often find it difficult to view the matter objectively.

Asta Powerproject is our main product of choice and we make a point of recommending it to our clients.

In these cases, Cyril Sweett uses Asta Powerproject for forensic investigations to analyse where the responsibility lies for project overruns. Calvin Payne commented: “Asta Powerproject is the perfect solution to help us with forensic examinations.

It gives us fast and easy access to historical plans and reports as well as visibility across the entire project. The legal team also find it easy to view and analyse, because of the excellent clear outputs.”

Calvin Payne concluded: “To ensure speed and consistency when managing a project, it is essential that we use the same project management software as our clients. Asta Powerproject is our main product of choice and we make a point of recommending it to our clients.