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Lifecycle Solutions for Capital Project Management from Skire
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The company Skire has been around since 1998, when it was founded by ex-Bechtel executives focused on capital project management. The company’s vision was to deliver full lifecycle, owner focused solutions in the form of Unifier, an integrated workplace, project portfolio management software.
According to John Leet, director of marketing at Skire, their clients are typically large owners of Fortune 1000 organizations and leading public sector agencies at the federal, state and local levels. The product is horizontal across various verticals such as chemical, oil and gas, commercial construction, and universities. An example is Kaiser Permanente, which is managing a $37 million program. Universities and other public sector clients use the product for cost control, forecasts, as well as important project funding and funding management. “The core of the product is in assimilating all that cost information and CAD file based information, while adhering to common processes and standards.”
What differentiates Unifier from other products on the market? “Configurability is probably key,” said Leet. “Within Unifier, you take a simple process such as RFI. Most applications deliver that in a fairly predefined way as far as what content is on that RFI and what process it goes through to be resolved. With Unifier, you can automate virtually any process and our clients don’t have to come back to us to configure the application. That is done through an easy to use and flexible tool, whether it be a process that has a few steps or many. It doesn’t matter how complex you need to configure these workflows for your given process. It’s really minimizing total cost of operation for our clients by allowing them the ability to do that configuration without hiring programming resources.” The latest release of Unifier, 8.7, came out in late May and includes an “enhanced, powerful and sophisticated Document Manager, which delivers configuration capabilities.” Document management, business process and resource management, cost and schedule controls are all in one unified application. Customers can configure folder and document attributes for use in the Document Manager, which allows them to tailor Unifier to attach relevant documents directly from within the Document Manager and associate them with their file based information. Unifier 8.7 has an open web services interface. It was developed in Java E2EE and it is database independent, but used primarily on Oracle or SQL Server. Since a lot of cost data comes in from an ERP, the product has those integration interfaces which allow it to be tied in at the enterprise level. “All you need is a web browser to access the software any time anywhere,” said Leet. Unifier 8.7 focuses on greatly extending the relation between that business process and document management side. “Going from a CAD file, you can have an instant view back to any other references, such as what RFIs reference that document, submittals, or any other record within the system,” noted Leet. In addition, there is more robust search capability for metadata around a document as well as within a document. As far as building information modeling (BIM) is concerned, Leet said that their client base has not yet made a strong move toward BIM. “Within our application we work actively on the document and file based information and metadata around a document as well as cost data and schedule data, so it’s very well positioned to support that transfer over to BIM where you’re working at the design data level.” Although Unifier does include schedule management and scheduling tools within the application, most client implementations involve schedule data from Primavera or Microsoft Project, as clients want to stay with what’s familiar to them. Announcements Farkas Berkowitz & Company and Bentley Systems, Incorporated reported the conclusions reached during their recent Sixth Annual Harnessing Information Technology Workshop held in Washington, D.C. Participants in this invitation-only event included 60 chief information officers (CIOs) from the ENR Top 200 Design Firms, who gathered to discuss "Strategies to Improve Economic Productivity." During their roundtable discussions, the CIOs concluded that: -- Information technology (IT) is viewed as an enabler of increased sales and a driver for collaboration, productivity improvements, knowledge retention, recruitment, and other business functions. -- IT ranks among the top three investments of design engineering firms and has a place at the corporate strategic table. -- IT rollout rates in firms are currently limited by knowledge transfer rates. -- Training has become a key requirement for IT investment success and consequent productivity gains.
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