More time to grow — how HBL Associates use Synergy to stay nimble

“HBL Associates has been going for nearly 30 years, expanding organically over that time to employ twenty-two staff,” Liam Massey, one of their directors, says.

“Our clients range from private individuals and small businesses up to FTSE 100 companies. It’s quite a broad spectrum we work on.”

As a growing consulting engineering business, the question for HBL became how to keep progressing without losing flexibility with staff and client growth.

Benefits

Track business and project management progress in real time

When three of HBL’s staff became directors at the same time, “that kickstarted the look at Total Synergy [link: https://totalsynergy.com/engineers-project-management-software ]”, says Liam, “as we wanted to find better ways to run the practice and project management, which, until then, involved a lot of spreadsheets in various locations.

“Spreadsheets mean there’s a large possibility of error and a lot of time went into keeping these spreadsheets up to date. With the manual input there was always the possibility that certain stages in the construction process might have invoicing delayed, for example.

“The problem is that spreadsheets don’t scale with the business,” he says.

“We were just waiting for the right solution, essentially. We recognised that software like Synergy would give a certain amount of time back,” Massey says.

“You can track business and projects a lot more easily with Synergy. Even though we’ve got very different sizes of contracts, we can now keep a track of them all in a single, central location.

“The old spreadsheet system was quite limited in what it produced because it relied on us adding to them as we went along. Whereas the joy of working with software like Synergy is that you’ve gone out into the architectural, engineering, and construction design AEC industry and asked what we need. You’ve incorporated that into Synergy and it feels like it is designed for our specific needs. We’re getting information that we now see we need, but we might not have realised previously. It’s certainly a massive value added in being able to look at the business as a whole.”

Get back admin time to spend on built environment design

HBL Associates is a consultancy with a passion for engineering at its heart. Juggling spreadsheets and labouring over data input was costing engineering time.

“When you get a tricky engineering scenario, you sit down and think about how it has to be constructed and then at the end of the project you take a step back and you look at your creation,” he says.

“If you look at the amount of time saved with Synergy, I’d say it’s probably ten percent, overall, per engineer. If you just add up the number of hours that you stage a project… I mean, every single engineer’s finding Synergy a lot easier to work with.”

If we take Liam’s advice and look at his estimation of time saved using industry-specific business and project management software (ten percent of time for every engineer), we can start to get a feel for the amount of time HBL Associate’s has been able to win back.

11 (engineers) x 40 (hours per week) = 440 engineering hours per week à 10% of 440 is 44 (hours per week saved)… That’s a staff cost to the business of more than 1 engineer. Full time. Working on administration.

We’ve certainly simplified this in order to demonstrate the point, but whichever way you look at it, those saved hours can be immediately redeployed on billable project delivery work.

A good business and project management software solution can give you that time back to spend on the work that you actually love.

Solutions

Scalability for growth

Liam Massey has always been clear that HBL’s management software needed to be scalable, both in terms of the size of the business itself and the scope of their projects.

“We’ve taken Synergy on board at this stage to improve our structure around tracking and billing project delivery work,” he says.

“The next step is to grow with the software and tap into all the additional functionality around document management and project collaboration”.

HBL is a prime example of how a scalable, cloud project and business management software, used well, can help a growing AEC business become more effective and efficient. That efficiency gives the business more time to be responsive to growth, and the team more time to work on what they’re passionate about – engineering.