Today I discovered Johannesburg, South Africa-based Contract Communicator, a technology company providing web-based solutions aimed at managing contract issues involving any of five forms of the FIDIC contract or the NEC3 Engineering and Construction contract.
Founded by technologist Leon Cilliers and lawyer Mark Ilbury in 2008, the company‘s core product (see PDF too) is a Software-as-a-Service, SaaS-based change management system focused on identifying, managing and communicating the causes and effects of events causing delay or additional expense on construction and engineering projects. Its features include a Site Diary, Risk Register, Claims Manager, Requirements Manager, Document Manager, and a reporting toolset.
From my largely UK-based AEC collaboration technology perspective, this field, particularly in relation to the NEC, was once the preserve of contract change management specialist MPS (once part of Needleman’s which is today part of Mott MacDonald – see post) and of [my former employer] BIW Technologies – which integrated contract administration into its SaaS project control platform some five or six years ago. In recent times, though, other well-known UK-based construction collaboration vendors (eg: Asite) have also expanded their system functionality to include contract change management.
It is unclear what level of sophistication in document management is offered by Contract Communicator. One of the advantages of BIW’s system, for example, was that contract administration could be seamlessly integrated with the whole project design, delivery and handover process, alongside some powerful drawing and document control, mark-up and commenting tools. This has strong appeal to clients/owners/operators (and/or their representatives) who want a full archive of all project-related communications. But I am sure there will be contractors or project managers who are mainly contract-focused for whom a solution like Contract Communicator could be ideal.
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Have you seen http://www.controlledprojects.com/ ? You might find their services interesting.
Thanks for your coverage of Contract Communicator Paul. Our solution is primarily concerned with the collaborative administration of NEC compensation events. I think NEC is a great contract and really does encourage collaboration and transparency, but the administration of compensation events is onerous. We set out to develop a solution to take the complexity out of adminstrating compensation events and uphold the collaborative ideals envisaged by the NEC.
The result is a systematic approach to compensation event administration, allowing clients to instill a minimum level of competency amongst its project managers and to allow on-demand insight into the realtime status of all compensation events on projects.
[…] information (other businesses focused on contract change management have also emerged; a year ago I blogged about Contract Communicator, for […]