Online management of NEC contract processes features prominently on the agenda of next month’s document and knowledge management conference in London (which I am chairing – post), with SaaS vendors 4Projects and Sypro both listed as talking about contract administration. The event is timely too, insofar as it comes just weeks after NEC publisher Thomas Telford announced that full-on collaboration vendors 4Projects and BIW Technologies had been appointed NEC licensed content providers (post), but, as I’ve noted before, the field is very competitive, with vendors such as MPS and Sypro focused just on NEC compliance and management. In this field, the latest provider brought to my attention* is a Gloucestershire, UK-based SaaS vendor, CMToolkit.
Incorporated in 2005 and managed by directors Ben and Andy Walker, Client Managers Toolkit Ltd markets Contract Event Management And Reporting system (CEMAR), which its website describes as “a fully hosted web application for use with projects and service contracts under NEC3 ECC & TSC” (Engineering and Construction Contract, Term Service Contract). The website also provides a business case document (October 2010) that calculates the potential time and consumables savings arising on a major ECC project from using the CEMAR application. This suggests an estimated tangible saving of £97,538, but of course it doesn’t detail how much would be spent on CEMAR in order to achieve that saving. And the so-called “Savings Calculator” also doesn’t count the cost of the CEMAR system (the given example suggests a £118,000 gross saving).
The CMToolkit website lists and quotes comments from various customer organisations – including Halcrow, Volker Stevin and Belfast Community Housing Association – which have used CEMAR. Some of these organisations also feature in the three case studies.
Online, there is also a YouTube video which is presented by a blue and white robot (sadly, soundless and not animated). While MPS’s system will be familiar to anyone who likes using Excel spreadsheets, the CMToolkit menu interface is described as similar to Microsoft Outlook, with reminders treated like emails and colour-coded based on the amount of time left for resolution of the process concerned. Relevant drawings, photographs and other documents can be managed alongside NEC processes, and the reporting tools allow export to Excel and creation of PDF reports.
[* Thanks to Dr Glyn Jones for the link.]
