Conject enhances commercial management solution, enable dynamic financial forecasts for projects.
Anglo-German SaaS construction collaboration technology provider – now positioning itself as an infrastructure lifecycle management (ILM) group – Conject has launched new financial management capabilities in its applications for commercial teams and asset owners.
Director Nick Sansome says:
Customers who use the existing cost management and EVM [Earned Value Management] capabilities in the Conject platform improve the visibility and control over their expenditure and improve the financial outcome of projects. The new enhancements provide the capability to forecast not only costs, but critically the work performed over time, and compare these to budget expectations.
As BIW, Conject invested in developing a strong project cost control module, and this has helped differentiate the business from rival collaboration vendors (it began marketing its EVM capabilities more recently in late 2013). However, there have been recent signals from AEC SaaS competitors such as 4Projects (post) that they plan to add financial capabilities to their applications (US vendor e-Builder also offers EVM – February 2014 post).
Nonetheless, Conject believes it is currently unique amongst collaboration software vendors in providing customers with financial management capabilities integrated into its Common Data Environment platform (March 2015 post), enabling in-depth financial reporting and EVM across projects and programmes (cost is often described as the fifth dimension, 5D, of building information modelling). The platform supplements back office ERP [Enterprise resource planning] systems by providing day-to-day supply chain cost control and EVM features that ERP does not provide.
Its new capabilities dynamically forecast the “Earned Value” of the work completed until the end of a project. This is valuable to asset owners and commercial teams – they can now control project costs, and calculate detailed budget comparisons at various points throughout the project.
The new functionality is the headline item in Conject’s July 2015 release. Other capabilities include extending integration with MS Outlook accounts on mobile devices. Team members who do not have system logins can now send and receive files (documents, drawings and models) and process transactions from their email inboxes.
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[…] First, Anglo/German SaaS infrastructure lifecycle management provider Conject was for a long time able to differentiate itself from competitors by offering project cost control functionality developed out of a close working relationship with UK-based Bovis LendLease during the early 2000s. Only yesterday, the Woking-based business announced the release of new commercial management capabilities strengthening its EVM capabilities. […]
[…] including claims and payments, contract administration, earned value management (EVM – post), budgeting, cost performance, and forecasting. The cloud-based cost control solution was acquired […]