ProjectCentre founder joins Total Synergy

Australia-based construction project management software developer Total Synergy has recruited ProjectCentre founder Paul Hemmings to lead its product development.

North Sydney, Australia-based AEC project management software developer Total Synergy has recruited Paul Hemmings to lead its product development.

Hemmings founded ProjectCentre (acquired by Germany’s RIB in 2012, and rebranded as iTWOcx in 2013) in 1997, and stayed with RIB as a global director in its global R&D team for some years.  RIB’s iTWOcx combined RIB’s iTWO 5D enterprise platform and a new iteration of ProjectCentre to offer tools covering pre-contract and design through to construction cost control (ie: enterprise resource planning – ERP – capabilities) and progress reporting.

When I met Total Synergy founder and CEO Scott Osborne in November 2017, he described the transition of a one-time on-premise toolset into a SaaS-based platform offering practice management tools for architects and engineers. The then 27-strong business had accumulated some 10,000 users in Australasia, but was expanding internationally, establishing a London office, and planning a US office in 2018. The company says it has acquired new 95 customers in the past seven months.

Hemmings says:

“Total Synergy has been a leader in the practice management and project accounting space since 1999. The new cloud product — Synergy — launched last year to the global market, has the best potential I’ve seen for SME built environment design businesses to collaborate securely on projects with shared, multi-party access.

“The advantages of this kind of project collaboration software are that it’s affordable for small businesses, it’s not limited to the life of a project, and it is symbiotic with project accounting, essential for successful project delivery and business profitability.”

Synergy Enterprise

Hemmings is designing the final stages of the Synergy Enterprise product, the third and most feature-rich level of the Synergy cloud application. He continues:

“We’re currently engaged in developing advanced forecasting and resource planning and we’ve just released the document register and transmittals features. Our project portals module is now available where project teams can use in-app chats and document sharing, as well as being able to invite third parties — external consultants, contractors, JV partners, clients — to join the project conversation and shared documents.

“The future product roadmap is designed to enable SME [one to 500 staff] architecture, engineering and construction design related businesses to manage complete project delivery, increase effectiveness and efficiency, and to collaborate wherever and whenever they need to. It’s a big vision.”