Kykloud wins major English schools survey project

Mobile Software-as-a-Service asset management application vendor Kykloud has secured one of the largest asset data collection projects in the UK.

The firm’s solution is to be used by teams of surveyors who, over the next three years, will be reviewing the condition of around 80,000 buildings in 22,000 state-funded schools across England as part of the Education Funding Agency’s (EFA) Condition Data Collection (CDC) Programme. The detailed data will be used by the EFA to target condition funding for schools during the next three to five years.

This project follows the 2011 James Review of Education Capital which recommended independent condition surveys on a rolling 20% sample of the school estate, repeating this to develop a full picture of the estate’s condition in five years and thereafter. The Property Data Survey Programme (PDSP) surveyed the building condition of the school estate in England from 2012-2014, resulting in an investment of more than £17bn in the education estate in England.

The CDC Programme is planned to start in the late autumn 2016, and will help the DfE and EFA to better target funding where it is needed in the future.

Kykloud CEO Edwin Bartlett said:

“This is one of the most innovative and largest projects of its kind in the UK.

Kykloud’s condition assessment and asset management technology will give the EFA the knowledge, tools and accurate data they require to make informed decisions about maintenance and capital spend for years to come. Kykloud is already used across a number of large scale projects both in the commercial and public sector but the sheer scale of this project and the impact it will have on determining future spend across the state-funded education estate makes this something we are certainly proud to be part of.”

Kykloud growth

Launched in January 2012, Kykloud was founded by Bartlett and former 4Projects (now part of Viewpoint) CTO Nick Graham. Since then the North Shields-based team has expanded to around 25 people, Bartlett told me earlier this month, with the business expecting to generate £5m in revenues in 2017-2018.

Initially, the company’s customers were predominantly (90%) surveyors and engineers (in 2013, the firm launched the first RICS-approved mobile survey templates) but the customer base has now diversified to the extent that these now make up just 30%. “Owner/operators are our biggest sector,” said Bartlett. “Kykloud customers include universities, local authorities and retailers, and we are also winning a growing volume of work from investors and funders of PFI-type and corporate real estate projects.” A property management inspection for Network Rail is just one of Kykloud’s recent projects.

The core Kykloud software suite comprises three main components:  mobile building surveying data collection, web-based asset management data storage, and desktop reporting. Bartlett said recent software development, driven by user feedback, had largely focused on the user interface, with improved tools for data validation and quality control. “A retailer customer, for example, has customised Kykloud to meet its asset needs, helping them verify expenditure on repair and maintenance to priority items such as lifts or HVAC equipment, and linking the surveys to data from their price books so that they can quickly assess replacement costs.”

Interestingly, given Nick Graham’s 4Projects background, a document management component now also forms part of the Kykloud application suite.

The EFA project, however, is a major coup for Kykloud, says Bartlett. “We were up against some serious international competition, and we were eventually chosen to replace Tribal’s K2 asset management system.” In a global real estate market worth US$10 trillion per annum and which spends 1% – c US$100 billion – on asset repair and maintenance, he thinks Kykloud, which opened an Australian office in 2014 and plans to operate in the US later this year, is beginning to make some serious waves in the asset management software market.