Rennes, France-based Script & Go is looking to establish itself in the UK with a new focus on the house-building sector, capitalising upon its strong experience in this sector in France.
Based in Rennes in north-west France, Script & Go, previously best known in the UK for its Site Diary application (Script&Go’s Site Diary revamped – May 2019), has developed a new product for the UK construction market. It is looking to capitalise upon its customer experience with French housebuilders. Its latest offer is a Software-as-a-Service defects management platform to manage the reporting and rectification of issues during the initial handover to new residents in the post-construction warranty period.
Site Diary product owner Khaldon Evans told Extranet Evolution that Script & Go had been developing new products to support its largely France-based customers. They include contracting giants Vinci and Bouygues, automotive manufacturer Renault, aerospace manufacturer Dassault, rail operator SNCF and infrastructure provider Suez. Its solutions support a wide range of assets, from conventional buildings and infrastructure to aircraft and railway assets.
Since its UK launch in 2017, UK customers for Site Diary have included contractors Costain, Alun Griffiths and ISG, but Evans said Site Diary had struggled to expand more widely. Similar to Checkd’s ‘excuses’ experience in Scandinavia (post), he said “Expansion has been slow for two reasons: either the managers don’t want to pay for the app, or managers want to pay but field workers don’t want to use it. We have never lost any deals yet due to any competitors – at least, prospects didn’t tell us that.”
The company has recently taken strategic decisions to drop the UK Site Diary corporate branding, instead use its Script & Go name, and focus on its core French strengths.
Script & Go housing focus
One profitable market has been products for French home-builders. Evans said that in some parts of northern France its platform is being used by 80% of home-builders. The French business initially grew through collaboration with a local house-builder. Adoption of its technologies then gradually extended to other house-builders in the region. As in the UK, few French house-builders operate nationally, instead specialising in particular house types that suit their local regions. Script & Go developed a platform to manage the final stages of construction, where house-builders need to capture and remedy defects with their subcontractors
Home warranty management
The 60-strong company recently (May 2021) launched a new Site Warranty product for the UK (see also this blog post), and is looking to get some early traction in the UK and then build out its market. Using its application on a mobile device, users capture defects. They can combine text entry, photographs, associated markups, documents and drawings, plus links – where necessary – to any related defects, and location information on building floorplans. These are then notified to the relevant subcontractor for rectification while providing residents with process visibility. The platform also provides reporting functions to house-builders helping them manage progress and identify persistent quality issues across their supplier base.
Script & Go is also migrating its technologies to an integrated platform to help support more deployment options – key to the roll-out of its warranty product. Currently, Evans said, its ‘back-office’ platform (offering unlimited storage and use across an enterprise) is available for a one-off perpetual licence fee of £490. Individual field users are then enabled for a one-off fee of £300. In September 2021, the company will launch a subscription-based system priced at £20 per month per user. The Site Warranty application is to be offered at a standard £30 per residence to cover the period of a typical two-year warranty period.
