Discover more about how Microsoft supports AEC firms
How the Microsoft platform empowers AEC firms to achieve better results
If you want to know which platform is best to drive innovation and growth...your team is most likely already using part of it every day.
Connected AEC Firms
Service businesses dedicated to growth know they need to be completely integrated so their people can deliver exceptional client experiences. When executives are empowered with meaningful, real-time data insights, not only does productivity and efficiency increase, but also it becomes possible to understand how the business operates and identify opportunities to develop new services and cross-sell.
This is particularly true of the Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. When different areas of an organisation are disconnected, executives managing different projects will not be able to utilise untapped skills and expertise elsewhere within the business, leading to a loss of billable hours. Even worse, a project manager might bring in additional (expensive) expertise, when it was already available and underutilised within the organisation.
These inefficiencies reduce margins on the work that teams are already delivering while also increasing the risk of missing out on new business opportunities. By contrast, connected teams can communicate opportunities arising at a client to another part of the organisation. This enables executives to look at capacity and skills across the company before putting together a proposal to secure new business and avoiding losing a valuable sales opportunity.
This awareness of skills, expertise, and capacity across an organisation makes connected companies much better at tendering for new projects. Connected organizations know the talent they can tap into and understand where the gaps lie. Additionally, clarity around financial planning and supply chain considerations empowers them to build a picture of what a project will truly cost the business to deliver. This not only allows connected AEC firms to put together competitive proposals, but also crucially prevents them from winning work at a price that ends up losing the business money.
The legacy barrier
The journey to becoming a connected AEC firm is filled with challenges and business-critical decisions. The first barrier many will come across is historical. Departments and different offices typically work in siloes. Each rely on their own tools that were billed as state of the art at the time but are now expensive to maintain legacy systems. Despite failing to deliver the insights needed for growth and innovation, these legacy systems continue to absorb resources.
In order to keep up with modern business challenges, AEC firms are encouraged to develop a comprehensive IT strategy that leverages a best of suite solution, rather than a best-of-breed approach. This approach allows a suite of software tools to be interconnected on a platform that is hosted remotely. Employees across the globe can coordinate projects through accessing the same systems which are hosted on a secure platform that is kept up to date for them remotely, saving internal resources and reducing the need for maintenance downtime.
Which platform is right?
The advantages of an interconnected, remotely-hosted platform are obvious, so the question soon becomes not whether to use a best of suite solution, but rather which one? The irony here is that many may have already picked the best offering for them, without even realising it.
Most professionals (over 340 million worldwide) use Microsoft Office 365 tools for productivity and hold meetings on Microsoft Teams every day. Microsoft tools are so frequently selected because they are familiar and user friendly and work well together, allowing employees to work more efficiently together by sharing data and insights in a secure environment.
For Hans Broer, Business Development Manager at HSO, this is always the best approach to picking a software suite. Choosing the best available solutions for your organisation should always be considered before deciding where to host them. This is certainly the case when companies opt to unlock the vast potential of Microsoft’s business tools, hosted on the Microsoft Platform.
Companies can pick and choose between many suppliers, but the best options will usually be the suite of tools Microsoft offers. It has project management tools, finance, HR, business development, sales and CRM, among others, that are designed to be integrated. So, that works really well for business because they deliver huge efficiencies and are very intuitive for end users.
The beauty of expanding the Microsoft platform within an organization is that the many different tools, from Dynamics 365 Marketing & Sales to Dynamics 365 Finance (and beyond) are designed to be integrated with one another. This enables companies to provide executives with secure, integrated access that allows for more data-driven insights to be unlocked across the organisation. Architecture, engineering, and construction firms are free to combine software from different providers with their Microsoft solutions but requires much more integration work slows down transformation programmes, adding complexity and extra cost. Investing in the Microsoft platform not only offers solutions that are always up-to-date, but also avoids the high upfront costs of constantly upgrading, patching, and integrating a tangled web of outdated legacy systems.
Industry-specific tools for AEC
The Microsoft platform offers companies a best in suite solution, allowing companies to pick and choose the best software solutions that fit their requirements. In addition to the wide variety of standard Microsoft business applications, firms in the AEC sector will likely benefit significantly from industry-specific tools such as Microsoft Project Operations and MS Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations allows executives to streamline project planning by defining resources, allocating roles and responsibilities, establishing dependencies, and agreeing on milestones. The tool empowers managers to gather real-time insight into skills and capacity to ensure workloads are balanced among staff who can communicate with one another through the software. Usefully, it also tracks projects and offers reporting tools so teams can be kept up to date with progress and determine if they are on-track or falling behind schedule.
Delivering growth with digital transformation
Investing in the Microsoft platform allows companies to differentiate themselves by supporting innovative new ways to offer new value-added services to customers. There are obvious efficiency and productivity gains to be had through equipping the organisation with tools that seamlessly work together, eliminating the need to hunt around disparate systems for the information need to get the job done.
The most significant differentiation offered by the Microsoft platform comes from empowering executives to expand relationships with clients, identifying new service needs and cross-selling opportunities.
When given access to the company’s finance system, for example, a team can discern which projects are more profitable than others, so they can find the company’s ‘sweet spot’ and win more contracts in those fields. Just as importantly, they can also discover which projects are 'bleeders‘ and mean a loss for the business. Access to time management and personnel systems will offer further insights into where there is capacity which can be turned into new services for clients and pitches for prospects.
Ticking the board’s check list
The good news for organisations adopting this interconnected approach to growth is that the Microsoft Platform not only allows them to focus on customer need as an interconnected business, but also it removes many maintenance issues. The platform is constantly updated to ensure they remain ever-green, always offering the very latest features and capabilities and is always made secure from cybercriminal attack tactics.
This commitment to keeping its software at the cutting edge of business tools is evidenced by Microsoft’s impressive record in AI development. This means its tools will always remain ahead of the game and therefore never run the risk of degenerating into the legacy systems companies leave behind when committing to the Microsoft platform.
AEC firms will need to check several boxes at board level to achieve true digital transformation, and Microsoft supports in every area. The decision is made easier by the fact that most companies almost certainly already using at least one element of the Microsoft platform, if not several. Since Microsoft tools are designed to integrate with one another, the platform approach becomes a truly sound investment, offering seamless access to data-driven insights.
For those looking for growth, ‘now’ is always the right time. Organizations can move forward with confidence, knowing that Microsoft solutions can be integrated and scaled up at speed, empowering business to embrace innovation rather than be held up by integration headaches and delays.
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