How Seymour Civil Engineering tracks the drivers of delays across its portfolio of projects

The drivers of delays

Seymour Civil Engineering leads a range of civil engineering and infrastructure projects across the North East and Yorkshire regions of the United Kingdom.

Working with Aphex, the Seymour team are solving one of the most difficult challenges in managing multiple large projects: understanding the drivers of delays. 

To learn more about how they’re tackling this problem, we chatted with Alan Robson, Senior Planning Engineer, and Morgan Ellis, Digital Change Manager, both at Seymour Civil Engineering.

Collaboration, visibility, and control

The Seymour team are determined to improve the management of programmes and the identification of change — and used Aphex to support these ambitions.

Aphex firstly made it easier for project teams to collaborate and update programmes regularly. Aphex has also provided increasingly accurate data about delivering to that programme. 

As Morgan explains, Aphex allows and actively encourages delivery teams to work together to build their lookahead plans. Aphex also allowed management to get an accurate view of multiple projects at once. 

Aphex has delivered the visibility and control that we need to transform our operations and improve the outcomes of our projects.
_{Alan Robson, Senior Planning Engineer}

A robust system for tracking delays

The team at Seymour Civil Engineering worked with Aphex to transition their teams to Aphex, starting with a trial of five schemes across their portfolio.

After training and kick-off sessions, the team imported their master schedule into Aphex, which acted as base for their Short-Range Plan (SRP). This meant that the SRP’s Task ID’s and folder structure aligned with the contract programme. 

From this base, the project team were able to break work down into more specific sub-tasks. When this was done, the project team were then able to establish a routine of reporting and revising the plan according to their weekly publication routine. 

This publishing routine allows the team to ‘promise’ the plan for the following week. If any tasks are delayed from this promised schedule, the engineer who owns the task must select a reason for the delay, and to provide extra narrative to provide additional information. The team is aiming to roll out the use of Aphex’s Field App to make it even easier to capture delays as and when they occur. 

This routine has meant that Seymour has a much more robust system for tracking and documenting delays. Increased quality of data and increased transparency has provided a solid foundation for accurate, informed decision making. 

Consistency across the business

Seymour didn’t just want to solve this problem for a single project. They wanted all projects to be in one connected space, giving them visibility and oversight across all the project’s different plans and routines to drive consistency across the business.

To solve this problem, they used Aphex’s Multi-Project Reporting PowerBI Template. This pulled data from all projects using Aphex and provided the team with a single view for updates on projects across the business.

Data visualisations included a rolling PPC and an 8-Week delay breakdown across all their projects on Aphex in one dashboard.

Aphex integrated with the Power BI dashboard has greatly improved our oversight of milestones and PPC, while the Aphex app makes it easier to track delay reasons in real time.
_{Morgan Ellis, Digital Change Manager}

A one-stop shop for understanding delays

The combined impact of Aphex and PowerBI has been transformative. Alan and Morgan have helped transition the company to increase access to real-time, accurate data — all within three months.

As Alan says, the planning, delivery and management teams are now all on the same page. “With the PowerBI dashboard and Aphex, we have a one-stop shop for understanding delays on-site across multiple projects. 

We also have the ability to see how different delays are impacting the delivery team and we can see the most common type of delay on each project. This makes it much easier for us to address the root cause of delays and seek continual improvement.
_{Alan Robson, Senior Planning Engineer}