WSP replaces spreadsheets with real-time Project Controls & Reporting

Founded in 1959, WSP is one of the world’s leading engineering professional services firms. WSP supports the Australian Department of Defence with Project Management / Contract Administration and Design services on construction projects of national significance.

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Problem

WSP was engaged as Project Manager and Contract Administrator (PMCA) of the RAAF Base Curtin Redevelopment project, acting for the Department of Defence.

The RAAF Base Curtin Redevelopment project is complex, and the PMCA services required WSP to actively maintain a risk register, reconcile project financial information and report status to Defence in support of Government financial year estimates. This included complex cash flow projections and monthly reviews. 

“Previously our Project Team would establish a system of spreadsheets and documents in many different formats and disparate templates. This would take weeks. It had a flow-on effect of creating a significant bottle neck of administration and uncertainty, simply to produce critical reporting information for Defence,” says Andrew Benn, WSP Technical Director.

The result was a complicated system of spreadsheets that required extra resources to manage. This slowed reporting timeframes, increased risks of potential data errors, & subsequently increased costs to the Commonwealth in most instances. 

“The disparity of information and limited transparency made it difficult to interrogate the information and provide timely responses to Defence”

Solution

Mastt’s turnkey, fit-for purpose solution solved these underlying problems. 

WSP was aware of Mastt through the adoption of the solution across Federal Government. The firm was looking for a simple, easy-to-use solution to reduce internal resourcing commitments, while boosting reporting services to Defence, ensuring the most timely and effective decisions could be made on this critical project. 

“Rather than waste weeks of time setting up dozens of silo-ed spreadsheets for tracking and reporting on risks, contracts, finances, cash flow and status, we were able to get started with Mastt after only 45 minutes and generate reports immediately for our client,” Andrew Benn said.

With Mastt, the automated roll-up and reporting of key information in project dashboards enabled Defence to make decisions across projects that was not previously possible in spreadsheets and documents.

Key Results in the first few weeks

• Time Savings - Mastt transformed financial, risk and reporting processes without the use of existing manual spreadsheets. The solution significantly reduced PMCA administration and enabled fast access to reports and data visualisations for CFI (Capital Facilities and Infrastructure). WSP can now enjoy automated production of reports for direct download and drag into Objective for Defence Record Management System (DRMS) requirements. 

• Project Controls Setup - 100% time savings / save 16+ hours one off. With Mastt, the set up of Project Controls in spreadsheets for managing finances, cash flow, risk and more is no longer required.

• Producing a Monthly Report - 57% time savings / save 8 to 16 hours per month. Mastt automatically prepares PDF and excel annexures, tables and data visualisations for insert to the monthly report, including actual/forecast spends, risk provision management, risk registers, variation registers and project cost plans.

• Real Time reporting - 30 days saving. Rather than wait until the end of the month for a report, WSP’s client can get a live financial, risk and reporting snapshot directly from Mastt's Dashboards.

• Project Risk Management - 50% time savings / save 2 hours per month. Mastt provides a significant increase in capability with respect to the management, tracking and reporting of risks in accordance with the Estate & Infrastructure Group (E&IG) Risk Management framework. Mastt is the only risk system globally that integrates with costs, automatically feeding financial risk provisions into cost planning and forecasting within Mastt’s cost module. Having this integration saves WSP time updating risk registers and presenting risk.

• ‍Project Budget and Cost/Capex Management - 50% time savings / save 8 hours per month. Mastt provides a solution for financial management and reporting including all aspects of budgeting, project contracts, claim management, forecasting, reimbursable contracts, cash flow and trend analysis. Enter data once and have it reflected across the system.
  

• Standardisation - Mastt is a standardised framework for CFI and PMCA project management that ensures a consensus of all relevant parties on a project. Mastt as a standardised solution helps in ensuring the interoperability and compatibility of resource movements and also project information. Vertically, PMCA, Project Officer, Team and Director data is handled electronically, in a standard format to align and make all direct reporting consistent. That way the firm can reduce the opportunity for different interpretations of the same information caused by non-standardised information.

• Transparancy - Mastt provides the capability for Capital Facilities and Infrastructure (CFI) and their appointed PMCA to operate in such a way that it is easy for each other to see information and actions. Previous disparity of information and limited transparency of spreadsheets made it difficult for CFI to interrogate information and provide timely responses to Directors and DG-CFI. Now, CFI has the ability to interrogate that information to find answers and build collective knowledge.
  

The importance of ease of use and fast set up

Finally, Mastt’s ease-of-use, fast set up, training resources, and intuitive interface have proven critical in WSP’s decision to embrace the platform:

“A key factor in our decision to adopt Mastt is its user-friendliness. Not everyone is IT savvy. In data centre construction, we simply can’t afford to introduce a tool that increases the complexity of our job. It had to continue to empower us to work SMART, allowing us to consistently deliver excellence across multiple sectors and geographic regions. Using technology that enables us to do this, and to delight our customers, will always be our priority. This is definitely the case with Mastt,”
_{Fergus Bruce, WSP Project Manager.}