Colas
A very successful start to delivering on a great vision
Colas Ltd is a UK-based service provider to the highways and airfield sectors. The services they provide include civil engineering, maintenance and construction, which are carried out throughout the UK. Colas Ltd is a subsidiary of the international Colas Group.
Colas' Vision
Colas purchased the Triaster Process Library solution to fulfil their vision of replacing their existing Integrated Business Management System (IBMS) with one that would:
- Improve employees attitudes towards business management systems and processes
- Increase and expand the use of their IBMS
- Maximise stakeholder collaboration and employee engagement
- Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of each process (business activity) through process redesign and removal of waste
- Apply risk management control
So, a project which the Triaster Process Library is the ideal IBMS to deliver upon, but also an ambitious one.
As it became clear that Colas needed some specialist support to get the first project underway, after speaking with Triaster, it was the decided to go with their recommended supplier of Triaster Process Library professional services, Process Envision. Eric Brangier, Managing Director of Ensign said, “We decided to use Process Envision as they have over 20 years of expertise in the Triaster platform. Using an external consultancy gave another point of view and was a great way to ensure we didn't continue to work in a certain way, just because that is the way we have always done it.”
He went on to say, “Although we have the skills to map in-house, adding extra resource on demand proved invaluable to us, as it freed up our team members for other tasks.”
Atlas Dream Team
Working with Process Envision, Colas got started by establishing a core implementation team, which included the following roles:
- Senior Stakeholder
- Owner
- Executive Sponsor
- Sponsor/Subject Matter Expert
- Implementation Manager
- Change and Lean Manager/Facilitator
- Deputy Implementation Managers/Expert Mappers/Tool Admins
The team drew up a Project Charter, which documented their Vision (as above) and Mission, which recognised that the implementation of the Triaster Process Library would require cultural change as well as system change.
To help with this cultural change, the team started to establish a clear identity for their new IBMS by naming it Atlas - a very apt name given their work with roads and highways and that Atlas would be showing users the right way (to do their work).
The First Bite of the Elephant
As with every large, complex project, the first task was to break the implementation of Atlas into manageable chunks. It was decided to start with the following projects:
- Pilot: Portsmouth PFI
- Early Adopter: Area 9
The Pilot: Portsmouth PFI
Portsmouth PFI is an established 25 year project, which looks after Portsmouth's highways and footpaths, curb-to-curb. This involves the delivery of a wide range of services from road maintenance, to gully cleaning, to bin emptying.
A pilot team was established and Process Envision worked with the team to both develop Atlas' identity and structure and to capture and map all the processes delivered by Portsmouth PFI.
The Early Adopter: Area 9
Area 9 was a new Colas project in Birmingham, awarded by National Highways. Colas needed to be able to share their process documentation with National Highways as part of the contract.
Process Envision again worked with a Colas team (the Early Adopter team) to run facilitation workshops to capture the Area 9 processes Colas delivers, mapping and publishing these to Atlas within a very short time frame.
Having Process Envision on the project meant a very efficient capture and creation of the process documentation and that the effectiveness and efficiency of each process was examined and improved at the same time. It has also enabled process notes to be incorporated into the activity steps within each process map, so that the notes are available to the end user at the click of a button, instead of having to be looked for separately.
As these projects have gone live, Atlas (which is hosted online) is accessible to everyone working on these two projects on a self service basis. This means everyone delivering Portsmouth PFI and Area 9 services can always find out what they should be doing at the click of a few buttons. Processes now not only have ownership against activity steps, but all of the documents and forms that are needed at each step of the process.
The Benefits
With Atlas in place as their IBMS, both Portsmouth PFI and Area 9 are experiencing the benefits of an easily accessible and navigable Process Library containing all their process and supporting information in one place. These can be summarised as follows:
- One source of truth: consistent process and supporting information available to both everyone working on the projects and their customers
- All project workers are trained quickly and easily, including temporary ones
- All project information can be accessed at any time on a self-service basis by authorised users
- Best practice working is promoted as standard
- Atlas has an attractive identity which is encouraging employee use and process understanding
- A blue print process manual is in place which can be the start point for other projects
“Working with a platform like Triaster has given Colas the opportunity to start to standardise our processes. Firstly working with Portsmouth PFI, we could see how our local processes can link together in Atlas. Then, when the Area 9 project started, having Process Envision available to convert existing documentation and come in to facilitate workshops and publish them into Atlas so that all of Colas could view them, was a real step forward for us.”
Vankatesh Kode, Quality and Improvement Manager for Colas UK
Colas' Next Steps
Colas plan to identify the next project to adopt the Triaster Process Library/Atlas shortly and then to work step-by-step towards hosting the whole company's end-to end processes in Atlas - a great vision, most definitely worth achieving.
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Published January 2023