Pilotkunde ABW Route 66

“Route 66 has enabled us to get to the forefront of technology,”

says Halcrow Group’s Senior System Manager in an interview on their successful pilot on Agresso Business World Route 66

Halcrow Group is a global infrastructure planning, design and management company that has been a UNIT4 customer for over 10 years. The company was a pilot on Agresso Business World Route 66, a journey that started in September 2010 and took off in December when Halcrow went live on Route 66. The company is currently operating on most product areas of Agresso Business World although they are primarily using PCB and Financials. Halcrow is a large scale user of Agresso with approximately 6.000 users.

We recently met with Steve Goulder, senior systems manager at Halcrow, to find out more about the pilot project and its key success factors.

A flawless upgrade

Halcrow has been live on Agresso Business World Route 66 for some months now. How would you describe your experience with the new release so far?

“The upgrade from Agresso Business World 5.5.2 to Route 66 was practically flawless, a very good experience for us at Halcrow. We were working against a very tight timeline and budget but managed to upgrade within these limitations,” Steve explains. “The size of our organisation has led to performance bottlenecks and issues in the past, but with Route 66 this is not an issue anymore. The difference in performance is huge. Some systems processing that used to take up to four minutes before will take about 10 seconds now.”

According to Steve the pilot project in itself was a bit of a bumpy ride precisely because of the time and budget restrictions. “Pushing the pilot project through was a battle. But the team at UNIT4 R&D did a great job and pulled things through for us,” Steve says.

Timesheet processing not a concern any more

What enhancements on the Route 66 release have impressed you most?

Steve says that in spite of a significant performance improvement most of Halcrow’s users did not really recognize a difference with using the new release. But from a super user perspective Steve says that the ability to move up to the most recent version of the reporting engine was particularly beneficial. “Web services is another area that will provide us with additional functionality and will be very valuable for our organization. But for Halcrow the major benefits of the upgrade to ABW Route 66 have mainly been performance related,” Steve says.

You’re biggest concerns before upgrading to Agresso Business World Route 66 was the timesheet processing with more than 6.000 employees filling out their time-sheets. How has that turned out with Route 66?

“In general terms half of our employees are in the UK and they all have to do their timesheets on Friday afternoons. The system was slow before the upgrade so it took them a long time to do their timesheets which could obviously cause frustration. There was a problem of an exponential time lapse when lots of people were using the system. We had to be very sure when we upgraded to Route 66 that this was not going to be a problem. So, we did two stress tests: one was done by the UNIT4 team in Harrogate and another by an external company, CSS Corp that did timesheet testing “in the cloud”. In the end we followed R&D’s recommendation that we should have virtual machines running on 5 or 6 web servers. This turned out to be vital for us and now, even with 600 concurrent users, there is no exponential time lapse, partly due to performance improvements in Route 66, partly due to tuning which has been done to our database and also due to the change in web server loading as recommended by R&D.”

The silence tells the success story

What is the initial reaction you’ve received from Halcrow staff to Route 66?

“I think the users silence really tells the success story. Users typically don’t notice it when things run faster and are easier to use. They’ll react when things don’t work. However, the people that work with billing have noticed a big change with Route 66 because for them, the system has become very responsive. And from my point of view one of the benefits is that people can now print their timesheets directly from the web as opposed to before when they had to wait for it to be processed. Such things are very positive,” Steve explains.

What does the fact that all functionality for operational management of projects is now available via Self-service mean for Halcrow, a project intensive organisation?

“At the moment we don’t use Self service except for timesheet and expenses. We have plans of moving more functionality to the web and to roll that out will be a big project. That will be a big benefit for us in the long-run.”

Can you sum up in one sentence what the new Route 66 release is to you?

“Halcrow decided to upgrade to Agresso Business World Route 66 for several good reasons, amongst those the ability to reap the opportunities that X2 will bring down the line. Route 66 is a state of the art product and as a consequence of the upgrade, we have improved our business and IT processes and we are now at the forefront of technology. Route 66 brings us on to a platform from which we can embrace the new designs and concepts that will be introduced with X2. We are very excited about that and we are ready to exploit the new opportunities X2 will bring.

Lastly, I would like to say that it was a great pleasure to work with the Norwegian team at R&D. Moving ahead as a pilot on the new Agresso release came with some perks and we got in some small additional functionality we wouldn’t have got otherwise, but which will make a huge difference for us as an organisation down the line.”