The license to construct

To expand Al-Futtaim Technologies’ offering for the construction sector, the company recently partnered with WennSoft – a Microsoft partner that develops and services business solutions for the heavy construction industry.

The advantage of WennSoft solutions is that since it is a Microsoft product, customers find its user interface and features familiar and easy to use.

“We have received tremendous interest from the construction sector in the UAE and are currently in discussions with a few of them. We certainly believe companies in the region will have to embrace technological advancement to meet the growing challenges faced by the industry,” says Raghavan.

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With the giant scale and complexity of mega projects, and the involvement of a large number of people and organisations, there is a greater need for effective communication and collaboration within the sector.

“Some of the mega projects we’re servicing, like Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, Dubai Metro and the Lagoons, involve thousands of people, from hundreds of organisations that are based across several countries. The volume of information they generate and need to share is staggering. Organisations working on Yas Island, for example, store about 100,000 documents a month on our system – can you imagine trying to manage that using paper documents?” asks Jasper.

“The longer duration of mega projects also means that there is inevitably a continuous turnover of people, and so there need to be effective mechanisms in place to support continuity of information. It can really put the brakes on things if key people leave a project and take their information with them. Our system prevents this happening by ensuring all files are stored in a central place where they can be accessed by the organisation that created them.

“We invest a great deal in improving overall robustness, scalability and performance of our system so that it can cope with the demands of these projects. We’re also developing configurable features like more advanced access rights to information that reflect the multiple layers of management in large organisations.

“Just as important as the technology is the customer service and support you provide around your product. A key strategy of ours has been to establish a network of support offices around the world so that, no matter where project participants are located, we’re able to train and support them.

 “With mounting costs and shortage of resources, costs on a project need to be controlled. UAE-based EZware Technologies are among the leaders in ERP (enterprise resource planning) software in the region.

“The company recently added on additional options to its software such as budgeting and cost control to its software for the construction industry – EZ Business Solutions.

“With old contracts and new prices, contractors have to walk a tight-rope to manage and stick to budgets. The system now allows them to create a budget, ability to track all the resources, which allows them to make controlled decisions at the start of a project instead of the end,” says Shabbir Zirapury of EZware Technologies.

“Our system can be integrated laterally or vertically into a project. We are very strong in the functionalities of the business. According to our client feedback, our competition is Oracle or SAP,  and even those softwares don’t have all the modules that we do. Our software is extremely strong especially in the construction sector,” he says.