Project based manufacture doesn’t get much bigger than shipbuilding. Sea Master Consulting & Engineering SL installed Sescoi’s MyWorkPLAN job management software to help it control the cost and delivery lead times of its naval engineering and design contracts. Located in El Puerto de Santa Maria in Southern Spain, the company was formed in 2007 by a group of engineering professionals with extensive experience in the shipbuilding sector, to provide pre-contract designs, technical proposals, evaluations, risk analyses and assistance with stability, dock and sea trials as well as providing expertise in solar power generation plant designs.

<< Keeping track of cost, planning and workload was both a chore and unreliable. These tasks have now been automated producing accurate figures and saving hours of work >>
Luis Labella, Director at Seamaster

Luis Labella, Director at Sea Master says, “We have a large number of varied projects running simultaneously so, before we installed MyWorkPLAN, it was difficult to keep track of progress and identify the resources required by each of them. Our aim is to establish ourselves as a market leader in the shipbuilding and solar power generation sectors, so we needed the right management systems to improve efficiency.”

Sea Master evaluated MyWorkPLAN, on-line and through a series of web based demonstrations, so face-to-face meetings were not necessary. Engineers from the company then installed and implemented the software themselves, purchasing it following a successful subscription period. Luis explains, “It was a supremely easy implementation. The software is very intuitive with standard reports which cover nearly all our needs. The learning curve for users is virtually zero.” Naturally, Sescoi has project managers dedicated to managing MyWorkPLAN implementation. However, the ease with which Sea Master’s engineers installed the software themselves shows how simple it can be to integrate and implement.

Sea Master prides itself in the high levels of expertise which it can offer to its customers, so the manual methods it was using to control its projects were a serious drain on valuable human resources.

Luis says, “Keeping track of cost, planning and workload was both a chore and unreliable. These tasks have now been automated producing accurate figures and saving hours of work. We are also achieving major improvements in the reporting of our key performance indicators, resulting in significant cost savings and more efficient project management.”

MyWorkPLAN integrates with many existing office based software systems, such as Microsoft Excel®, as well as with popular accounting packages, enabling it to utilize existing knowledge and data which has been built up by users, and then share it around the organisation. Its ability to automatically collect real-time information greatly reduces administrative effort and increases the accuracy of the data collected. CAD models imported into the system can be analyzed and viewed in a tree structure arrangement so that, when combined with historic information, engineers can prepare highly accurate quotations. Furthermore, the planning module enables a company to monitor the workload on each of its resources, helping it to predict realistic delivery times. Luis adds, “In addition to providing technical excellence, we need to meet deadlines and provide our customers with exceptional service in order to achieve our aim of becoming a market leader. With MyWorkPLAN we have a precise assessment of our workload, enabling us to provide very accurate tenders. It has produced a huge improvement in our customer service levels.”