Smoothe Communication for Customised Projects
How IT’LEC uses PlanRadar to improve the quality of its projects through better communication within the teams.
IT’LEC is an electricity company based in Savoie (France), dealing with projects both locally and in the Rhône-Alpes region. For 20 years, IT’LEC has grown to 20 employees and has specialised in electricity and home automation for luxury cottages. This sector is very demanding in terms of quality and flexibility: each project is unique. The apartments range from 200 m² to more than 2000 m² and aesthetics take precedence over technology. The demands, which are always different, require the delivery of a tailor-made service. This high–level of requirement is reflected in IT’LEC’s slogan “Close to you”. Perfect communication within the teams is necessary to achieve impeccable quality. This is precisely one of the reasons why IT’LEC chose PlanRadar.
The challenge: to satisfy demanding customers who expect the highest quality of deliverables
Alexis Meyer is head of the design office at IT’LEC. He acts as the bridge between the architects, the project managers, and the field teams. Once the architects’ and project managers’ requests have been collected, he creates the plans by incorporating as much information as possible. His main objective is to transcribe the information he has as simply and clearly as possible and then forward it to the team on-site.
IT’LEC simultaneously manages a multitude of projects that can be located more than 70 km apart. This creates a challenge in terms of organisation to ensure follow-up and presence on the sites and creates complexity due to the many sources of information to be processed. Nevertheless, the main challenge lies in the quality of the finished project, which must meet the high standards of the clients in the luxury sector. It is therefore essential for Meyer to be able to clarify the demands of the architects and project managers on the plans so that the construction teams can work in the ideal conditions to achieve the expected standard of excellence. Before implementing PlanRadar, Meyer would email the plans to the teams on-site. They printed them out and made annotations on the paper plans. The problem was that this led to the coexistence of several different plans dealing with the same project and this led to errors because the information was not centralised.
The solution: centralising information on a single platform
With a background in construction, Meyer had already identified communication between project stakeholders as a potential source of error. Meyer first tried to solve this problem with the tools he already had (Excel…) but wasn’t finding anything that would suit all his needs. That’s when he discovered PlanRadar.
During the month-long free trial of PlanRadar, Meyer realised that the solution not only addressed all his issues but could also provide him with new opportunities. For IT’LEC, the main advantage of PlanRadar is the ability to centralise all site information such as plans, data sheets and key documents and synchronize them to one place. As PlanRadar is accessible on smartphones and browsers, all teams can access the information at any time and from any place. IT’LEC particularly appreciates the “tasks” tool, which allows tasks to be located directly on the digitized plan in the application and assigned to a user. Another advantage of the platform is the ability to automatically update plans without losing the tasks already saved.
In addition, IT’LEC finds an essential quality of PlanRadar is to provide access to constantly updated information! In a sector as demanding as luxury, demands can change overnight. Responsiveness is therefore always necessary. PlanRadar, with its data synchronization for all project participants, allows teams to have access to the same information despite the distance between them. Today, IT’LEC uses 50 plans for 30 projects in progress with PlanRadar.
The result: smoother communication and better deliverable quality
The quality of communication between the teams has improved. The centralisation of information and direct access for everyone to the same, up-to-date information increases the fluidity of projects and allows IT’LEC to better meet their clients’ requirements. For example, when a job involves pulling an electrical cable for lighting fixtures, field crews can access all the necessary information directly on the plan via the PlanRadar task function: location of the cable, type of cable, technical data sheets for the fixtures that the cable will supply, etc. As Meyer says, “The objective of adopting PlanRadar is also to simplify the work for the people on the site. Today they are asked to know everything, all the time, it’s very complicated! With PlanRadar, people on–site can access the necessary information at any time with precision!” Another feature discovered while using PlanRadar is the editing of reports directly from the application. With just a few clicks, Meyer can create progress reports for the customers directly from the job site. This gives them a clear view of the projects’ progress.
“Such accurate reporting to the client directly from the construction site paints a good picture.” Alexis Meyer adds: “I sent these reports to one of my clients and he said he had never seen this before and thought it was great! He could see the entire project in advance, every switch location….” Thanks to the application, Mr. Meyer spends less time editing reports. He can quickly create a report with a part containing the plan annotated with numbers and a second part with the descriptive legend of these numbers. This gives the customer a clear and precise view of the progress of the work. The future goal is to propagate the use of PlanRadar on 100% of IT’LEC’s projects, and to push the use of BIM models to its customers to gain even more clarity and visibility on the project.
