H&J Martin Leverages Logi Symphony to Combine Data Sources & Gain Complete View of Business

At a Glance

The Customer: H&J Martin Asset Management Services

The Challenge: Struggling to combine data from multiple analysis applications:

• Had to export data into Excel, which only occurred once a month

The Results: Met with departments to understand their analytic requirements:

• Able to see all data in one place, and have standardized reporting
• Can identify inefficiencies and take corrective action, as well as measure performance and productivity

About H&J Martin

Founded in 1840, H&J Martin is a construction company headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In April 2015, they joined the Lagan Construction Group of companies and now operate two main divisions. H&J Martin Asset Management Services delivers minor works, planned and reactive maintenance, and facilities management services. Construction & Fit Out provides construction services, interior fit out, and refurbishment to the leisure, office, and retail sectors throughout the UK and Ireland.

The Challenge

One of the biggest challenges for almost every organization is finding that single version of the truth. With separate applications for all of its core functions, from computer facilities management to document management and billing, the H&J Martin Asset Management Services division was struggling to combine all its data for analysis. To gain a complete view of the business, the division had to manually export data from each system and bring it together in an Excel spreadsheet. This was a time-consuming process that typically only occurred once a month, creating a lot of lag time for people to get a snapshot of their performance and the status of projects. Additionally, the division had a huge internal demand for custom dashboards that they weren’t able to meet using the multiple-application environment.

“We had all these systems and no way of bringing them all together into one arena for analysis,” said Jim Cray, Operations Director of Asset Management Services. “We needed a solution that was affordable and could connect to a wide variety of data sources.”

The Solution

After considering several solutions, including Qlik, H&J chose Logi Symphony to bring their data together in an efficient, user-friendly way. Mr. Cray explained, “Logi Symphony was our preferred option. It was affordable, it met our needs, and the training was fantastic. We started to develop and create reports very, very quickly.”

To address the demand for custom reports, H&J took time to truly understand its users’ needs. The team met with each department and determined their key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics needs, then created standardized reports and views. These dashboards are now available in real time via a web-based portal.

About 100 internal support staff uses the portal daily to access reports on progress and financials and compare KPIs against internal and external service-level agreements (SLAs). Since the portal is both permissions- and role-based, H&J has also opened up reporting to its external clients, providing them with transparency into the company’s performance. Next, they plan to make Logi Symphony the core reporting system for the 50 or 60 companies in their supply chain.

Among the data sources the Logi Symphony reporting portal pulls from is H&J’s mobile working platform, an app the company developed five years ago to meet the business needs of its 145 field engineers. Previously, these users had to physically go to the home office to pick up or drop off orders. Now using the app, they can log a variety of data, including start and finish times, credit card expenses, and client signatures. With the advent of Logi Symphony, management can bring in that data to analyze the engineers’ productivity.

Mr. Cray explained, “We can see all our data at the push of a button, whereas before we were having to take data from one source and another source and join it together – and we’d only do that maybe at the end of the month. So, all that reporting is now at our fingertips.”

Through standardized dashboards, H&J Martin can also measure its performance for contract KPIs, reactive response, planned/preventative maintenance, and more. “We can see how our engineers are performing, we can see how our supply chain is performing – who’s falling behind and why,” Mr. Cray added. “There are loads and loads of benefits and cost savings that we have gotten from the product.”

The Global Services Dashboard, for example, shows the productivity of the company’s internal engineers. The data, which Logi Symphony automatically imports from the mobile working platform, includes time spent on productivity, travel, training, holiday, sick, etc. Users can drill down by individual engineer or look at the percentage of overall productivity. H&J can then compare the engineers’ overall performance against its target (in this case, the national average of 65 percent productive).

“It’s a first-class product,” Mr. Cray said of the company’s experience using Logi Symphony. “It evolves and is under continuous change when there are different demands on us to do different things with it.

The Results

Thanks to Logi Symphony’s reporting capabilities, H&J Martin is now able to identify inefficiencies and take corrective action quickly. This both increases their productivity and avoids the costly financial penalties of missing SLAs.