Cost-cutting is often an inevitable consequences of economic crises. However, according to Graham Murphy (pictured above), director at Semco, investing in technology is not something that should fall by the wayside when margins are tight.

Despite business having dropped by approximately half due to the current economic crisis, Murphy is convinced that Semco's investment in technologies such as their business management system, Systime, is helping the company to survive today's tough economic climate.  

Systime is a global services provider that delivers solutions in enterprise resource planning, e-procurement, process collaboration, business intelligence, business integration, infrastructure management, human resources and wireless (WAP) technology.

"It allows a dealership like ours to keep a finger on the pulse of all the different facets of our business so that you know precisely what's going on in different areas - parts, service, sales, field service," Murphy said. "It's a complete business management system. It's a software system that we run our business on so that at the end of the month we can press a button and we know precisely what our results are for the month. In any business you have to know where you are before you can work out where you're going."

Semco also has a GPS satellite tracking system on all service trucks, allowing the company to know where the trucks are at any given time. The tracking system also allows Semco to more accurately monitor the mileage of trucks, avoiding potential disputes with customers.

"We don't want to choke the goose but we have to make sure that we recover our costs and that we can substantiate the accounts and bills that we send out," Murphy said.

While admitting that machinery and technology can never replace good quality customer service, Murphy concedes that technology can help the construction industry to save money by more quickly and efficiently performing the work that people once did. "We are going through a technological revolution now. In the old days, a typical contracting company might have had 15 staff and three machines and most of those people were on picks and shovels. Well nowadays, you have 15 machines and three staff ... Even a little machine can do the work of 10 people," he said.

Aconex is another example of how technology can save both time and money for construction companies. It is an online project management, document management and web collaboration system for the construction, engineering and facilities management industries. It uses the internet to store and manage all of the information on projects that rely on several people coming together over various time frames, to meet a set deadline within a set cost.

It allows architects, contractors and other construction workers to pull up drawings, approve requests or request information any time, anywhere. "For instance," says Will Turbet, Aconex marketing manager, "if they want to find a document, instead of searching through files or having to request it from someone on the project team, they just log into the system and can do a Google-style keyword search for architectural drawings from this organisation or between these two dates and it gets pulled up straight away."

Aconex also keeps an audit trail of every transaction and update made on a project. This allows all people involved in a project to be kept up-to-date on developments and if something is overdue, it is flagged in the system, allowing bottlenecks to be identified and resolved as quickly as possible.

Turbet says that the company is seeing the uptake of Aconex roughly double each year as people get more comfortable with the idea that online collaboration systems are an efficient and cost-effective way of managing information.

"The volume of information being generated, and managing it efficiently is such a critical part of project success and keeping projects on track. Only relying on emails and hardcopies is not efficient and it just doesn't work and it costs companies money and wastes time as well," he said. "When margins are tight it can just give you that little bit of cost-saving, speed up the flow of information and get people more productive because they have faster access to and exchange of information." - by Danielle Bowling