A building firm runs at two speeds at once. Head office and the design team carry on from one year to the next, while the sites themselves appear and vanish with the contracts you win. Out in a cabin somebody needs the drawing that is actually in force, back at the office a technician is turning a multi-gigabyte model, and the trades on site change with every package let. Pulling all of that into one IT arrangement, and then keeping it alive without ever driving anywhere, is what this solution does.
Five areas: three belong to head office and design, two to the site. Anything that has to be switched on out there is switched on by whoever is standing next to it, usually in a couple of minutes. The configuration behind it arrives over the network.
A document library, in SharePoint or whichever project platform you already pay for, laid out identically from job to job, holding every version and handing out rights per contract. Drawings stop riding around on memory sticks and on personal storage that somebody opened at midnight before a submission deadline.
Native files from Revit or ArchiCAD, and the IFC exports between them, weigh far more than a mobile connection can carry. So we stand up remote desktops, or a viewer that runs in a browser, and only the screen image travels while the original sits in one backed-up place. Those same machines swallow the slow work, a RE2020 thermal calculation rerun three times in a week being the classic case.
Each subcontractor gets a guest identity in Microsoft 365 that reaches exactly one job, sits behind a second factor and expires when the works are signed off. Which expiry mechanism applies varies with the subscription you run, so we pick one that genuinely works in your tenant. That retires the shared password written in marker pen on a sheet pinned above the kettle.
Buy the mobile router from your own operator and we will have written its configuration before it is unboxed. On arrival it wants power and, where reception is thin, an aerial bolted to the cabin roof. Everything after that, the encrypted tunnel, the filtering rules and the alerting on the line, we operate ourselves without leaving our desks.
Every tablet and laptop is registered for central management, with Intune as the usual choice when your Microsoft 365 plan covers it. Sign in with a work identity and the drawings, the mailbox and the qualified signature tool are simply there. Leave the tablet on a scaffold and it can be wiped before the shift ends.
Contracts last anything from a few months to several years, so the computing around one has to be erected and struck as briskly as the site accommodation itself.
Hours vanish into drawings opened straight down a thin connection. The file crawls onto the screen, and if the signal drops halfway through a save it can come back corrupted. Working on a remote desktop, or in a browser viewer, sends nothing but pixels: the original never moves from the central library, where it keeps its revision number and its author.
Its configuration is written and loaded in advance, which leaves power to plug in and, sometimes, an aerial to bolt on. Your site manager or the electrician already working there handles that from a single printed page. Tunnel, filtering and alerting all come to life afterwards without anyone travelling. On-site visits are not part of our catalogue, and you are not abandoned either: an engineer sits on a video call throughout.
Your bid is yours to write; the machines used to submit it are ours to prepare. That means a qualified signature certificate installed and rehearsed well before the closing hour, a browser that cooperates with the buyer portal, bid documents filed in the job library, and invoicing through Chorus Pro once the award arrives. Material reused between one European procurement document and the next lives in a single current place.
Not always. Where heavy rendering happens twice or three times in a month, hiring capacity online while everybody keeps an ordinary laptop often works out cheaper over three years. Both routes get costed against what your team really does, and the numbers land on your desk before any purchase order is raised.
Keep one library in which the current revision is what opens by default, and older ones have to be fetched deliberately out of history. Half the battle is habit rather than software, so the naming convention and the procedure for publishing a new revision get written down together with your team and kept somewhere everybody looks.
It expires on the date you set, through automation or through the periodic access review, whichever your subscription supports. Should snags surface later, reopening takes a couple of minutes. Logins and document openings feed an audit trail whose depth again follows your licensing. So when the client asks which firm read which drawing, the answer comes out of a report instead of somebody's memory.
Probably not. Example: a structural contractor of twelve people, two live jobs and a single drawing station fits inside the Start plan, which begins at EUR 690/month excl. VAT for up to ten users. Anything outside a plan is billed at EUR 95/hour excl. VAT, so it is quite reasonable to start by tidying documents and decide about the rest later.
How many contracts are live at once, which design software your team works in, and how a drawing reaches a cabin today. From that we sketch an arrangement for head office and for the sites.
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