Barratt Homes

Industry: Construction

Location: Hampshire

Departments: Operations & Compliance

Documents: Drawings, Compliance, Warranty & Safety Documents

Industry Expectations

Many construction organisations are having to make radical changes to the way they store, access, and retrieve documentation relating to any project undertaken. Appropriate records should be compiled and maintained throughout the duration of construction projects. This creates a contemporaneous history of what happened at what point during the Project that can be referred to if necessary.

For example, under the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS), contractors must keep a record of the gross amount of each payment invoiced by subcontractors, excluding VAT and any deductions made from subcontractor payments. These details must be kept for at least 3 years after the end of the tax year they relate to. It is important that the standard of records kept is high, or they may not provide the expected information when they are actually required. In particular, records should be dated (including incoming records) and where appropriate, signed, and a Document Management System should be in place to allow efficient storage and retrieval. See more regarding the legislation and legal responsibilities: https://www.hse.gov.uk/leadership/legislation.htm

Barratt Homes contacted Plan2Scan to better understand how they could go about converting business critical documents from development projects into digital images. The real goal of this project was the need for Barratt Homes to have faster access and securely share important documents from the project such as Certifications from contractors, Warranty Documents & Plot Drawings as well as Financial Invoices from contractors.

Before Barratt Homes engaged with Plan2Scan they reviewed their current processes. Documents from each development, once completed, were boxed, and sent to storage to be archived, which was leading to high storage and retrieval costs when documents had to be recalled due to warranty challenges or audit purposes. Members of staff would then be assigned to locating the relevant documentation in these boxes once retrieved, which could often be a time consuming activity.

Project Implementation

Once Plan2Scan had an initial consultation with Barratt Homes to understand the exact requirements of the project, we collected a number of projects and immediately put the Preparation Team to work going through each box, separating documents into document types such as, Finance, Certifications, Drawings Warranty, and Correspondence. Once the documents had been identified by the correct document type, they were scanned in high DPI and had OCR applied (optical character recognition). This allowed for Barratt Homes to open each document type and search by any of the contents written on each document such as an Invoice Number, Contractor Name or Certification. The digital documents were then uploaded onto Barratts internal Document Management System ensuring a fast, secure, and cost-effective way of accessing business critical documents moving forward.

Barratt Homes have recognised internal processes need to change to improve operational effectiveness as well as GDPR and data compliance, with a project in mind that would lead the way to digital transformation within the construction industry.

"We only had a small volume of documents to scan but were not made to feel like a small customer. The documents needed to be scanned in a secure location and consisted of A4 to A2 plans that needed scanning in high quality to ensure all details were captured. We were very happy with the service and quality of the digital files that were retuned and would us Plan2Scan again."

"Plan2Scan introduced us to OCR technology software that actually reads the documents as they are being scanned, this meant we could scan the drawings in batches, simply open the PDF and do a search on the drawing number we were after."

"We wanted to move our DocuWare and Scanning support to a provider that could bring our document management to the next level. Plan2Scan helped to utilise tools within DocuWare which has helped to speed up the scanning process. This efficiency gain has been passed back to us and now not only has the turnaround of documents appearing in the system been improved but our monthly invoices have also decreased."

"We were re-designing our office and needed to scan some secure documents that we no longer had space for. Plan2Scan were more than happy to talk us through the scanning journey and provided reassurances that the work would be completed professionally and to a high standard. We were not disappointed; the digital files were returned with a higher quality than we had imagined and well presented. We now run monthly collections with Plan2Scan and are very happy with the service."

"We needed to scan a range of business documents that we had to keep for an extended period for GDPR purposes. We contacted Plan2Scan who took us through the scanning process and helped provide some guidance around how to scan the documents without it being expensive (unlikely we would access these documents in the future) while still ensuring the scan quality was high and we could access and locate files easily should we need to. Files were collected, scanned and returned to us exactly as promised we would recommend Plan2Scan and use them again."

Barratt Homes

Industry Expectations

Project Implementation

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