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Stephen George and Partners, an architectural practice with offices in Leeds, Leicester, Nottingham and Solihull have become the latest organisation to adopt Workspace. The system will be rolled out to all the firms’ staff and will replace the company’s current intranet, timesheet and project management systems. Workspace, developed by specialist construction software authors, Union Square Software, is the leading practice management platform in the industry and is used by over 30,000 industry professionals daily.
Stephen George and Partners has always looked for ways to improve practice management procedures and access to information. Three years ago the company implemented a company intranet and PROJECTminder. However, it became clear that these systems were not sufficient to address their information management issues in their entirety. Partner Mick Barker comments, “Use of the company intranet is limited to a dumping ground for documents, there is no incentive for people to maintain or access the information. Whilst PROJECTminder is good in many aspects, it has limitations in that it doesn’t address document management, which we recognise could be managed more intelligently by linking documents to project records.” Contact records are stored in three different places and as a result duplication and out of date contact details are common. Email filing is inconsistent with people storing emails in personal folders in Outlook, public folders and in some cases printing emails off and filing them. Public folders for storing documents are disorganised and inconsistencies commonplace. Mick needed a system that could address all of these issues and centralise information access in the practice.
After reviewing several products Stephen George and Partners identified Workspace as the best all round product that could manage emails, documents and project details. Mick was also impressed by Workspace’s drawing management functionality and will be using the system to introduce a more intelligent and structured way of storing drawings. Mick hopes to deliver consistency across Stephen George and Partner’s four offices following the Workspace implementation, “Workspace will help people to operate in the same way by providing simple and efficient ways to complete tasks. This will be supported by having one place to go for any piece of information whether it is a document or someone’s contact details.” The order represents just one of a string of recent new clients for Union Square Software. Director Will Yandell comments, “Many companies are starting to see the light at the end of tunnel and an investment in Workspace is seen as a well timed business strategy. By getting organised now and by investing in tools that drive efficiency, organisations like Stephen George and Partners will be able to take on more work when it comes, without increasing overheads as they might traditionally have done. Organisations are recognising that they can’t carry on as they were before and need to do something different to give them a competitive edge.”
Mick is confident that they have made the right investment at the right time, “Workspace is the market leading product in this area and we are looking forward to getting started and delivering benefits to our employees. Workspace will enable us to operate more efficiently and become more streamlined as a business.”
About Union Square Software
Based in Nottingham, UK, Union Square Software (unionsquaresoftware.com) is the author of Workspace. Workspace has been developed to provide organisations from across the construction supply chain with real competitive advantage through the pragmatic introduction of portal technology which enables effective Knowledge Management. Workspace provides a range of solutions for project centric organisations including: corporate database, enquiry management, document control and project collaboration.
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craig.coe[.]unionsquaresoftware.com 
