Rocla builds on Office 2007

Concrete design and testing firm Rocla plans to roll out a new job management system based on components of Microsoft Office 2007 to keep up with increasing demand for its services.

The system has been in beta testing within the company's Rocla Technology research and development division since September. It enables users to keep on top of the 10s to hundreds of jobs that Rocla may be managing at any given time.

The Rocla Technology division expects to complete a full deployment across all of its operating branches throughout Australia early next year -- including Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.

The R&D arm is focused on servicing around a dozen internal business divisions as clients, with its brief including the development of product testing and certification plans for new Rocla products and processes. The division's mission involves tracking all of its simultaneous jobs and quickly producing reports based on the findings of critical product evaluation and testing.

The new system was built, according to the division's manager of laboratory services, Bede Harrington, because the previous solution had become increasingly onerous to use. The old version was built around Microsoft's Access, Outlook and SharePoint Portal Server products.

Speaking with ZDNet Australia recently, Harrington blamed the lack of formal processes for what had become an inefficient and ineffective project management process.

"We [the employees] became the bottleneck," he said. "The system we used was manual, wasn't integrated and wasn't transparent. There was a lot of communication to determine what [clients] actually wanted, and that might mean at the end of the whole thing they didn't get what they wanted."

To streamline the flow of information, Rocla worked with system integrator Praxa to develop a more collaborative, workflow-driven way of harnessing the information inside the Access database.

The new system, which combines Microsoft's SharePoint Portal 2007 with the electronic forms management tool InfoPath 2007, builds on the collaborative features of Office 2007 to offer a more efficient, integrated process.

Rocla's engineers have already benefited from the use of the new solution as they have been testing it. Consistent forms for job tracking, shared calendaring, smoother reporting and a shared work pile have enabled staff to catch up with the flood of work they were struggling to manage in the past.

"We're being much more disciplined with this system and there's less scope for confusion," Harrington said. "We're focusing on the scheduling stuff for now, but just from looking around we can see there will be more features and benefits for us from this system."

Vista on the backburner
Rocla has readily bought into the capabilities of Microsoft Office 2007 and -- with just one InfoPath form in use -- has only scratched the surface of the product's extensive feature set.

This means the company has plenty on its plate before it starts to worry about any adoption of Microsoft's other new major recent desktop software release -- Windows Vista. Harrington said the company will "presumably" move to Vista at some point in the future, but that there are no concrete plans; for now, the focus remains on making the most of its new collaboration platform.