Winner

Optimising resources at L&T

L&T's E&C Division implemented a document, time and project engineering management system in March 2005 to automate engineering scheduling, documentation archival and monitoring of various engineering activities

L&T’s E&C Division in Mumbai is an engineering service department, and its profit and loss depends on the man-hours put in for various projects. It tackles about 1,500 dynamic documents every six months. Earlier, activities such as monitoring and control of engineering deliverables and output were monitored through Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access or FoxPro database.

But the division felt the need to develop packages that would make engineering measurable and less re-work prone, streamline documentation and project correspondence, schedule monitoring, and highlight delays at the right time. The Document, Time and Project Engineering Management System (DTP Manager) was the company’s attempt to create an umbrella package to address all these needs.

To fulfil the above requirements, the company conceptualised, designed and developed a browser-based integrated package, which in turn is integrated with an in-house developed Engineering & Construction Division Correspondence System (EnCorr) based on Lotus Notes and IBM’s Document Archival server, Domino.doc. This package is a versatile tool to keep a tab on the productivity of employees, appropriate approvals, and project completion status. It also complements other project scheduling tools such as Microsoft Project and Primavera.

Pricing the problem

Explains Avinash Sankholkar Head IT and R&D, E&C Division (Mumbai), Larsen & Toubro Limited, “Being an Engineering & Construction Company, it is mandatory for us to keep track of manpower productivity and the status of action of various projects being handled by our employees. Previously, a lot of time and effort was wasted in collating the engineering man-hour utilisation statement information, which was also prone to error due to manual intervention. This resulted in employee dependency for information, and loss of project information due to delay in updating input documents. It also continued to increase the conflict between the employees and the administration due to delay in collating month-end records.”

As a result, the division wanted to automate the engineering schedule control and approval cycle, monitor various engineering activities, and document revision control and transmission to the client or project management consultant or licensor and vendor (along with final engineering deliverables or documentation archival).

To search for the best-fit product, the division analysed a lot of external packages costing between Rs 16 lakh and 18 lakh, which were not a feasible investment for a services department. Moreover, the available packages had standard modules which could not be customised and required high hardware investment with high licence fees. Explains Sankholkar, “Due to budget constraints as well as the domain specific functionality needs, we decided to optimise the existing IT resources at L&T to meet our requirements. We developed in-house software DTP Manager with an investment of Rs 8 lakh based on the Microsoft Dot Net platform. This software was developed keeping in mind the hardware requirement, customisation, vendor support, licence fee and total cost.” They also tried reducing cost by using the ASP language and freeware.

Jury views

Good attempt to bring in transparency in the area of project management as well as MIS reporting of employee productivity, project progress etc. Integration with their internal system “EnCorr” created using standard tools such as Lotus Notes and Domino.doc. Good ROI (estimated)–savings of Rs.10 crore in the first year itself, on an investment of Rs. 8 lakhs. Tips The organisation could have gone for standard enterprise tools available in the market (e.g. Whizible by Compulink Software) and customised it to suit their needs. This would have given it the following advantages : The deployment time could have been shortened. Various dashboards would have been available as a standard feature, for MIS reporting at individual, project, SBU as well as at the organisational level. These tools also support the CMMI process framework. — Jury member: Satish Naralkar, MD & CEO, NSE.IT

Modules of the DTP Manager system

Administrator Module Project/Proposal Creation Engineering Plan module Document Master List Time sheet Logger Document transmittal note (DTN) integration with “EnCorr” System Squad Check (Inter-departmental Clearance) Design modification note Quality control and ratings E-mail Alert Engine integrated with Lotus Notes Document Management integrated with Domino.doc

KRAs and performance indicators
Key result areas	Performance Indicators
Monitoring ISO department procedures	The system captures the on-going as well as completed Project or Proposal list with details such as client name, consultant name, project description, project manager name etc. There's no need to maintain separate registers for this. The employee list and details such as joining date, confirmation date, contact details, skill sufficiency data are captured by the system. No separate list needs to be maintained.
CMMI certification	This is a building block with the provision to develop on it.
Monitoring detailed engineering man hours	Daily time logging on assigned project or proposal Assigned activity and document-wise time booking Extra work is captured in term of man hours utilised No extra effort is required to take out the accounts man-hour debit report.
Improved communication and information flow	Reduction in cycle time of various activities of detail engineering. HOD can communicate through the system to project and proposal manager as well as discipline heads, lead engineers regarding pre-defined objectives, goals, vision, assumptions and constraints. Time is saved in retrieving documents and drawings.
Increase efficiency of people and processes	Adherence to this system saves documentation and reporting time. Following the workflow results in error free detail engineering. Monitoring through the system helps avoid cost overruns.

Implementation in a nutshell
Company	Larsen & Toubro’s E&C Division
Solution	Document, Time and Project Engineering Management System (DTP Manager)
Implementation started	March 2005
Implementation completed	October 2005
Aim of the implementation	To automate engineering man-hour / schedule control, approval cycle; monitoring of various engineering activities; document revision control and transmission to client / project management consultant / licensor and vendor along with final engineering deliverables / documentation archival
Challenges faced	Budget restriction Utilisation of existing resources Customisation of package based on the E&C division's requirement
Major benefits	Maintaining entire documentation for a specific project Control on integrity of outgoing documents Single authentication reporting platform for head of the department, discipline heads and project manager

About L&T

L&T Ltd is a technology-driven engineering and construction organisation, and one of the largest companies in the Indian private sector. It has additional interests in manufacturing, services and information technology. L&T has an international presence, with offices scattered across the world. A thrust on international business over the last few years has seen overseas earnings growing to 18 percent of the total. With factories and offices located around the country, L&T’s image and equity extends to virtually every district. Founded in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1938 by two Danish engineers, Henning Holck-Larsen and Soren Kristian Toubro—both of whom were committed to developing India’s engineering talent and enabling it to meet the demands of industry and commencing with the import of machinery from Europe, L&T rapidly took on engineering and construction assignments of increasing sophistication. Today, the company sets engineering benchmarks in terms of scale and complexity.

Performance of DTP Manager

Previously, individual project teams were saving their documents on their PC or network attached storage (NAS), thereby making retrieval of documents a painstaking task. Further, uploading documents on the Domino.doc system manually was time-consuming and tedious. DTP Manager has an in-built capability of storing documents to NAS to pre-defined folders as well as the Domino.doc system at the generation point, thus eliminating the need for any extra effort for categorising the storage and retrieval of documents.

Moreover, the new system facilitates the capturing of time spent by users on various activities. It automates the process of creating various documents such as engineering plan, document master list, updation of ISO Muster, project creation and delegation. It also keeps a check on documents being released, and automates the whole documentation process with in-built quality checks, approvals and audits.

Reveals Sankholkar, “Expenditure on document control, training, printing and other administrative costs has been reduced considerably. This has resulted in saving time for reporting, monitoring and doing away with cumbersome documentation for tracking manpower. In the first year itself our company has made savings of Rs 2.64 crore.”

He adds, “At the end of six months of research and effort, we finally achieved collaboration across the project involving all disciplines and task force members by the use of generic technology, and have also drastically reduced the time taken to train engineers.”

In the next three years this application will be rolled out at all engineering centres located in Mumbai, Delhi, Vadodara and Abu Dhabi. It will eventually cover more than 1,000 engineers working at various centres. They are also planning to integrate this package with e-Connect and Data Publishing (a package that has been developed in-house). Phase Two will involve merging all the stand-alone packages on the same platform, for example, Oracle or ASP.net, and integrating the same with IBM Lotus Notes. The ultimate vision is to make DTP Manager a single window gateway for all information, collaboration and correspondence-related requirements for a specific project.