Breaking new ground with low-code and a mobile strategy at Mercury Engineering

CHALLENGE: Manual processes meant low project visibility

Building and cabling the enterprise and hyperscale data centers, life sciences and technology centers, court houses, and hospitals that support our busy, modern lifestyles takes monumental skill and effort.

And in an industry that’s been traditionally slow to adopt information technology, Dublin, Ireland-based Mercury Engineering is breaking new ground and going mobile.

That’s no small task when you consider how complicated and customized processes are when creating new structures designed to last hundreds of years.

With a company-wide passion for creating innovation and change, Mercury Engineering’s digital steering committee meets quarterly to identify and prioritize opportunities to drive improvements using technology.

Finding a simple, effective way to improve the user experience across bespoke processes was high on the list.

Because they rely heavily on the SAP enterprise solutions, including materials management, payroll, finance, project management, and even distribution, the digital steering committee knew they needed a flexible strategy that would help them create easy-to-use apps for teams working on job-sites throughout the UK and Europe.

“Building sites aren’t necessarily IT-friendly, and our teams weren’t using the SAP solutions directly. Instead, they manually tracked the hours that crews worked on site and spent considerable time and effort on the phone, said Brendan Docherty, Team Lead at Mercury. “Given the size or our construction jobs, the process for tracking time and payments was fairly complex.”

Each site foreman typically oversees the work of 20-30 workers, many of whom are direct employees. Additionally Mercury subcontracts a number of companies to tackle specific pieces of work.

Image: construction site at Mercury Engineering

The fast-pace of construction projects meant they required real-time, immediate visibility on work progress. At any given time the company needed to track labor allocations and know if teams are delivering on the effort.

“We wanted to make it easy for our foremen to review, allocate, and change hours and feed data into SAP using their mobile phones,” said Brendan. “And we needed a solution that leveraged SAP more effectively for our productivity solutions and which was able to scale and change with us in the future.”

“After hearing about Neptune Software at conferences and an SAP User Conference, and comparing other vendors, it quickly became clear that Neptune was head and shoulders above any other solution for us.”

APPROACH:

Pilot customized projects across increasingly large job sites

After the decision was made in October of 2018, the Mercury Engineering team moved quickly, working loosely with Neptune Software and Client Solutions to create a staged approach for the initial project.

Four months later, the teams spent a week defining the requirements of the project. Mercury Engineering initially launched a small pilot project involving six site foremen and 60-70 crew members. In June they launched a larger pilot with two key constructions projects and a large crew – 40 foreman, with 20 crew members each.

The UX would be designed to be unique to each foreman, so they could work they way they prefer. And given the nature of their job sites, which often have limited wireless connectivity, being able to work online and offline would be key.

A number of users would also use the app to approve purchase orders or conduct payment searches. To keep work moving, the ability to do that mobile was also important.

“Training was simple, completed in just two hours, and was very seamless, said Brendan. “Our trainers showed us how the low-code application development platform worked, gave us access to test data to experiment with, and within a few short hours we were up and running, submitting real data.”

RESULTS:

Fast, easy, user-friendly apps with perfect results

Today, site foremen have a user friendly way to keep job site crews and progress under control, with no delay in data. And that means no more paper, no more back and forth on the phones.

Feedback has been very positive.

“Users quickly began working in the productivity apps and are really happy. The foremen find the apps easy to learn and use. The speed and connectivity are good, too. In fact, the results coming back are perfect,” said Brendan.

Now that the apps have launched, Mercury Engineering is looking to the future. They’re already adding more capabilities to the labor tracking tools and are preparing for additional key projects using Neptune Software to extend their SAP solutions.

“Working in Fiori can be tough. With Neptune, it was easy. We now have the flexibility to improve the design and user experience of our mobile apps that rely on SAP back-end solutions”, added Brendan. “Now that’ we’ve deployed this software in one area of the business, we’re confident we have the knowledge and skill to deploy to other key areas of SAP across the business.”