PlanChest - Five key features
PlanChest - Encourages users to maintain corporate knowledge
PlanChest - Is not a project host
PlanChest - What it can do for you
Ask yourself these questions:
Do your staff maintain their own contacts lists in MS Outlook?
Do they check that they're up-to-date?
Do you keep, and regularly print, a record of every company and contact working on your projects?
Can you provide a list of every person who received a specific revision of a drawing and when?
Do you know the current telephone number of everyone you invited to last year's Client Party?
Do you hold 'database information' as Excel spreadsheets?
Answer "YES, BUT NOT VERY WELL"? - PlanChest can help you work more effectively.
PlanChest - Is 'open' - you own the data
PlanChest is built around one fundamental concept - You own the data, we provide the tools to use it.
Unlike many equally sophisticated document management systems, PlanChest does not 'hide' your data in cryptic code. PlanChest uses easily-understood naming conventions which allow the expert user to see and manipulate the data using normal MS Access tools.
You may interrogate the data using your own programs or, better still, use our PlanChest 2 Outlook and PlanChest 2 Word software to read the data in your other Microsoft Office applications.
PlanChest - Works with your current MS Office software
PlanChest does not require you to change any of your current working practices - You still write letters with Word, do calculations with Excel, and send e-mails with Outlook.
PlanChest allows these applications to work with your corporate knowledge base - Use PlanChest 2 Word to insert names and addresses in letters - Use PlanChest 2 Outlook to ensure that all staff have access to the latest contact information.
PlanChest provides the additional core functions that most construction companies lack - a central database of all the companies and contacts with whom you work integrated with a sophisticated document management system for controlling the flow of drawings and other contract documents to and from those companies.
All PlanChest's printed reports may be e-mailed, in a variety of formats, direct from the screen - No need to export a file and attach it to a separate e-mail.
PlanChest - Encourages users to maintain corporate knowledge
Maintaining contact information is tedious and time-consuming. Allowing staff to maintain their own contact information costs time and money and updates are rarely, if ever, communicated company-wide.
PlanChest's close integration between contact management and document management ensures that project-based staff have a clear incentive to ensure that the central information is up-to-date.
PlanChest - Is not a project host
Project Hosting is not a substitute for an in-house corporate knowledge base.
Web-based 'project hosting' is now a fact-of-life for many construction companies but project hosting is just that - it is project-based, and generally suitable only for the larger projects.
PlanChest puts you in control of your data - your contacts, your drawings, your schedules.
PlanChest provides all the document management you need for projects too small to justify project hosting.
PlanChest already incorporates sophisticated automated import/export routines to minimise duplicate data-entry when project hosts are used, and we are constantly striving to improve these functions.