Customer Success Story
Aspire Defence Ltd.

Deltek Cobra® Proves its Worth on Project Allenby/Connaught

Project Allenby/Connaught, a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to be undertaken by the Ministry of Defence, will take 35 years to complete and is expected to cost £8 billion. Its purpose is to improve the quality of life for 18,500 soldiers at garrisons across Aldershot and the Salisbury Plain. The project is being implemented by Aspire Defence Ltd, a consortium that incorporates the skills and experience of KBR and Carillion.

Paul Dempster, managing director of Aspire Defence Capital Works and his team are charged with delivering the £1.3 billion of construction works. "Our challenge was to select a value management software package with the ability to cope with vast amounts of data covering multi-sites over a 10 year construction programme. Deltek Cobra was appointed because it had the necessary flexibility to suit the business needs during the construction phase. The database that is now in operation is bespoke and has been tailored to suit the commercial reporting needs of our business," he says.

Aspire's selection of enterprise and management software is a key factor in the running of the business. Its choice for cost value management is Deltek Cobra. As a result, one of the project's commercial managers, David Stirling, is able to keep a tight rein on what has already been achieved, what is left to do and the remaining budget. The project management team has around 30 surveyors inputting information into the system on a daily basis.

Robust Demands

As, Stirling explains, the demands of the project meant only a well-established, robust system would be up to the job. "It isn't just the size of the project that creates the challenge, it's the fact that it is split over six separate locations. We needed something that everybody could link into and we needed consistency across the six sites," he says.

The Deltek Cobra cost and earned value management solution is a well-proven choice for large implementations, helping clients comply with rigorous standards across aerospace and defence industries and government sectors worldwide. It provides a single source of project cost information, helping managers identify problems in time to apply effective corrective action to minimise cost overruns.

"We had certain requirements that our previous system wasn't meeting so decided to consider what was on the market," continues Stirling. "Deltek Cobra's track record, its strength and scalability and the fact that it could be customized to our specific needs made it our first choice."

Aspire Defence knew that it would have to amend whatever system it selected to meet the projects unique demands, but identified that Deltek Cobra's open architecture gave the right flexibility. The system is also sturdy enough to support hundreds of concurrent users in a multi project environment.

"From my point of view, having six different locations doing six different things would have been a nightmare," says Stirling.

He describes how the team has now loaded the allowances for one thousand-plus buildings onto the system and then loaded budgets against this. This was then used for procurement and time phasing, knowing that when necessary they could pull out data on how much still needed to be done within given time frames.

"We can drill down to a considerable amount of detail because we have coded the whole job," he says.

"This enables us to plan our forward workload and we put the forecast costs in so that we know that on a particular building or a particular trade what our allowances are. In summary, it tells us what we have to do and the budget we have left to do it with.

It seems that Deltek Cobra is already proving its worth. "We already have hundreds of thousands of lines of data and millions of calculations," he continues, "and this figure will continue to grow. On a project this size, it's certainly the right tool for the job."

About Aspire Defence

Aspire Defence
Aspire Defence Limited is a joint venture between Carillion (50%), KBR (45%) and HSBC Infrastructure (5%). Aspire Defence Capital Works (construction) and Aspire Defence Services (FM) are both 50:50 joint ventures between Carillion and KBR. For more details, visit www.aspiredefence.co.uk

Carillion
Carillion is one of the UK's leading support services, construction and Public Private Partnership project companies.

It is a leader in Public Private Partnership projects, particularly in the Defence, Education and Health sectors in the UK and in the Health sector in Canada. For more details, please visit www.carillionplc.com

KBR
KBR is a leading global engineering, construction and services company supporting the energy, petrochemicals, government services and civil infrastructure sectors.

KBR provides programme and project management, contingency logistics, operations and maintenance, construction management, engineering and other services to military and civilian branches of governments and private clients worldwide. For more details, please visit www.kbr.com