How Ellipse Structure increases the productivity of its design office?

Ellipse Structure is wood, concrete, and metal design office specializing in the structural design of tertiary, residential, industrial, public, or private buildings. They decided to equip their teams with Clovis. We are meeting Jean-Baptiste Brunet, Senior Manager at Ellipse Structure, who shares with us his experience.

What are the job and the main challenges of Ellipse Structure?

Ellipse Structure is a design office, we intervene in project management for the different phases of the preliminary project, then in the supervision of the worksite and management of the project execution. We operate throughout Europe.

Our job requires efficiency. We cannot waste time, we must use it wisely. In case of problems or changes, it is essential to be able to react and make decisions quickly. Coordinating between several trades is also a considerable challenge we face daily.

What were the issues you identified before choosing Clovis?

Before, we used to have a weekly site meeting with handwritten reports. Then, this report would have been transcribed in Word and sent by e-mail to all the concerned parties. All this would have been followed by asynchronous email exchanges resulting in a significant waste of time.

Often, a lot of time would pass between the site meeting and the decisions made after the reports were sent. Moreover, the asynchronous mode meant that certain points were only clarified at the next meeting when they could have been raised earlier.

Also, we were used to communicating through multiple channels, which was not very efficient.

How did you proceed to set Clovis up?

We have deployed Clovis in a few simple steps. First, we set up a document tree and access rights.

Once this was done, we communicated the tool to the companies. Then, the users started to use instant messaging in the application. And last but not least, we’ve got a hang of the Plan Box and assigned the first tasks.

All this took place in only a few weeks because the solution is simple and fun.

What is the typology of Clovis users at Ellipse Structure?

A number of us use Clovis, each in a different way depending on our jobs. I do the site supervision. Then we have guest users:

• Our clients who have a global view of the project and can monitor the progress in real-time.
• The architects use it to share plans and manage the different versions.
• The contractors can be general or specialized companies who use it to assign and manage tasks. They often use the mobile version when they are on site.

What results have you obtained so far by using Clovis?

Project managers are often perceived as being behind the scenes, interacting with the various trades. Thanks to the Clovis application, we can give our customers access to the worksite monitoring and thus ensure transparency and they feel reassured.

Workers use a lot of the application's photo and live annotation functionality. In addition, the fact that each task and subtask is dated allows for a real-time view of the various deadlines of the site.

Clovis also had an impact on our brand. Any company that uses digital tools is perceived as a modern company. Moreover, thanks to Clovis, we have dematerialized many files and documents.

The fact that we are dematerializing our processes brings us closer to the objective of being paper-free, which saves us time and money!