How SOHO ATLAS IN FINE improves data management and sharing with Clovis?

SOHO ATLAS IN FINE is a multidisciplinary architectural agency of more than 110 collaborators located in Lyon and Paris. With 13 areas of expertise and numerous general services (construction, computer graphics, modeling and interior design), it is one of the 30 largest architectural firms in France. Interview with Claude Brugiere, Associate Architect, referent of the Health division and IS manager at SOHO ATLAS IN FINE.

What is your job, what are the main challenges for SOHO ATLAS IN FINE?

We are a multidisciplinary architectural firm. Our agency is organized by divisions, in total we have thirteen, of which the most important are the housing, tertiary, health and logistics divisions.

I implemented Clovis for the real estate master plan for the Northern Hospital Complex of the Hospices Civils de Lyon. The master plan is a document that summarizes the overall real estate strategy and must program all the real estate investments and projects for the Croix-Rousse Hospital site in Lyon over ten years. This involves a lot of people - general management of the Hospices Civils de Lyon, site management, department heads, staff and patient representatives, etc.

For this project, in addition to the architectural aspect, we created a multidisciplinary team of about 20 people around our Health Division. We partnered with A2MO, a project management assistance firm, for technical support and programming, with GOVHE, a consulting firm specializing in Lean Management in the health sector, and URBALAB for the environmental aspect. The Croix-Rousse Hospital being a historical site, an architectural conservator is also part of the team, in this case it’s Cécile REMOND agency.

For this project, the main challenge was to qualify, organize and share documents, and ensure that the team members always have the latest information in real time.

What were the difficulties you identified before choosing Clovis?

Given the scope of our project, we needed to streamline the transfer of information to be able to coordinate projects and teams as efficiently as possible. If we were to file all these documents in a database, I would have needed someone who would spend their time on managing the multiple information channels.

It would be very complicated to recruit a specific profile for this kind of work. Clovis presented itself as an ideal solution and took the place of an intelligent information exchange platform.

How did you proceed to deploy Clovis?

We deployed Clovis very quickly. The configuration was done in three steps:

1. First, we set up a document tree: the document classification system, archiving and version management.
2. Then, we classified the existing documents while respecting the defined tree structure.
3. And finally, we set up filters so that we can distribute information and documents based on the role of each participant, so that everyone can access the data that is relevant to them.

Thanks to the instant notification of new documents, each team member has access to the information in real time.

We started using Clovis as our Electronic Document Management system very quickly and today we upload all our documents to the application! Everything was extremely simple, and the teams adopted the solution naturally.

What convinced you that Clovis was the right choice?

First, it was the simplicity of the platform and the ease of sharing documents. Thanks to Clovis, our teams are able to get the latest information very quickly.

Secondly, we really appreciate the possibility to store different types of documents on a single platform: whether it's graphical, written, administrative documents, plans or tables. The extremely fast display of the files, whatever they may be, allows us to use them as a support for our meetings.

What also made the difference was the responsiveness of the Clovis teams. The teams are available and attentive to any problem we might have.

What is the typology of users within SOHO ATLAS IN FINE?

The profiles of our users are diverse: architects, heritage architects, engineers (design office), quality engineers...

Given the security rules that we have to apply, we have provided a shared access to the teams of the Hospices Civils de Lyon.

What results have you achieved with Clovis?

Thanks to Clovis, everyone can focus on their skills and do their job without worrying about the distribution of information between each team member. The application is reliable, and the stress of knowing if the person has actually received the document has disappeared.

By using Clovis, we feel really secure. Moreover, we can see the modifications made to the documents in real time, there is a real ease of information sharing and that is a real time saver.