Since 1980, Canata & Seggie Chartered Architects has maintained its status as one of Scotland’s leading small architectural practices through their commitment to continually developing and improving the quality and range of their services, ensuring their staff is provided with exemplary training and resources, and fully harnessing IT advancements to the advantage of both their business and their clients. As a company, Canata & Seggie predominantly employs architects and architectural technologists — whose principal job is preparing working drawings for architectural projects — and trains all employees within the office. Offering a variety of architectural, CDM coordination, interior design, and project management services, they typically undertake a wide variety of projects for both the private and public sectors.

Part of Canata & Seggie’s embrace of new IT advancements means keeping a keen eye on their own business processes, and recognizing when certain practices need an update. When it came to tracking time and expenses spent on projects, they quickly realized their process of setting up Excel spreadsheets and manually tracking projects by hand was becoming too cumbersome and limiting for their thriving business. Not only was this manual system costly in terms of time and potential errors, they also weren’t able to generate the variety of individual reports they wanted.

After evaluating a few other products, Canata & Seggie were drawn to Replicon’s user-friendly interface, ability to generate various different reports, and easy, intuitive project and time tracking processes. Below, Chartered Architect & Founding Partner John Seggie goes into more detail on some of the reasons they chose Replicon over the rest:

Significant amount of time saved by automating administrative processes

“The amount of time I’ve saved using Replicon is colossal,” says John, “I can generate reports on the number of billable and unbillable hours spent on each project very, very quickly — and the same goes for expenses. On average I’d say I save about a day a week on what was formerly very cumbersome administrative work.”

Consolidated, reliable data

“At the end of each financial year I generate reports for each member of staff that show over the course of the year the unbillable hours they’ve worked, the billable hours they’ve worked, the number of sick hours they’ve taken, and so on,” says John. “With all this data in one place, I can easily calculate each employee’s utilization rate in terms of billable hours, and know that the information I’m using is correct.”

Quick and easy transition to new processes

“Introducing any new software in an office will inevitably generate some amount of initial resistance to do something differently,” says John, “But very quickly I was able to demonstrate to my staff how much more efficient and user-friendly Replicon was compared to the way we’d been working previously, and it didn’t take long for all to understand that this was very much a change for the better.”

Access to historical information for informed estimates

“If a potential client requests a fee estimate for seeing their project work stages through to completion, we use Replicon’s historical records to find a similar project we’ve done in the past, and gain relevant information on the number of resources used to complete that project and a breakdown of expenses,” says John. “We use this historical information to provide as accurate a fee estimate as possible, and then if the project goes forward, we monitor everything in Replicon in real-time to ensure that we’re working within the estimate we provided.”

Overall

“We consider Replicon an excellent value for many of us here at Canata & Seggie,” says John. “Not only has Replicon freed up my time to work on other things, it’s allowed us much greater insight into the type of work that tends to be more profitable for us, and the type of work that we typically find difficult to make a profit on.”