• lets project managers actively supervise the financial outcome of complex projects
• connects key change control processes directly to the project’s financial reporting systems
• gives immediate visibility of issues that may have a financial impact – in time to take action.

Financial control is the process of planning, estimating, coordinating, controlling and reporting of all financial aspects of a complex project. As the customer and every member of the supply chain will want to be kept fully informed of the impact of any changes, this has traditionally resulted in every organisation maintaining versions of the cost plan covering their own inputs to the overall project.

BIW: Financial Control is the logical alternative. It provides:

• one repository of financial data – a single, up-to-date version of the truth
• confidential, secure areas – only accessible by individual firms
• change management – backed by a full audit trail
• integration with back-office systems – such as Excel and COINS

BIW: Financial Control is fully integrated with the BIW: Collaboration platform and, in particular, BIW: Contract Administration. It meets the change management needs of team members working to particular standard forms of contract (eg: NEC 3rd Edition) or bespoke forms, helping team members to assess and confirm changes and to authorise and commit relevant expenditure.

• faster change management – early capture and rapid analysis of the time, cost, operational and performance impacts of potential changes
• greater clarity – change proposals clearly identified so that authorised team members can review the right information at the right time
• clear audit trail of all changes to project cost plan
• increased productivity – faster production of company- or work package-specific sub-sets of data
• single repository of financial data – every team member works to same cost plan structure and data, with bank-level security guaranteeing company confidentiality
• improved corporate compliance

The starting point of BIW: Financial Control is the initial cost plan (ICP). This is based on the off-line plan used to apportion values to the various elements (work packages) of the project, with each element being broken down into groups of line items to form a work breakdown structure against which payments can be made. The ICP can be entered into the BIW system manually or imported from an Excel spreadsheet, and forms a baseline for monitoring costs during procurement and construction.

Features

• role-based security – configurable to allow confidential views of cost plan specific to each supply chain member
• full audit trail – all user transactions are time- and date-stamped, retaining a full record of who changed what and when
• historical snapshot – users can review the status of the project at any point in time from initial entry to date
• two-way integration between processes and costs – access drawings, documents, forms, etc associated with a cost item; all process items impacting on the cost model are automatically recorded
• easy import/export – import ICP direct into BIW system, saving re-keying; export data to Excel spreadsheets or third-party accounting systems (eg: COINS) to allow offline analysis or reporting
• wizards and query builder – easy input/extraction of data
• support for multiple currencies – can report financial data in sterling, dollars, Euros and other currencies
• supports different procurement routes – eg: construction management, management contracting, design and build, single-stage and two-stage lump sum contracting
• multi-project views – authorised users can view financial data across multiple projects, allowing them to aggregate financial data, do trend analysis, etc

For more information, contact sales@biwtech.com.