Case study detailing how Ground Technology Services achieves a 200% ROI per year with KeyLAB

1. Case StudyCase Study
Keynetix Limited
Systems House, Burnt Meadow Road,
Redditch, B98 9PA United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)1527 688 888
E: sales@keynetix.com
W: www.keynetix.com
Business Situation
The Technical Reality
Ground Technology Services is a specialist team of engineers and
geotechnical experts providing comprehensive site investigations
and consultancy services across the UK, to determine the
geological and contamination characteristics of sites. Their
combined experience has resulted in over 4000 investigations and
they have been operating as Ground Technology Services since
May 2011.
Being self sufficient and adopting leading technology solutions
allows Ground Technology Services customers to benefit from
rapid delivery of data and reports which are downloaded from their
online customer portal.
This case study covers just one of their 2012 projects to conduct the
site investigation and geotechnical testing for a development and
remediation project in King’s Cross, London. The project’s value
was around £100,000.
A geotechnical laboratory generates a large amount of data for
each test and uses this data in a calculation process to produce
maybe only one or two reported results for the client.
Prior to purchasing KeyLAB in 2012, Ground Technology Services
stored the data in a single Excel file per test and the reporting
process involved several stages of data re-entry.
The “file per test” based approach to test management works quite
well for very small laboratories but Ground Technology Services
soon found this became difficult and time consuming to manage
and maintain the quality.
With 90% of large projects carried out by Ground Technology
Services requiring AGS data, the output to AGS was also an
important deliverable.
The Solution
The Benefits
KeyLAB ensured Ground Technology Services had a single system
to manage all aspects of their laboratory and ensured that any data
was only entered once throughout the lifetime of the project while
enabling them to monitor important KPI’s without additional
processing of the data.
Ground Technology Services integrated their existing laboratory
spreadsheets into KeyLAB’s Microsoft Excel interface allowing them
to implement the system without having to re-train laboratory staff.
The whole system linked to an enterprise level database that also
allowed Ground Technology Services to manage the sample store,
work allocation among technicians, project progress and reporting,
AGS data, management reporting and equipment calibration.
Sample details logged on-site with KeyLogbook tablet computers
were transferred immediately to the laboratory and imported
directly into KeyLAB minimising the time spent re-keying the
sample data.
The testing was carried out and reports were produced from
KeyLAB without having to double entry any data and the data was
immediately available in the Ground Technology Services Site
Investigation Management System to allow for further
geotechnical and spatial analysis.
Ben Armstrong, General Manager for Ground Technology Services
sums up their experience with KeyLAB by saying “Laboratory
processing time for this job was reduced by around 60% and
represented a saving of around £5000 for this single project. When
this saving is scaled up across all the projects Ground Technology
Services expects to complete this year, the saving will be around
£20,000 a year representing a return on initial investment of around
200% a year.”
Stay in control of your laboratory
Visit www.keynetix.com/keylab for more information and KeyLAB videos
Ground Technology Services
Maple Road, Kings Lynn,
Norfolk, PE34 3AF United Kingdom
T: +44 (0)1553 817 657
E: mail@groundtechnology.co.uk
W: www.groundtechnology.co.uk
GroundTechnology Services’ implementation of KeyLAB was selected
as a finalist in the UK’s Ground Engineering Awards 2013