Case study

“From Hours to Minutes”​

How Galliford Try Standardizes Schedule Integrity with Intelligent Automation

The Project: UK’s A303 Upgrade​

Galliford Try, a leading UK construction company, was awarded a £135 million contract to upgrade a 3-mile section of the A303 between Sparkford and Ilchester. This critical infrastructure project aimed to alleviate congestion and improve road safety for over 23,500 daily users

As part of this complex project, Galliford Try had to manage schedules from both their internal teams and nine subcontractors, updating them on a monthly basis to ensure timely project completion by Winter 2024/2025.

Contract Amount
£ 0 million 
Contract Duration
0 years
Daily Users
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The Challenge: Complex Multi-Subcontractor Schedule Management

Managing schedules from nine subcontractors and their teams presented an enormous challenge. Each month, Galliford Try had to collect, verify, and analyze schedule data — across multiple inputs and thousands of activities—while ensuring that each update adhered to their rigorous internal standards.

Manual processes made it hard to maintain schedule integrity and standardize data, leading to risks like misinformed decisions and delays. Achieving consistency across all schedules was critical but difficult without the right technology.

The Consequence: Time-Consuming and Error-Prone Manual Processes

Managing multiple manual data inputs each month led to inefficiencies, with Galliford Try spending excessive time verifying data and analyzing schedules, often resulting in errors that compounded over time and led to misinformed decisions.

This manual process increased risks, including compensation events from project delays or changes. Without a way to efficiently standardize schedule quality, flawed data became more likely, creating a domino effect where unreliable information led to inaccurate analysis, further compounding errors and missteps.

The Project: Schedule Integrity Workflow Automation

To overcome these challenges, Galliford Try turned to Nodes & Links’ Schedule Health tool for intelligent automation. This solution allowed them to automatically standardize the quality of all incoming schedule data, both from their internal teams and the nine subcontractors. 

The tool provided real-time, automated analysis of each schedule submission, identifying non-compliant elements and instantly generating reports with specific instructions on what needed to be corrected. This transformed a labor-intensive, error-prone process into an easy, streamlined, automated workflow.

The Solution: Automatic Prevention of Misinformed Decisions

The intelligent automation not only replaced the manual workflows spread across multiple spreadsheets but also surfaced problem areas instantly. Instead of siloed data management, Galliford Try now had an automated system that verified schedule integrity in seconds, ensuring that any schedule submitted met their predefined standards. 

The team could react quickly to potential issues, preventing rework, inaccurate decisions, and non-compliant schedules from causing project delays or cost overruns.

The Results: Time Savings and Improved Decision-Making

The time savings and productivity gains from this automation were game-changing. Tasks that once took hours of manual labor each month were reduced to mere minutes. For the first time, Galliford Try could standardize the integrity of schedules across every data input in the program. This streamlined workflow enabled the team to shift their focus from tedious manual verification to making strategic, informed decisions that would drive the project forward.

Thanks to this automated approach, Galliford Try is on track to complete the A303 upgrade by Winter 2024/2025. The significant reduction in manual workload has allowed the team to redirect their energy toward managing the project’s broader goals, ensuring it stays within budget and meets its deadlines.

Lessons Learned: The Importance of Data Integrity in Construction

The first step in any analysis must be ensuring that the data used is consistent, logical, and adheres to the organization’s standards. Galliford Try’s experience showed that schedule integrity is not only vital but also complex when dealing with large amounts of data from various sources. Their workflow for managing a large-scale project looks like this:

If the first step—schedule integrity—is not accurate, everything that follows will be flawed. By automating this critical initial step, Galliford Try ensured that the data informing their decisions was reliable, allowing for better project outcomes.

The Business Case for Intelligent Automation

Galliford Try’s experience with intelligent automation proves the clear business case for implementing automation in complex projects. The main benefits include:

Time Savings and Productivity Gains

Automation reduced manual workflows from hours to minutes, enabling the reallocation of resources to higher-value tasks.

Standardization of
Data Quality

Automation ensured that all schedules, whether from internal teams or subcontractors, consistently met the organization’s established standards, improving data reliability.

Informed
Decision-Making

With accurate and standardized data, Galliford Try could make better decisions quickly, avoiding delays and costly errors.

For large-scale projects involving multiple subcontractors and complex workflows, intelligent automation provides a competitive edge by ensuring consistent data quality and efficient project execution.

Conclusion: Automation as a Critical Tool for Project Success

Galliford Try’s use of Nodes & Links’ Schedule Health tool demonstrates how intelligent automation can transform the management of complex projects. By automating schedule standardization and verification, Galliford Try saves significant time and improves their productivity, while ensuring that every decision they made was based on reliable, high-quality data.

This automation not only helped the A303 project stay on track but also provided a blueprint for how contractors can leverage intelligent workflows to enhance project performance and help ensure success. Automation is no longer just an option—it’s a need for managing the complexities of modern infrastructure projects.

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