Construction development broad embraces transformation with Microsoft 365 and Mint Group

Published on April 16, 2020

Summary

The Construction Industry Development Board’s (CIDB) mission is to drive enhanced delivery management, capacity improvement, and contractor development in the South African construction industry through strategic interventions and partnerships. The organization has invested in various projects and platforms over the last decade to drive its overarching contractor accreditation and support the contractor’s industry delivery platform for South Africa’s social-economic growth.

To establish practices and processes that promote the CIDB’s objectives for the South African construction industry, the CIDB is embracing digital transformation through the implementation of all three Microsoft clouds: Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure.

Challenge

The CIDB’s main responsibility is to deliver improved delivery management, capacity improvement, and contractor development in the South African construction industry. However, due to outdated IT systems coupled with manual paper-intensive processes, contractor applications took very long to process and validate with extremely long queuing times at regional offices for contractors who require accreditation or support from the CIDB.

In addition, the manual processes at the CIDB resulted in the printing of approximately 10,000 documents per day, which drastically hindered efficiency and visibility over construction processes coupled with administrative-intensive processes for record keeping and, in many instances, the loss of data. Collaboration and skills empowerment also proved challenging at the CIDB due to a lack of visibility over staff capabilities.

Strategy

CIDB worked with Mint Group to help them embrace digitization and enable a paperless environment through the implementation of automated processes and workflows, ensuring better collaboration through the powerful applications of Office 365.

The digitization journey promotes faster turnaround times for contractor applications and processing, and, through Mint’s Digital Enablement offering, empowered staff with the necessary skill sets to utilize the new technologies, enabling proper infrastructure procurement and delivery, as well as contractor development, to support South Africa’s infrastructure development.

The CIDB embarked on Mint’s cloud-based Digital Transformation offering, fully embracing all three Microsoft clouds with:

  • Microsoft 365 to support the modern office worker, including Office 365 and SharePoint
  • Dynamics 365 adoption all up for customer engagement, social, finance and operations
  • Azure Cognitive Services to drive AI as part of core business decision making
  • Azure PaaS for application modernization
  • Digital enablement to unlock full cloud value (Modern Change Management)

Results

The CIDB has invested in various projects and platforms over the last decade to drive its overarching contractor accreditation and support the contractor’s industry delivery platform for South Africa’s social-economic growth. SharePoint is available for enhanced collaboration among the various offices throughout the nine provinces in South Africa.

The implementation and use of Microsoft Teams has allowed the management teams across the country to have a Teams meeting and for the first time see and collaborate with each other virtually since the organization’s founding. They have access to all the other benefits that SharePoint enables such as content management, seamless interaction with their members and customers, ease of accessing customer files through rich search capabilities, and providing the customer with improved services.

Results at a glance – Through the cloud journey that CIDB embarked on the entity will realize the following benefits:

  • The reduction of the process time for the application and registration of construction
  • Increased efficiency, visibility, and management of construction administration processes
  • Automated and streamlined delivery and procurement of infrastructure and contractor development across South Africa
  • Paperless environment
Read full case study