One of the most powerful areas of the PIMSS system is the Contracts Module, offering a flexible, customisable framework within which to manage your programmes of work. This can include planned works, cyclical works and new build development projects.
The Contracts Module allows you to manage your contracts robustly by providing:
Accurate financial forecasting which can be reported on at any level, including the unit costs you already hold in PIMSS, contractors’ tendered prices and the actual costs. These can all be used to forecast the overall cost of a contract, and how it differs from the original budgets, at any time.
Comprehensive monitoring of progress of contracts and completion of individual work elements:
- each contract has a contract manager who is assigned overall responsibility for delivery of that contract
- for each work element it is possible to record planned start, end and actual start and end dates and use this information to report on performance at any level
- the ability to summarise information at various levels provides all stakeholders with the information they need including top-level summaries across all contracts, or groups of contracts for board progress reports, reports for individual contracts, individual property assets and drill down to individual work elements for project managers and customer contact staff
A full audit trail, with a built-in approval process, of additions and omissions, tenant refusals, and variations:
- contracts rarely remain static from inception through to completion, so it is important to retain the baseline position and have a record of the things that have changed and why
- recording the different reasons for omission and variation, who approved them and when
- the facility to define checklists for effective governance and workflow - good governance helps ensure that tasks are completed at the right time, in the correct order
- provides a central repository for contract related documentation, ensuring that relevant documentation is captured and then subsequently available to users
- helps ensure Health & Safety compliance, such as provision of asbestos register to contractors, receipt of pre-construction information or application for F10
- mandatory items can be defined to ensure that a contract cannot move to the next stage until a task, such as attaching an important document, is complete.
A robust mechanism for recharging costs to homeowners and leaseholders where works have been carried out on their behalf
Granular security permissions which allow users three levels of access:
- Administrator level access – full access to administer the module
- Full write-access to the module for day-to-day operation, but without administrative permissions, for project managers
- Read-only permissions only to view data and reports but not amend data, for customer contract staff
The Contracts Module is fully integrated with the core PIMSS asset register and stock condition data and allows for automatic updating of stock condition component data, following sign off of physical completion of work. This potentially eliminates administrative tasks required to update data using other mechanisms.
Our users have reported significant reductions in administration costs by using the module because it makes it easy to validate data, identify errors in valuations submitted by contractors, and identify areas where contracts and contractors are not performing optimally.
The Contracts Module can be used in conjunction with the Contractor Portal to allow contractors to upload and download Excel request for payment files themselves, which further reduces the administrative overhead for you, and allowing contractors easy access to the asbestos risk information held in the PIMSS Asbestos Module.
Further information on the Contractor Portal and the PIMSS Asbestos Module will be provided in a future article but please get in touch with your PIMSS account manager, or the PIMSS support helpdesk, if you would like to find out more about these, or other areas of PIMSS.
