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Florian Meichsner
Co-Founder and Vice President of Marketing, Sablono GmbH
Supernova Award Category:
Future of Work - Productivity and Collaboration
The Company:
Sablono is a construction software startup that was launched as a spin-off from Technical University of Berlin in 2013. Based in Berlin, the company’s vision is to make complex projects manageable while also making delivery more reliable, transparent and comprehensible. As a result of this vision, the company built the Sablono Platform which enables real time project management in complex projects based on SAP HANA. It connects scheduling and workforce management in one combined solution allowing for an unprecedented level of detail.
The Problem:
In construction, complex project environments often include general contractors and sub-contractors tightly engaged in a multidimensional work environment. To accurately relay intricate and essential project details across multiple teams can be time intensive and subject to error.
Project management is also faced with several technical challenges. There are often too many tools to choose from leading to over complication and various programs to sync. Additionally, due to the influx of data produced across these tools, there is an influx of fake or unstructured data which requires manual work to sift through — increasing both time and resources for minimal return. Many teams also experience connection gaps between necessary files such as contract schedules, supply chain delivery schedules, workforce schedules and daily reports. This halts production severally and can lead to inaccurate communication of data, potentially costing thousands of dollars. Current tools in project management often collide with the need for real-time insights
The Solution:
Sablono saw the need to bridge this market gap and created its platform with the vision that its solution would provide better insights into construction projects. With Sablono, enterprises across multiple industries can now get a unified project management solution to understand their projects’ performance in real time.
- Real-time Project Performance Insights and Analytics
- Increased Project Transparency
- Increased Collaboration across multiple Locations, Business Units and Teams
Sablono has been applied successfully in several large-scale projects across Europe including in projects such as the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi and the Greenwich Peninsula in London. The company founders often recognize that the platform’s success is hugely in part because of its integration with SAP.
The Results:
Sablono’s results can be demonstrated in three categories:
Technical Impact
Increased Level of Detail: Other scheduling and task management solutions don’t allow for 10,000+ tasks without losing control. Sablono was designed for 10,000+ activities and can scale up to 250,000 activities
Mobile Solutions in the Field: Mobile solutions for task management are not common. Sablono is the first to deliver mobile solutions that directly connect to the overall project program
Big Data Analytics on Project Performance: Sablono allows for real-time project analytics such as planned vs. actual comparisons and progress visualization
Business and Social Value
Time to Project Insight: Sablono reduces the process of data collection to collect insight and take action from 7 days to 1
Project Transparency: The project delivery status is transparent to everyone involved, from the project manager to the client
Collaboration: With Sablono, projects are planned and controlled collaboratively
Human Empowerment
Progress Reporting in the Field: Field workers usually write daily reports; Sablono workers use a simple mobile method
Real-time Planned-vs-Actual Analysis: Weekly/daily status reports are now available in real-time with Sablono
Schedule Updating: A planner updates the schedule monthly which can take up to 8 days. With Sablono, planners can get this down to a couple of hours
Metrics:
As outlined above, resulting ROI’s can be measured in these three categories as well.
Technical Impact
Resulting ROI:
- Level of Detail in Project Management – Increased by factor 50
- Enable the field workers to actively engage in task management using mobile solutions
- Real-time Project Performance Analytics
Business and Social Value
Resulting ROI:
- Time to Project Insight – From days down to seconds
- Transparency in Project Delivery Status – From seldom to frequent
- Collaboration in Construction/Production Project Management – From basic to interactive
Human Empowerment
Resulting ROI:
- Time reduced for progress reporting in the field – up to 65%
- Time reduced for Planned-vs-Actual Reporting – up to 80%
- Time reduced for schedule updating – up to 80%
The Technology:
- SAP HANA One SP 12 run on AWS
- Built-In XS Engine: XSJS, XSJSLIB, XSODATA
- Calculation Views
- SAP HANA User Management
- Delivery Unit Management
- DU Transport Management
- SAPUI5 Frontend Framework
- NGINX for Content Delivery
- AngularJS Framework for Web Applications
- Multiple additional JS Libraries
Disruptive Factor:
Sablono’s key disruptive factor is its ease of use. Its mobile offering is unlike anything currently on the market and has been praised by clients for its simplicity. The project dashboard enables businesses to quickly grasp what’s important, allowing teams to collaborate to identify what is going well and where projects might be behind.
Soblano’s use of SAP HANA allows them to turbocharge project management for its customers. The application allows companies to integrate scheduling, workforce management, and other key functions and lets managers monitor complex projects in near-real time.
Goswin Rothenthal, Senior Project Manager at Waagner Biro AG and project manager on the Louvre Abu Dhabi project, noted:
“Sablono is a great tool to track the progression of our construction sites and deliverables. The cutback in administrative efforts is amazing. We have not found a similar or comparable product before.”
Shining Moment:
The product was awarded a SAP HANA Innovation Award in the category of Process Innovator. Lukas Olbrich, one of Sablono’s founders was selected as one of “Europe’s Innovators under 35” by the MIT Technology Review. Sablono was also awarded the main prize of “IKT Innovativ” by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. In 2017, Sablono was shortlisted at the UK Construction News Awards as “Commercial Innovation of the Year”.