While saamwerk as a company is still in the process to be registered, the concept has been developed within the two major shareholders over the past three years. Shareholding in saamwerk will be held by the following institutions and persons:

a. Van Der Dussen Bourekenaars Inc (VDDB)

An established player in the quantity surveying and cost management function within mining and other large industrial construction.

b. Eagle Support Africa CC

Providing project support service within the mining industry and other business related projects.

c. Pieter van der Dussen

Co-Founder.

d. Nico van der Dussen

Co-Founder.

saamwerk has quickly come to realise that within the fragmented environment of professional services within the engineering industry, development of systems is not viable as the fragmentation means that both the capital, both human and financial, cannot be sufficiently pooled to start any meaningful development of IT systems. Concepts like ERP, document management and collaboration are thus poorly understood and in general not being used.

saamwerk has started to provide collaboration and document management tools to the industry via SharePoint 2010, but this provides only a portion of the full requirement.

Figure 1: saamwerk functional architecture

a. SharePoint

Collaboration and Document Control within a team distributed geographically as well as organisationally.

Starting with Document Control clients are encouraged to expand their views beyond email collaboration and eventually collaboration beyond the document – even with team members outside of the traditional organizational boundaries!

b. Project Server

Collaboration on the three pillars of project management: Scope, Time and Cost.

By working together on the same set of tools, project management and reporting is pulled into the real time environment – do something about issues while there is still time. The monthly or weekly report is too late!

c. Acumatica

Web-based ERP providing cost management in structured ledgers that continues into asset management and other disciplines currently not in place in most construction projects.

Control your project cost from the start in detail – do not wait for things to go wrong and then sit with endless reconciliations. Transform from perceived control to effective control.

Acumatica includes the following:

i. Financial Suite

Takes care of complex accounting, financial and automation requirements by effective management of the project ledger, accounts payable, cash management, currency management, tax management (including withholding tax) and more.

ii. Distribution Suite

An add-on to the Financial Suite for managing the complexities of distribution such as purchasing, ordering, tracking inventory, filling orders and more.

iii. Fixed Assets

Track your assets through is life cycle while maintaining easy to use depreciation schedules.

d. Signatura

Electronic signature solution (user physically signs a document via an input pad) that provides the bridge between paper and digital documents.

With these components in place saamwerk will make a big impact on the industry and start to pool sufficient resources to act as a conduit for the development of applicable systems to support project in a new way.

saamwerk’s current client base includes its shareholders, several companies broadly offering EPCM (Engineering, Procurement and Construction Management) as well as a some mines that handles the EPCM process internally.

Solution strategy

The functional architecture above clearly indicates that saamwerk’s intention is not to develop new functionality but to select and implement appropriate existing functionality. In this regard saamwerk has already partnered several strong partners to make the vision work:

Microsoft

Sharepoint and Project Server

Computer Initiatives (Pty) Ltd

Acumatica – Computer Initiatives have more than 25 years of experience in the ERP market serving companies in several industries such as banking, mining and manufacturing.

Signatura

The local distributors of the Xyzmo-product range offers unrivalled support for electronic signature solutions.

While some integration between the different products has already begun, the drive towards an integrated project management suite will continue with the assistance of our clients. The main driver will be the mutual growth of understanding the possibilities by both saamwerk and its clients.