Farrans is a leading civil and building engineering company with operational interests throughout the UK, Ireland and Europe. They are an operating division within Northstone (NI) Limited whose activities also include aggregate production, manufacture and supply of quality building materials and utility access chambers. Northstone is a wholly owned subsidiary of CRH plc. CRH have a turnover of over €18billion and operates in 35 countries, employs approximately 75,000 people.
Farrans
Project Management and Governance
Northstone Group implemented Oracle Cloud HCM with a vision to have one system for Human Resources to cover a number of HR data services. Northstone wanted to grow confidence in the system so Nine Feet Tall were brought in to run high level workshops and to assess the HCM Functionality. Recommendations to address specific issues were quickly established.
RESULTS
Farrans' Leadership Team were delighted with the results and requested further support from Nine Feet Tall. This involved implementing a number of the recommendations in the initial Information Management report.
Business & Digital Transformation
Farrans wanted to address growing resource costs and manual reporting within their business, in order to gain efficiencies. Nine Feet Tall were engaged to scope efficiency savings across all back-office processes with a view to improving current processes across IT, Training, Finance, Commercial, Health & Safety and Operations. A gap analysis was conducted to identify future value adding opportunities for Farrans. Nine Feet Tall also facilitated over 20 process mapping workshops, and lead vision workshops to define where Farrans wants to be in the medium- and long-term future. Key findings and a forward plan for change implementation were presented in a formal report the business.
Workshops delivered
27 across 10 departments
Change Management
Nine Feet Tall were brought in to manage the implementation of Office 365 Sharepoint and Teams, as well as a new project delivery system to improve the simplicity, collaboration, and security of document management within Farrans. Communication and training strategies were put in place to ensure that the Farrans employees had ongoing awareness and support for using the newly implemented systems. Nine Feet Tall were able to uphold their 'Change for Good' motto by increasing capability and skills within change management across the Farrans team. Farrans now had the skills and experience to deliver future change independently for their ongoing project rollouts. The change journey was supported by the implementation of programme management mechanisms across 'Project 9', ensuring robust vendor selection processes were followed to meet the Farrans team's needs. The journey was completed with an overarching support model including coaching, project planning and risk management.
Nine Feet Tall provided us with an invaluable service. During the 3 years of consultation with us on a large IT Improvement Programme they were very professional and agile, and were able to tailor their approach to suit our business processes and requirements. The project deliverables were very detailed and informative and the outcomes are continuing to bring a lot of benefits to our business. The NFT direct involvement ended in December 2022, but they have left their mark on our business and we are in a far better place with regards to Programme Management, Change Management and Governance. This is because NFT didn’t only provide the consultation service, but they also coached our people as part of the process. This means that we are now self-sufficient with internally experienced Programme and Change Managers.
Simon AikenIT Applications Manager, Farrans
