Time recording: Excel too banal, in-house development too complex at some point
“As engineers, we are of course very tech-savvy and all have the appropriate programming skills. Recording time for our projects using pure Excel lists therefore seemed too banal right from the start.”, DI Markus Götsch, shareholder and project manager in the geotechnical and hydraulic engineering sector at Geotechnik-Team, remembers the beginnings of his company in 2008. For this reason, the company initially developed its own software solution for time recording.
“Until now, ZEP has never let us down. The system works and meets all our requirements for modern time recording”
Dipl.-Ing. Markus Götsch
Shareholders and project managers
However, with an ever increasing volume of projects, the complexity of the requirements for the in-house solution also increased in the following period. At the same time, however, this also increased the effort required to further develop the system. This in turn was at the expense of the availability of employees responsible for development for their actual activities in the project business. “At some point, the effort required to develop our own time recording solution became too much for us. We decided to focus on our main business in the future and look for an external solution for time recording.”, explains DI Götsch.
“Invoicing is essential when it comes to ensuring the smoothest possible process between time recording and billing.”
Dipl.-Ing. Markus Götsch
Shareholders and project managers
ZEP wins the race
Through Internet research and advice from their own business environment, Mr. Götsch and his colleagues came across the cloud-based time recording solution ZEP from provantis IT Solutions.
ZEP stands for time recording for projects. The web-based solution has been on the market since 2000 and offers project-oriented companies a complete solution for time recording and reporting, travel expenses, project management and controlling, and invoicing.
Since 2014, ZEP has also been working at Geotechnik-Team. In addition to pure time recording, the company also uses the invoicing module. DI Götsch: explains: “Invoicing is essential when it comes to ensuring that the process between time recording and billing is as smooth as possible. ”
In addition to the variety of functions, the engineer sees the advantages of time recording via ZEP in particular in the clarity and intuitive user interface. He explains: “As part of the project selection process, we also looked at other solutions, including one of the leading controlling and management software solutions for architects and engineers. However, the user interface seemed much too cluttered and 'colorful' for our needs, so we finally opted for ZEP. ”
Project overview and control guaranteed
According to DI Götsch, in addition to the ease of use, ZEP's main advantage is the ability to get an up-to-date project overview of the solution at any time and to be able to check who worked on what on a project and when. “Project overview and control are indeed very easy via ZEP. The project work carried out is billed via the appropriate module, which receives the required data from the time recording system at the push of a button”, confirmed by a satisfied project manager.
Although the initial idea was to run ZEP in-house on their own server, the geotechnical team is now using the solution in the cloud computing model. The solution is operated in a certified data center. The employees of the Geotechnik Team access the solution via the Internet and web browser.
, is DI Markus Götsch's satisfied conclusion after almost four years of use of ZEP.
