Flowfinity is an effective and efficient data management platform for all RSK Group businesses. RSK is comprised of more than 200 global businesses covering a diverse range of sectors. The group feels that this platform caters for our unique requirements within a single system. This is incredibly useful in supporting our business goals.
RSK connects people, processes and technology at scale using Flowfinity to do it all
Region: Global
Company Size: Enterprise
Industry: Engineering / Environmental / Technical Services
Function: Site Inspections, Asset Management, Fleet Management, HSE, and more
Executive Summary
RSK Group is a global leader in the delivery of sustainable solutions. Its family of more than 200 environmental, engineering and technical services businesses and 15,000 employees works together to provide practical solutions to some of the greatest challenges societies have ever faced.
With a sector diverse workforce worldwide, RSK was seeking a data and business process management platform with the flexibility required to deliver custom workflow solutions at scale for a wide variety of use cases in a common platform.
Flowfinity is so versatile that we deploy it for a range of technical data management applications that other systems just couldn't do."
The group deployed Flowfinity and now have more than 30 business units that have collectively deployed over 200 diverse apps to serve their specific business processes.
The ability to deploy apps and solutions to so many different use cases including health and safety, project, asset and personnel management as well as highly technical engineering surveys all under one platform, set Flowfinity apart and earned the platform a place in RSK's strategic technology roadmap.
About RSK
RSK is a global leader in the delivery of sustainable solutions. Its family of more than 200 environmental, engineering and technical services businesses and 15,000 employees works together to provide practical solutions to some of the greatest challenges societies have ever faced.
The company operates in most sectors of the economy, including many of those most critical to future global sustainability, such as water, energy, food and drink, infrastructure, urban development, mining and waste. With its integrated offering across research and development, consultancy and on-the-ground application, RSK can deliver a complete solution that is unrivalled in the market.
The company is certified to the ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and ISO 45001 international standards for quality, environmental management and health and safety management.
The Challenge
RSK Group is a business focused on global growth and initially each business unit had different applications and services, which led to a desire to provide an official centrally supported platform for data management to deliver the efficiencies of standardisation.
Each RSK Group business makes its own decisions regarding systems, people, and processes. At group level, RSK support specific systems and platforms to make them broadly available for everybody with dedicated app templates and centralised IT support.
RSK wanted to find a platform with the flexibility, scalability, and ease of deployment to support a broad spectrum of varied use cases with enterprise-grade functionality.
The Solution
One of RSK's business units, Structural Soils, had already extensively evaluated no-code platforms for data management and workflow automation and selected Flowfinity. Based on the successful results Structural Soils had achieved building custom applications for complex technical engineering workflows, Flowfinity was presented to RSK at a group level as a potential solution for broader adoption.
At that time, Ben Enticknap was brought on board as Mobile Data Capture Manager to assist RSK's business units in adopting digital data capture in general. After an internal review and testing, Flowfinity was selected as the most suitable solution to deploy organisation-wide based on its technical capabilities and flexibility.
Flowfinity has evolved into a group-wide, multifunctional tool, with multiple layers of administration and access."
Flowfinity has allowed RSK to host all their applications on the same platform and servers so they can securely store all their data in its own self-managed cloud service which also allows for easier integration with other services they host. Even though it is centralised all Flowfinity deployments are all separated into individual use cases, which enables the administration to be separate; business units can do their own things with the system but retain the ability to connect apps between units or external systems.
"We have a solid understanding of how it's all set up. This means when we consider issues, such as cyber-center insurance, we have confidence that it's very secure," says Ben Enticknap, Mobile Data Capture Manager, RSK Group.
The Results
RSK now has more than 850 users across 30+ business units on the system, accessing over 200 applications for both their individual technical data management needs and a growing number of standardised apps the team at RSK Group has created, including Safety, Health and Environment, Asset Management, Fleet Management, and various technical surveys.
The use cases vary widely from carrying out rope access surveys of tall structures to ATmospheric EXplosive (ATEX) surveys in challenging environments inside public utilities. Apps have been deployed across the UK, Tanzania, South Africa, and Singapore and pilot projects in Australia. RSK has found value by leveraging the platform as much as possible to be a multi-national, multi-user system.
Flowfinity is an effective data management platform for all RSK Group businesses, the platform caters for our unique requirements within a single system."
Several divisions have put in their own dedicated resources to manage their Flowfinity deployments and create their apps on an in-house development server. The team has pushed the boundaries of what they initially thought possible and has been satisfied with the platform's versatility. For example, they replaced a VBA (Visual Basic Analysis) enabled Excel spreadsheet system, which was a very mature and complex system, and migrated it to Flowfinity while increasing its functionality and usability.
"Flowfinity is an effective and efficient data management platform for all RSK Group businesses. RSK is comprised of more than 200 global businesses covering a diverse range of sectors. The group feels that this platform caters for our unique requirements within a single system. This is incredibly useful in supporting our business goals," says Ben.
Now, work units can satisfy all their different data management needs, no matter how complex all in one product. This also provides cost savings, and it's much easier because they can focus on training staff to use the app on a familiar platform.
Support Services have been faultless. We've directed some significant asks in their direction and always received great service."
One of RSK's divisions provides very technical analysis of vertical structures, recording engineering surveys hanging off very tall buildings. Their client has a particular set of procedures and rules to follow, and RSK was able to deploy a custom application in Flowfinity to perform and share QC (Quality Control) checks at multiple stages in this process that met all the client's stringent requirements within a couple of days.
"It's that functionality and that usability where Flowfinity shines. No other data capture system allows you to quickly put all that process in with user permissions, so the client only sees the data they need so quickly. And do it all under one roof," says Ben. "Additionally, Flowfinity Support Services have been faultless. We've directed some significant asks in their direction and always received great service."
Going Forward
RSK has plans to leverage the IoT capabilities of Flowfinity to expand their data collection and monitoring workflows to connect to their mature database system to provide further process automation for specific use cases.
Flowfinity is continuously improving the platform and adding new functionality; most recently, a new task scheduler and calendar feature were released to help organize work.
As they continue to expand and expand their use of Flowfinity, some large divisions are investigating significant deployments for their people. Flowfinity is supported, and it's scalable, so it's an excellent option to help RSK drive its digital transformation journey. It will continue to be a significant part of its IT roadmap in the future.
