Prescience Technology: Managing the Complexity of Capital-Intensive Projects

A year into the pandemic, new norms have evolved, with many firms abruptly transitioning to working from home and relying on technology more than ever. When it comes to project management, however, it has become more difficult for companies to manage their projects as new roadblocks have emerged. While technology has allowed many businesses to streamline their projects, others continue to report challenges such as speed-to-provision, manual processing, integration gaps, and legacy concerns. Additionally, lack of in-house expertise and infrastructure capacity continue to wreak havoc on project controls in terms of time, cost, and efficiency.

Brisbane-based Prescience Technology (Prescience), with its Project-Driven Cloud solution, helps to overcome these challenges through cloud-to-cloud connectivity, rapid solution deployment, common data environments and process automation.

With specializations in project management, cloud and traditional technologies, managed services and training, Prescience is the go-to technology consultancy for capital-intensive projects. The company has created a unique, high value cloud solution that provides a single point of access to their client's comprehensive array of project management and controls tools, at both the project and enterprise PMO levels. In addition, the Project-Driven Cloud solution offers enterprise-level security, a full authentication system, and a swift deployment regime capable of completing the configuration-ready deployment in fewer than five days. "The technology is single, secure, high-availability, high-performance platform that provides the entire PMO solution, irrespective of the tools and software you use, saving time and money while fostering confidence and peace of mind to a wide range of clients across Australia," says Vinny Sharma, Cloud and Technology Strategist, Prescience.

Prescience additionally provides clients with full life-cycle services including software procurement and maintenance management, managed support services, public and dedicated training services and facilities as well as consulting and advisory services. Adding its competencies, Prescience's Project-Driven Cloud clients also have access to skilled professionals to support and manage their project controls applications while reducing risk and requiring minimal infrastructure.

As a highly accredited and awarded Oracle Cloud Partner, Oracle Primavera Specialist and project controls consultancy, the company has evolved the Prescience Project-Driven Cloud since its genesis in 2011, to provide an innovative, secure, and fully integrated cloud-based project controls portal. As a result, clients can integrate and automate existing PMO tasks and procedures, significantly improving project quality, delivery efficiency and project profitability.

Sharma recalls a recent successful case study where Prescience was tasked with enhancing project and performance outcomes for a well-known Australian construction organisation. Prescience successfully migrated their capital projects PMO, project planning, and reporting platforms to a fully managed cloud-based Prescience platform. This increased the efficiency and performance of the client's project network across Australia and New Zealand.

Connectivity remains a common cause of project performance issues for clients from remote areas. To address this challenge, Sharma described how Prescience implemented encryption and compression services, allowing clients to deliver improved performance even whilst operating over long distances and in remote locations. In some situations, the company observed performance increases of up to 460 percent between the Prescience Project Driven Cloud and the client's on-premise configurations. "Ultimately the feedback that we receive from our clients is in regards to the peace of mind and improved performance that comes with the deployment of the fully turnkey, tried and tested Prescience Project Driven Cloud," Sharma states.

With over two decades of expertise, Prescience addresses and resolves challenging real-world issues for some of Australia's largest and most demanding capital projects. As the organization continues to grow and to apply its trademark discipline of outstanding project delivery, both new and existing clients regard Prescience as their trusted "one-stop shop" for improving project performance.

Having recently been awarded the Most Valuable Project Award from Deltek Inc, and also having been named a 2021 Finalist in the Project Controls Consultancy of the Year Award (which they won for the first time in 2019), Prescience Technology's future looks promising.

Prescience continues to evaluate new technologies to determine ways the company can incorporate machine learning and augmented or artificial intelligence in the Prescience Project Driven Cloud, as well as identifying how the data can be used to provide insights to clients to support better decision making.

"Our R&D activities are already focused on identifying solutions to bring data together and help our clients continue to intelligently transform their projects for the better," concludes Sharma.