Case study / Wates & SES Engineering Services
Background
Wates Group and SES Engineering Services both use Asta PowerProject and Asta Vision to plan and manage their construction programmes. Both organisations needed to go further — to turn schedule data into portfolio-wide management insight, and to bring additional operational reporting into the same environment.
For project teams, the challenge was extracting meaningful analysis from complex programme files without manual effort. For leadership, it was understanding performance trends across a portfolio of projects in a consistent, comparable way. Acumine deployed its Programme Intelligence solution for both clients, tailoring it to each organisation's workflow while building on the same proven integration and analytics framework.
Asta PowerProject and Asta Vision held rich schedule data, but extracting meaningful trends, exceptions and performance patterns required significant manual effort from planning teams.
Project programmes were managed in isolation. Leadership had no consistent, timely way to compare performance across projects, identify common risks or understand portfolio-wide schedule health.
Producing reports from Asta required planners to manually extract, format and distribute data — a repetitive burden that reduced time available for actual programme management.
Important operational information — actual resource numbers, company-specific reporting requirements — had no structured home alongside the programme data, creating a gap between plan and reality.
Wates Group is one of the UK's leading privately owned construction, development and property services businesses, with a diverse portfolio spanning residential, commercial, education and infrastructure projects.
Wates engaged Acumine to bring programme intelligence to its planning function — giving project teams and leadership a more consistent and insightful view of schedule performance across the portfolio, and extending the platform with company-specific reporting tailored to how Wates manages its programmes.
SES Engineering Services is a leading mechanical, electrical and public health contractor delivering complex building services across the UK, with projects ranging from commercial fit-out to major infrastructure programmes.
SES engaged Acumine to reduce the manual reporting burden on its planning teams and improve the consistency of programme reporting across its portfolio — unlocking the value already held in Asta PowerProject without adding further effort for the people managing the programmes.
Asta integration
Acumine's Programme Intelligence solution connects directly with Asta PowerProject and Asta Vision — extracting schedule data and transforming it into a governed, analytics-ready format without disrupting how planners work.
Rather than requiring planners to export files or change their programme management process, the integration runs automatically against the Asta data. Tasks, milestones, baseline dates, actual progress, float, critical path and resource allocations are all surfaced in a structured model that can be reported on consistently across every project in the portfolio.
Because both Wates and SES work with Asta Vision as well as PowerProject, the integration covers portfolio-level programme data from both — giving leadership a single view of schedule performance that spans individual projects and the wider portfolio without reconciliation.
Planned versus actual progress across tasks and milestones — highlighting where programmes are ahead, behind or at risk relative to baseline.
Visibility of float across the programme and near-critical activities — giving planners and project managers earlier sight of where schedule risk is building.
Cross-project comparisons of schedule health, completion performance and programme quality — enabling leadership to identify patterns and intervene before individual projects fall behind.
Planned resource data from the programme, forming the baseline against which actual resource numbers can be compared through the Power Apps capture tool.
Company-specific reporting
While the core Asta integration and analytics framework is consistent across both clients, the reporting layer was tailored to each organisation — reflecting their own terminology, workflow, project structure and what their planning and leadership teams actually need to see.
Portfolio view
High-level portfolio pages giving directors and senior leadership an at-a-glance view of programme health across all active projects — with the ability to drill into individual projects and periods.
Project view
Detailed project pages giving project managers and planners visibility of their individual programme — progress, float, critical path, lookahead periods and performance against baseline.
Programme patterns
Analytics that are difficult or time-consuming to extract from the programme tool itself — duration distributions, activity clustering, period performance trends and quality checks across the schedule.
Power Apps — resource capture
The programme file holds planned resource allocations, but capturing what actually happened on site requires a separate input mechanism. Acumine built a Power Apps solution to close that gap.
Site and project teams use the Power App to record actual resource numbers — labour, plant and any other operationally relevant categories — in a structured, consistent format. This data flows directly into the reporting environment alongside the Asta programme data, enabling planned versus actual resource comparisons that were previously impossible to produce without manual spreadsheet effort.
The result is a more complete picture of project delivery: not just whether the programme is on schedule, but whether it is being delivered with the resources planned — providing both project teams and leadership with early visibility of resource pressure before it affects programme performance.
Power Apps — additional reporting
Beyond resource numbers, both organisations had reporting requirements that couldn't be met by the programme tool alone — company-specific data points, operational status information and project-level inputs that needed to sit alongside the schedule analytics.
Acumine built configurable Power Apps to capture this additional data in a structured way — removing the need for separate spreadsheets or email-based reporting processes. The captured data is surfaced directly within the Power BI reporting environment, so project teams and leadership see a single, consolidated view of programme and operational performance without switching between tools.
Both Power Apps were designed to be simple enough for site and project teams to use regularly, with minimal training and no dependency on specialist planning knowledge.
Outcomes
By automating the extraction and transformation of Asta data, Acumine removed the repetitive manual effort that had previously fallen on planning teams — freeing planners to focus on managing programmes rather than producing reports from them.
Leadership at both organisations gained a consistent, timely view of programme performance across the portfolio — something that had previously required significant effort to produce and was often out of date by the time it was shared.
The Power Apps resource capture tool meant that for the first time, planned resource from the programme and actual resource deployed on site could be compared directly — giving project teams and commercial managers earlier visibility of resource variance.
Standardised data extraction and structured reporting inputs reduced the inconsistency that came from manual processes — improving confidence in the numbers and making it easier to compare performance across projects and periods.
Client feedback
The impact on our efficiency has been remarkable. By removing layers of manual input and eliminating repetitive reporting tasks, the planning dashboard has freed up valuable time and ensured far greater accuracy and consistency in our data. What was once a labour-intensive process is now streamlined and effortless.
Technology
The solution combines Acumine's Asta integration with Power BI for portfolio analytics and Power Apps for structured data capture — giving both organisations a practical, scalable reporting environment built around the tools they already use.
Work with Acumine
Whether you need portfolio-level programme visibility, automated reporting for your planning teams or a structured way to capture operational data alongside your schedule, Acumine can deliver it.