Nirman Key Features:
The system is highly configurable to allow the delivery of highly functional systems tailored to meet the wide range of business requirements and methodologies prevalent to construction sectors.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Key Features:
- Accounts & Contacts Management: Nirman captures contact data in a single repository. Centralized contact data helps automate client interaction and business processes across all divisions.
- Subcontractor Management: The subcontractor module provides control over subcontractor commitments and activity, including contract printing, over-billings, and required lien releases. Alerts bring to light upcoming expiration of subcontractor licenses, insurance, and Workers' Compensation policies.
- Enquiry Management: Nirman's enquiry module allows users to store job enquiries, including sales and marketing information, from the very beginning of the job enquiry, to the tentative confirmation phase, and to the conversion into an actual job.
- Correspondence Management: Nirman's communication log module helps you track all of your communications activities (phone, letter, fax, email and attached documents) with your clients, suppliers, and projects.
- Marketing & Leads: With Nirman, you can manage marketing campaigns and leads generated from a campaign across a variety of channels from a single application. Finally, you get a consolidated view of campaign spending and performance.
- Contract Administration: The Contract module enables you to set up contracts in the best way to control and bill the particular contract. The module’s multi-level structure provides for up to 10 levels of contracts and components, ensuring that you get the level of analysis that you need. There can be multiple customers on a single contract, and multiple sites per contract.
- Document Management: Nirman's document management feature serves as the central repository of all your project files, including documents, drawings, photographs, CAD files, and more. This central repository will help you ensure stakeholders work off the most current file versions, and collaborate using the integrated markup tools.
- Trade Template: A subset of trade and sub-trade which is built upfront, then copied over when a new project is created, saving you the effort to create the same tasks and work orders repeatedly.
Estimation & Quotation Management Key Features:
- Autobuild: Autobuild includes construction unit costs and assemblies which calculate prices from the 'sticks and bricks' components, without making you look at each individual item when you make a cost estimate. Assemblies combine construction material costs and labour costs into actual items of work that you will use in construction projects. For each type of work you do, you can get an accurate job estimate as soon as you enter quantities for each item.
- Bill of Quantity (BOQ): Based on pre-configured templates, Nirman allows you to create tasks, subtasks, and then materials and hours required to accomplish a task, making it easy to record the raw data for job costing. The process includes separate transactions for equipment hours, labour hours, material purchases, subcontractor costs, other costs and inventory used on projects.
- Item Breakdowns: Item Breakdowns include Cost Items and Assemblies. They are usually faster and more accurate, since they calculate costs based on the actual labour and materials that go into a job.
- Category Breakdowns: Category breakdowns are a simple list where you can type in the items you will include in a job, and divide them by cost category.
- Job Cost Progress: Nirman includes a progress window where you can enter the percentage completion for different phases of the relevant project. You can then view predictions of the final project cost.
- Subcontractor Bidding: This feature enables you to receive and manage bids by trade, place drawings and specifications, have subcontractors email you or submit their bids online attaching the necessary documentation.
- Quotation & Variation: Here you can create one or many quotes for a job and keep track of the difference between each. You can also create quotes using different profit margins, and view the quote, variation and communication history for the entire project from a single window.
- Bill of Materials: Based on pre-configured templates, Nirman automatically determines the list of materials, total quantities and hours required to complete a construction project. It allows you to override any information including profit margin per task, as well as considering waste factors and other variables.
- Automatic Price Updates: Nirman's estimation module automatically updates estimating prices when you enter material purchases or price quotes from vendors. For each unit cost, you can use the most recent pricing, or take an average of recent prices.
Billing & Invoicing Key Features:
- Accounts Payable (Paying Bills): Nirman's Accounts Payable / Subcontract Management module provides complete control over cash flow. The wide variety of reports and inquiry screens allows an accurate understanding of the status of each job and subcontract.
- Accounts Receivable (Customer Billing): The Accounts Receivable module creates customer invoices for your construction work. You can bill for draw schedules, progress payments, time-and-materials work, allowances and variation.
- Expense Tracking: Nirman makes it easy to keep track of expenses like labour hours, inventory used, material purchases, subcontractor costs, and so on.
- Draw Schedules: For payments of fixed amounts at different project milestones.
- Progress Payments: For payments based on the percentage of work completed in each cost category, location or individual cost item.
- Time and Materials: For payments based on actual costs. Nirman gives you several ways to add a markup or a management fee to the costs.
- Accounting Integration: Nirman offers various tools to integrate with accounting system such as SAP financial, MYOB, Attaché Accounts and QuickBooks to eliminate any dual input and ensure that the both systems’ data are current and consistent.
Procurement & Inventory Management Key Features:
- Inventory Control: Nirman's Inventory Control module tracks all inventory activity. Inventory may be requisitioned to jobs or sold directly to customers. Advanced reporting capabilities provide all of the information needed to make better purchasing and sales decisions.
- Purchasing: Nirman's purchasing module provides a complete control system for material purchases for jobs and inventory. The module updates the committed cost for the job as soon as a purchase order is entered. This allows a potential cost overrun to be identified as orders are being placed.
- Receiving & Dispatching: This module allows you to keep the receiving and dispatching history of inventory items, including the project name, picking slip, etc.
- Purchase Order Report: This report is available in a summary or detailed format, and reports by Vendor, Job, Item, or Purchase Order Number.
- Purchase Price Analysis Report: This report can serve as a tremendous negotiating tool. You are able to set up the special pricing rules of each supplier. The list of items in the Proposed Purchase Order are then compared against each supplier's price list to determine both the best package price with a single vendor and the best price by item.
- Competitive Bid Tracking: Nirman's bid tracking module lets you log in each of the bids that you get from suppliers or subcontractors.
Project & Job Management Key Features:
- Project Management: Nirman's project management module helps construction companies to effectively manage each construction project from start to finish. It handles bids, project billing, variation, project paperwork and many other details of a project.
- Project Variation: Nirman's Variation module manages both cost and revenue. This includes special billing for variation, wherein bills can be organised as per a fixed price, or relative to time and materials.
- Communication Log: Nirman's Communication Log module helps you to track all of your communications activities (phone, email, letter and fax) with your clients, suppliers, and per project.
- Problem Log: Nirman's Problem Log is a defect list or ‘bug list’ that helps you track problems that need to be solved. You can mark off completion as you finish each item, and see at a glance the current status for each task.
- Project Scheduling: Nirman's Scheduling module automatically calculates the duration of each item by getting the total labour hours from the Assembly, adjusted for the quantity and crew size.
- Workflow Management: Nirman's Workflow Management module provides a fully integrated process for managing workflow. Workflow Management tracks all items that must be fulfilled under a contract, plus anything else that must be tracked during the job.
- Other Project Management Features: The system’s other project management functions include contract writing, cost estimating, document templates, and bills of materials.
Human Resources & work Schedule Key Features:
- Employee History: The Employee History module is the complete source for accessing all personnel information. Ten different editing tabs provide access to review forms, training logs, employee earnings history, a history log that tracks changes to the employee file, and more.
- Employee Rate Management: Nirman's Employee Rate Management module allows you to adjust employee pay rates. The system automatically logs any changes in the salary history log for each employee.
- Employee Work Schedule: The Work Schedule function is used to store employees’ availability information and any constraints that need to be considered for rostering.
- Gang/Crew Management: Create gangs, crews or groups based on their location, skills or preference and assign them to specific shifts or projects.
- Fatigue Management: To comply with government legislation and to ensure your employees are not overworked, you can create many predefined fatigue management rules such as shift rotation, compulsory days leave between shifts, maximum hours per week, and so on. The rostering process will automatically apply those constraints.
- Rostering: Nirman's Rostering module not only keeps track of employee and project timesheets, it also accurately tracks and forecasts employee absences and staffing needs. The module warns you of scheduling conflicts and helps you minimise over-staffing, which in turn reduces payroll costs.
- Skills & Certifications: The Skills & Certifications module keeps track of employee qualification and certification details, including the option to set up triggers to send e-mail notifications and automatic updates if certifications need to be renewed.
- Benefit Management: The Vacation / Holiday / Sick Accrual feature allows users to accrue vacation, holiday, and sick dollar amounts and post them to the General Ledger.
- Overdue Items Report: The Overdue Items Report screens and prints a listing of items that are past the due date for return by an employee or group of employees.
OH&S Administration Key Features:
- Company Specific OH&S Records: Here you can centralize OH&S information on subcontractors, relating to their employee training, consultation sessions, employee qualifications, etc.
- Safety Inspection: The implementation of project specific safety plans in accordance with industry specific guidelines.
- Standard Safe Work Instructions (SWI): A register of all of standard safe work instructions.
- Standard Safe Work Method Statements (SWMS): A register of all of standard safe work methods.
- Standard Hazardous Substances (MSDS): A centralised hazards register to keep record of materials on all projects.
- Project Risk Assessments: Identify the level of risk to a project using industry specific checklists and undertaking activities to manage project risks.
- Auditing: Project Completion Audit, Subcontractor Plan Audit, and Subcontractor SWMS Audit.
- Hazard Report: The hazard report generates both corrective action, and also contains a risk assessments section which is liked to the risk assessment and control module.
- Accident Investigation: Register workplace accident information in an industry standard format.
- Toolbox Talk: This generates corrective actions in relation to tools, and is linked to the corrective action checklist.
Quantity Surveying Key Features:
- Cost Plan & Estimating: This module includes Trade Input, Project Variation, Cash Flow, Project Progress and Loan Table functions.
- Inspections: This module includes architect design statements, surveyor, structural engineering, Work Cover Authority inspections, photographs and inspection reports.
- Certifications: This module includes Construction Certificate, Occupation Certificate and Final Occupation Certificate functions.
- Approval: This module includes Section 96 approval and development approval features.
- Document: This module allows you to store relevant document information with references, the date of receipt, and notes.
Equipment & Vehicle Management:
- Nirman's Equipment Control module is designed to track and charge your company equipment, tools, and inventory to specific jobs. A single, easy to use module allows you to track all movements of your equipment such as issues and returns.
Reporting:
- Nirman enables managers to view reporting data in an ‘at-a-glance’ form. Using report snapshots and graphs, they can identify key metrics, such as gross sales, top-selling products, and more.