McConnell Dowell achieves operational excellence by streamlining tender process with Microsoft Dynamics 365.

McConnell Dowell (MCD) is a leading name in the Australian construction industry, known for delivering innovative solutions for complex projects. With a team of 3,000 employees spread across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, MCD has established a reputation for building quality assets and facilities, ranging from remote resources and energy projects to infrastructure that shapes the skyline of major cities.

Having delivered so many large-scale projects, MCD recognises the importance of maintaining an edge in their business processes and customer relationship management. Their unwavering focus on quality and operational excellence has put them in a position of leadership, as they strive to provide the best possible outcomes for their clients.

As Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst at McConnell Dowell, explains, “We pride ourselves on our ability to execute complex projects, but we also understand that we need clear operational paths to achieve great performance.”

Highly complex tendering processes to be streamlined and transparent.

Managing tender approvals and forecasting is challenging for complex engineering and construction projects, coupled with thorough approval processes, to secure new business outcomes. However, MCD’s tendering process faced significant inefficiencies due to the fragmented systems they had in place for storing and managing customer data and tender workflow.

Many of MCD’s tender processes took place outside of a primary system, using emails, meetings and phone calls that were difficult to track. Transferring information from these meetings and phone calls into the legacy systems was a significant challenge, leading to further inefficiencies. It took hours of meetings involving teams across the business to collect and approve tender submissions.

According to Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst at McConnell Dowell, “We’re involved in high-value new business with projects upwards of $200 million. This puts enormous pressure on everyone to get it right and within tight timeframes.”

Automation enabling MCD’s people to fully apply their world-class expertise.

According to Danielle, the lack of a centralised system made is difficult for their people to get on with their jobs. The goal was to free up the highly specialised skillsets of their people to focus on their expertise by implementing improved systems.

“We had clients and contacts in one system and opportunities in another. We could never say how many jobs we had tendered for a client over the last ten years or how much we won or lost out of any relationship,” Danielle says.

By implementing a centralised system, MCD could streamline their tendering process and customer relationship management, enabling their people to work more efficiently and effectively. In addition, the new system can provide valuable insights to empower their team to make faster, more informed business decisions.

“High value new business tendering, for complex multi-million dollar projects, is high risk. It puts pressure on everyone to get it right. It took lots of people hours to pull information and documents from various places across our business. There was no transparency. We needed a single, secure source linked to streamlined workflows and easy collaboration.”
Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst, McConnell Dowell 

“High value new business tendering, for complex multi-million dollar projects, is high risk. It puts pressure on everyone to get it right. It took lots of people hours to pull information and documents from various places across our business. There was no transparency. We needed a single, secure source linked to streamlined workflows and easy collaboration.”
Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst, McConnell Dowell 

Creating better together.

Understanding the exact requirements.

MCD’s brief to FiveP specified key areas to be addressed for its end-to-end customer information and business processes: management of relationships and workflows; visibility into client contacts, projects and opportunities; insights into business performance and trends; and the broader streamlining of group operations including collaboration across teams and departments.

FiveP worked closely with MCD to “identify our exact requirements so we’d have a solution that covers our current needs and has the flexibility to scale into the future. They took our operational details and applied tech to them, not the other way around. The result is a powerful system that has transformed our tender response processes and the way we make fact-based business decisions,” Danielle says.

The resulting solution was a custom designed Dynamics 365 platform that is a comprehensive, single system for managing their tendering process. The solution leverages the M365 productivity suite, enhanced by Power Platform to streamline processes and facilitate approvals from a range of MCD stakeholders.

Further technical assistance was provided to migrate MCD’s high-value data from existing systems and FiveP’s adoption and change management services smoothed the transition to the new workflows. “We have a system built for our purposes. FiveP got it right,” Danielle says.

“Our Group Project Manager, Ryan McDonough, said working with FiveP to bring this project home is one of the highlights of his career.”
Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst, McConnell Dowell 

“Our Group Project Manager, Ryan McDonough, said working with FiveP to bring this project home is one of the highlights of his career.“
Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst, McConnell Dowell 

Unlocking the potential of customer information for great performance. 

Automation of previously laborious and complex repetitive tasks has streamlined MCD’s operations.

The hours spent trawling for tender-relevant data, and then meetings to work through all the information required to approve a tender, have been transformed into efficient business approval workflows.

“The amount of documentation for our tenders is incredible. To now be able to give all the relevant people access, and in one single centralised place, is the largest and most important change. And from staff feedback, they love being able to receive an authorisation request, access information relevant to them and click their approval directly via an email.“
Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst, McConnell Dowell 

“The amount of documentation for our tenders is incredible. To now be able to give all the relevant people access, and in one single centralised place, is the largest and most important change. And from staff feedback, they love being able to receive an authorisation request, access information relevant to them and click their approval directly via an email.“
Danielle Cleary, Group Business Analyst, McConnell Dowell 

MCD’s D365 powered system “delivers all the information our people need to push through approvals within incredibly quick time frames.”  

MCD’s people now have clearer paths to interrogate data and interact with other experts across the business. “With all data in one place, we’ve unlocked the potential of our customer information and have vital insights into our business performance. It’s all at our fingertips. That’s very exciting.”