Milestone Infrastructure is a part of M Group Services, delivering a range of essential infrastructure services to the water, energy (retail and infrastructure), transport and telecom sectors across the UK and Ireland.
Milestone currently operates over 8 long-term highways maintenance contracts, several contracts for street lighting maintenance, and a variety of large, complex civil engineering projects across southern and central England. As the largest highways maintenance contractor in the UK, Milestone maintain and improve over 48,000km of roads and 370,000 lighting assets.
The Challenge
Before working with Causeway, Milestone were running multiple highways maintenance projects without a single standardised system in place. Instead, multiple systems were deployed in different locations based on the requirements of each authority.
While each system had its advantages, Milestone identified that this approach made information management across their portfolio difficult. Trying to pool information from different projects was challenging, time-consuming and the data was difficult to analyse.
The difficulty stemmed from the fact that data capture wasn’t standardised between systems to allow straightforward like-for-like comparison.
This is a common issue in the highways maintenance industry. Most contractors have a reasonable idea of how they’re doing but find it hard to evidence unambiguously.
But Milestone knew that if they couldn’t analyse all their data then it was unlikely that they could produce a uniformly accurate picture of performance as a business and produce the insights that could help them make consistent, long-lasting improvements on all projects.
The Solution
Milestone sought to standardise the way it approached the implementation of new contracts.
The first step was to move existing contracts onto one system, and Milestone selected Causeway’s integrated highways solution.
Built specifically for the construction and maintenance industry, Causeway enables highway maintenance teams to proactively schedule and manage work orders and keep track in the field of works status, labour, plant, material and subcontract cost activities and to drive billing and revenues. Commercial teams can manage revenue recognition, cost and value management and profitability without the need for any re-keying or spreadsheets.
Since implementation, Milestone has rolled-out Causeway onto 8 highways maintenance contracts, including Central Bedfordshire Council (covering 1,315km of carriageways and 2,472km of footways) and its contract with Suffolk County Council (covering 6,588km of carriageways, 102,000 signs and approximately 4,000km of footways).
The Outcome
A key lesson from this implementation is for businesses to approach solutions in a more holistic manner, seeking out the similarities between projects to identify standardised approaches, rather than looking for bespoke solutions to each project, process or issue.
Key benefits include:
- Using Causeway to provide a repeatable template, the effort and time required to mobilise Milestone contracts has been greatly reduced.
- Milestone effectively manages numerous work orders daily, handling both scheduled maintenance and urgent emergency requests, while coordinating with subcontractors and maintaining detailed billing records.
- Integrated critical mobile workers, depots, regional and central office infrastructure.
- Causeway allows Milestone to access information as and when needed, from anywhere, and report back to clients faster than they would otherwise.
- Accurate reporting in real time, meaning Milestone can report effectively from a position of confidence rather than working on estimates.
- Milestone can now better analyse different contracts, highlighting where there are differences in performance, and delve into the detail in one place.
- The outputs of teams can be monitored much more closely using Causeway and various tweaks and changes can be made accordingly to future contracts processes to facilitate continuous improvement.
- The time and effort required to mobilise the Causeway for the work in Suffolk was less than Central Bedfordshire, despite it being several times larger. This is thanks to the efforts of Milestone to standardise its solutions and the scalability of the Causeway solution.
"Once we had the Causeway solution in place, we quickly recognised the importance of introducing it to potential clients at bid stage to help them understand the benefits of a more standardised approach and the saving in cost and time it can provide."
Alex Winchester, Strategic Improvements Director at Milestone
By transforming its approach to contract implementation, Milestone has set a new standard in project management, demonstrating the power of digital solutions to standardise and enhance highways maintenance across the UK.
This collaboration with Causeway provides a model for contractors, showcasing the potential for digital innovation to streamline operations and deliver efficiency savings at scale.
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