Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew comprises 121 hectares of gardens and botanical glasshouses in southwest London. It is a UNESCO world heritage site with the world’s largest collection of living plants.

We built a “digital job bag” system for the design department. When we were called in the studio had a very manually managed system with handwritten job sheets and time-sheets. The same information was often entered in two or three different places leaving plenty of room for error.

They have a mixture of Windows PCs and Mac computers and needed a system that could be accessed by both.

We developed a cross-platform app that allowed both managers and designers to see information about every job that passes through the design studio from their computer. Information only has to be entered once and designers log their time and materials against each job. Managers are able to schedule which jobs each designer will work on & when.

A lot of time was being wasted ensuring that each job had the correct authorisation and had the correct internal charging information. The app enforced various business rules to ensure that incorrect data could not be entered.

Collating the data for end of the month reporting takes less than an hour instead of the full day it took before the solution was implemented. Other reports mean the managers have the information they need to run the department efficiently and effectively.