Milestone Infrastructure drives high performance with one easy-to-use platform

The Challenge

Milestone, a part of M Group Services’ Transport Division, is well established in the national infrastructure sector delivering design, build and maintenance services. With an ethos of superseding the current industry standard, it is setting the bar high for highways maintenance service providers.

Innovation is at the core of Milestone’s priorities and the business has big ambitions for the coming decade. Working to achieve this, Milestone needed to start using a new platform capable of connecting everyone across a business of their size. It also needed to ensure useability was high, so the team felt empowered to use all the available tools within the platform. This would ensure that the teams could turn Milestone’s big ambitions into reality.

The challenge was to ensure stakeholders could access and update each project’s site-based information, including safety audits and inspections, as well as enable the same teams to efficiently report on what’s happening on a project on a daily basis.

To house the monumental amount of data Milestone’s projects produce and stay true to their pledge of being increasingly sustainable and supporting the delivery of safer, greener highways, this was no small task. Yet it was one Procore was more than capable of answering.

The Solution

Milestone started using Procore to replace an older field management solution with a new, single platform that could unify field and office and blend holistically into everyday working life.

For Steven Frost, Milestone’s Head of Digital Solutions and Innovation, this was the game changer. “Procore’s user-friendliness means we’re seeing better engagement across our business and because of that, we’re more connected than ever. It’s become second nature to us; like Microsoft Teams or Zoom. We’re optimising site visits, standardising templates, and seeing the kind of scalability across the business our energised ambitions demand.”

The Results

• Procore absorbs extensive data across contracts and delivers it back in the form of insights that help improve the business.
• Easy to use and mobile optimised, Procore receives company-wide buy-in and is easy to scale up.
• Procore helps get things right the first time, driving down rework, as well as supporting the move to paperless processes.

The story

M Group Services, the leading essential infrastructure services provider operating within water, energy, transport and telecommunication sectors across the UK and Ireland, founded Milestone in 2021, having acquired the Infrastructure Services arm of Skanska UK.

Milestone works with National Highways and an extensive number of local authorities including Cambridgeshire, Croydon and Lewisham, Gloucestershire, Devon, Hampshire, and Oxfordshire. It works on projects involving highway maintenance, street lighting maintenance, design consultancy and support with numerous other projects.

Milestone has a great scope for growth. It aims to become the largest highway maintenance provider in England, targeting significant growth over the next five to seven years. This ambition is embedded in Milestone’s business model, as it looks outside the typical approaches to innovation to offer something more.

“Our appetite to innovate is a reason we enjoy long-term relationships with some of the major local authorities in the UK,” says Alex Winchester, Milestone’s Strategic Development Director. “We want to maximise our ability to move the entire industry forward.”

“Infrastructure is not an industry in which you can afford to stand still, especially when you’re growing in terms of scale and size. The ambitions and expectations of the industry grow every day – and so must our ability to meet them.”

By turning to Procore, Milestone implemented a single platform solution that is invaluable in connecting teams and processes across an extensive list of complicated projects. It also sets the business up for the future, with a system that can serve it for the long-term.

Owing to the extent of remote sites involved, staying connected in the highways maintenance service business can prove a challenge, leading to extensive travel to hard-to-reach places, longer hours and far from ideal working conditions with a team always on the go. Seeking to future-proof themselves against this, Milestone started to use Procore to continue to prioritise visibility of project performance and collaboration across remote field teams and the offices.

“Geographically there are obstacles,” says Steven Frost, Milestone’s Head of Digital Solutions and Innovation. “We have offices in Ipswich and contracts in Devon and trying to be everywhere isn’t possible. This is where Procore comes in allowing project information to be accessed and updated from anywhere.”

By staying better connected, teams remain productive, prioritise visibility and drive collaboration. They also reduce the risk of information silos cropping up – a major culprit of defects and rework.

Procore works across Apple, Android, and web, which has opened a whole new world of access for Milestone’s people. Its mobile functionality has been key to more of Milestone’s team using, and enjoying, the app.

“When bringing any new system onboard, there’s a team to convince and adoption at scale will always take time,” says Alex. “Even then, you’re not sure if anyone is really going to use it. But with Procore, we’ve seen the data roll in and it’s happening at a pace far faster than we’d hoped. Now we can focus on our future because we have the right tools to achieve it.”

Using data to its fullest

Data has a huge role to play in the future of infrastructure.

“For us, technology and big data is a major priority. We’re aware of the ever-increasing role that data is playing in our operations and it’s essential we have the right technology in place to collect it, distribute it and meet our ambitions. Data is undoubtedly a part of our business plan for the future.”

Highway maintenance generates a vast amount of data, with local authorities able to pull mountains of it from their operations. The challenge for companies like Milestone is having a system to absorb this information and to then produce insights from it.

“Everything has a data implication and deep-diving into this data and building transformative insights for your business is a key part of staying innovative,” says Steven.

A potential hurdle for Milestone and its many clients and contracts is a lack of uniformity of the data they’re gathering. For instance, 10 different local authorities can use 10 different forms. Through Procore, Milestone can use custom forms to tailor the information it's getting. This is applicable across all Procore’s tools and can be used to align with separate tools. It also prioritises ease of use, with no need for developer work or coding knowledge.

“With Procore, we can manage one central set of forms that replicate our core business management system templates,” says Alex. “This means forms related to health and safety, environmental and quality are all standardised. Being able to come into one space and easily standardise these templates at company level is something that’s been harder to achieve before now.”

Outstanding data management doesn’t stop there either, with Procore allowing Milestone to incorporate their data into analytics and dashboards.

“Data is at the forefront of our business,” says Steven. “It can point the compass needle towards our future, the insights given by the analytics module are helping to improve site safety and benefit our customer relationships.”

Making sustainability a reality

The infrastructure industry is increasingly focused on how it can become more sustainable. The highway maintenance sector is the second largest producer of carbon in the UK and the pressure is on the industry to improve.

For Milestone though, the impact they have on the planet has always been one of their core values.

“Sustainability is a huge passion of ours,” says Ed Godsiffe, Milestone’s Head of Sustainability. “More and more local authorities are committed to solving the climate emergency and we’ve taken big steps to becoming more sustainable. These include operating a roads recycling facility in Hampshire which helps recycle materials and put them back into the road. The majority of our vehicle fleet runs on hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), cutting 90% of carbon emissions. The next challenge for us was bringing this sustainability mindset into our business processes.”

The sort of digital transformation Procore heralds also brings huge advantages to sustainability. Through better efficiency and visibility and planning, carbon emissions and landfill waste are reduced.

In addition, there are sustainable advantages in planning a long-term future with a system that brings processes and forms online. Not only does Milestone continue to cut down on the huge quantities of paper typically used in infrastructure, but without the need for its team members to drive to sites to access the latest information, they are cutting carbon emissions too.

“However we scale, we can ensure emissions from site visits are down because we don’t need to go there as often,” says Alex. “Either we already have all the information to hand on Procore, so don’t need to go at all, or a great deal more can be collated in a single trip, meaning repeat visits aren’t necessary.”

“We’re only beginning to tap into Procore, but we’re excited about where this partnership can go.”