Growing from a small Concreting business in St Kilda, today the Crema Group incorporates two building companies – Crema Constructions and Camillo Builders – along with Crema Developments, Piave Concrete, Cambar Precast and SG Formwork. Tackling major building projects across Melbourne, the Group employs more than 350 workers while also working with a range of subcontractors.

Steven is a Director who oversees the Group's construction programs and labour force, but he didn't get his start in the family business with his father and uncles. Instead, he served a carpentry apprenticeship elsewhere to earn his stripes and then joined Crema Construction five years later. Steven worked his way up through finishes foreman and site manager before he was tapped on the shoulder for a senior position within the Crema Group.

Rather than sitting behind a desk, Steven still spends his days on construction sites but deals less with subcontractors and more with their managers and company owners. In his 16 years in construction, he says one of the most significant changes he has witnessed is the boom in paperwork when it comes to managing important issues like safety and quality assurance.

HammerTech has also transformed the way the Crema Group handles critical paperwork like SWMS, which every worker must have sorted before they can commence high risk construction work.

Getting their own people and subcontractors to submit their SWMS digitally via HammerTech has been a "real game changer" which saves the Crema Group time on every job. Particularly as once workers are in the HammerTech system their details can be added automatically when they start on a new site.

As a result, OHS reps and site managers no longer need to spend time manually reviewing every SWMS. Meanwhile, inductions for subcontractors can be reduced to around 15 minutes whereas they could previously take up to an hour.

"Every person I employ is here to build things, they're not here to shuffle paperwork, that's where you're spending time and losing money," Steven says. "The quicker they all get to work the better it is for everyone."

The Crema Group has only been using HammerTech for six months and is yet to take advantage of all of its features, with Steven and Mark deciding it best to introduce the new system in stages rather than taking a "big bang" approach and risk a backlash to change.

"Not everyone's 100 percent on board yet, but they're getting there," Steven says. "You've got a lot of different personalities out there, some are happy with change and others aren't."

"It takes time and you can't just bombard people with everything at once, or else you spook the herd, they run and they don't take ownership of it."

Rather than jumping in the deep end, the first 90 days of the roll-out was focused around Steven and Mark working closely with the HammerTech team to establish where the technology could bring benefits to the business and the best strategy for seeing quick results.

Building on this, Steven and Mark sat down with their own senior people – such as the general manager of each arm of the Crema Group – to explain the benefits of HammerTech and understand the best way to introduce the technology across the business.

Working down the chain of command, some levels of management were more reluctant than others to embrace change – particularly site managers. Even so, the immediate benefits delivered by shifting onerous paperwork like SWMS into HammerTech won them over.

"Those who were quick to see the benefits of HammerTech helped get the others across the line, because the encouragement was coming from their fellow site managers and not just down from senior management," Steven says.

"They also started working together and helping each other, and even today if one of them finds a better way to do things on HammerTech they'll share it with the others so we all benefit."