SES Engineering Services

SES now runs more than 10 projects on Morta with over 50 active users and a mandatory rollout underway to bring every future project onto the platform , making it the first mandatory Morta deployment across an entire business unit within the Wates Group. Through CDE sync with Deltek UX, the team monitors more than 60,000 documents on a daily basis across their project portfolio.

The governance hub built in Morta tracks hub creation rates, processing times, license allocations, training delivery, user sentiment surveys, and CDE sync health , all through native Morta charts and dashboards. When a business user submits a form requesting a new project hub, it is created automatically in minutes, eliminating manual setup overhead. SES and the wider Wates Group signed an enterprise-wide contract, formalising the platform as a core business system rather than a project-level tool.

Through the license request and training programme, SES is empowering project teams to become builders and owners of their own hubs, creating a self-sustaining digital culture rather than centralised dependency. Training data is cross-referenced with SES’s learning management system to identify gaps, and license activity tracking ensures the right people have the right access levels across all business units. The team has moved from building documents to building databases and representing that data in documents , and that approach now underpins their digitisation strategy for everything.

Although multiple projects were using Morta, each was developing in its own unique way. While this showed the platform’s flexibility, it perpetuated a fundamental problem of siloed working , there was no consistency across the portfolio, and lessons learned on one project weren’t transferable to another. Without governance or standards, implementations suited immediate needs but diverged from each other, making it impossible to compare performance or roll out best practices at scale.

The traditional approach to technology deployment in construction , where the board invests in software and enforces it upon project teams , was less effective at building genuine adoption. Adoption felt like it was happening to teams rather than for them, even when existing processes were clearly inefficient. SES wanted a model where teams felt new digital workflows were built with them, not handed to them.

As more projects adopted Morta, there was no centralised way to track the deployment’s health , no visibility into how many hubs existed, who was using them, whether training had been delivered, or whether users were confident in the platform. The jump from some projects using Morta to every project needing to use Morta required a fundamentally different approach to governance, training, standards, and change management that the team had to build from scratch.

SES identified that effective governance requires two pillars working in symbiosis. The developments pillar, led by Javier and Amrik, drives exploration, experimentation, and new use case creation. The standards pillar, led by Eve, ensures consistency, scalability, and compliance across all deployments. Developments without standards leads to exploration without scale. Standards without development leads to rigidity without innovation.

Rather than enforcing tools top-down, SES’s approach is to empower the business to encapsulate digital processes in their day-to-day work. The digital team acts as enablers , their job is to make everyone else digitally capable, not to centralise all digital knowledge. A central governance hub built in Morta manages the entire enterprise deployment as a one-stop shop: hub creation requests, license management, training tracking, user feedback, change requests, and deployment metrics. Business users request new project hubs through standardised forms, and hub creation is automated in minutes.

Structured training request forms, attendance tracking, feedback forms, and enhancement change request forms create continuous feedback loops. Project admin surveys capture sentiment data on how confident users feel and whether they need additional support, providing intelligence on the qualitative health of the rollout beyond just numbers. Golden standard templates provide consistency across all deployments, while the enhancement change request process allows projects to feed back improvements that benefit everyone.

SES first encountered Morta through Ministry of Justice schemes delivered alongside Wates, where the platform was already a standard. That initial exposure gave the team hands-on experience. About a year later, the digital transformation lead designed a business plan to leverage Morta beyond TIDPs, and six months after that, the team began engaging internally to identify additional digitisation opportunities.

The formal creation of the digital transformation department brought together a team of five. Three months later, the Wates Group signed an enterprise-wide contract with Morta. Three months after that, SES began mandatory TIDP rollout as a business standard across all projects. Before the mandatory rollout, the team engaged over 440 people across all functions in shaping the TIDP tool to ensure it met end-user needs , a collaborative approach that ensured buy-in rather than resistance.

The governance hub infrastructure includes forms for hub requests, license requests, training requests, feedback forms, project admin sentiment surveys, and enhancement change requests. Live dashboards show hub creation rates by business unit, processing times, CDE sync health with API downtime detection, user activity levels, training delivery rates, and license consumption. The next phase covers eight business functions , information management, design, technical management, people and culture, commercial, pre-construction, finance, and more , each receiving the same collaborative shaping process used for TIDPs.