Some metal construction companies and general contractors make a conscious decision, after much deliberation, to switch to a new project management (PM) platform. For others, the decision is made for them.
Such was the case with Bartlett Cocke, an employee-owned general contractor based in San Antonio, Texas. The software the contractor had been using for more than 15 years was being “sunsetted” and would no longer be supported. A new PM platform was necessary, and for Luis Berumen, vice-president of strategy and innovation for Bartlett Cocke, the discontinuance occurred at a fortuitous time.
“We have a steering committee comprising members from each business unit in each of our departments,” Berumen says. “When we were discussing overall process and technology improvement, a few topics quickly rose to the top of the list.”
The first of those topics was cost management, followed by analytics; scheduling was third. “It was the perfect time to re-evaluate our scheduling platform.”
The old way
Bartlett Cocke not only re-evaluated its scheduling platform but also took the opportunity to completely rewrite its scheduling policies and procedures.
Originally, the contractor employed a few in-house schedulers who created every schedule from scratch. However, this became impractical when the volume of jobs became overwhelming. (Bartlett Cocke has some 50-plus active construction jobs running at any given time.) Additionally, the schedulers were not necessarily in tune with the day-to-day cadence of what was happening on each of the jobs.
That task was turned over to the superintendents for a while, but during its extensive re-evaluation of the scheduling process, Bartlett Cocke decided to make scheduling the responsibility of the entire project team. By doing so, the perspectives of all team members would be included.
The search
Berumen began the search and came upon a case study of a large, well-known general contractor that was using a leading PM platform. “That contractor had recently gone enterprise-wide with the product and was getting great results,” says Rob Havins, Bartlett Cocke’s director of integrated construction.
There were a series of demonstrations and a more formal evaluation. Eventually, decisions were made—based primarily around ease of use and ease of implementation. “We felt like [this platform] would provide the easiest path to migrate to without being overly disruptive to our current workflow but would also leave us room to grow,” says Havins. “More specifically, we knew the [platform] was growing into enterprise-wide portfolio management, as well as other kinds of schedule quality health checkers and mobile applications. So we saw a development road map that helped make us comfortable with the purchase.”
It was also a third of the price of the competitive product.
“We were looking to democratize the scheduling effort,” says Berumen, “and we felt this application would allow us to do that better, more easily, more effectively, and more cost-efficiently.”
Improvements for schedulers
One of the things the new PM platform provides to Bartlett Cocke is a way to “templatize” each of its schedules. Before a new schedule is developed, a staff scheduler creates preset views and filters, saving the team from having to do it on their own. Staff schedulers have also built out task pools to maintain consistent activity nomenclature across jobs.
Those same views are used for upward reporting as well, looking at things like baseline variance compared to current progress. So, when teams send in their schedules, they look and feel the same way across the entire project collection. Currently, Bartlett Cocke is working on a way to pull the data out of each of those project schedules to provide a better semi-automated reporting function through their data visualization tool.
As a result, the company’s schedulers have been freed up to provide a more valuable “advisory” role. “The project teams are the boots on the ground. They should be the ones who have active input into managing the jobs,” says Havins. “Our schedulers can now offer an added level of oversight within each region. As our teams are submitting their schedules, schedulers are doing an independent review, checking for various health metrics. Or they might check it again before going through a major risk sequence or to document delay claims.”
Bartlett Cocke follows a specific checklist when they analyze a schedule. Since the contractor has reached the point where its data is consistent across the entire project portfolio, its data visualization tool can perform 80 to 90 percent of those checks automatically. This leaves schedulers’ time open for more nuanced project analysis.
Digitalizing processes
Bartlett Cocke also developed a unique function for the software. Operations managers can highlight a single project activity and download real personnel into it to check their availability or find any gaps in assignments, for example. All that data is tied to the business intelligence (BI) application, effectively creating a digital resource management tool across all jobs.
“We took the BI app and just repurposed it,” says Havins. “We were able to get rid of the cumbersome spreadsheets while cutting down on our paper consumption. We even had some teams who were using magnets on a whiteboard. We streamlined all of that.”
In a similar vein, the contractor is doing the same thing across its portfolio of pre-construction schedules. All that information is now fed into a pre-con status report in the BI app. So Bartlett Cocke has a better grasp of when various bid days are or when drawing packages will be received, among other things. There are no more paper agendas for meetings, and estimators are not running a separate spreadsheet of bid days and who is assigned to them. Bartlett Cocke was able to repurpose the software in some unique ways to digitalize some of its processes.
The new software is currently installed on the laptops of everyone in operations. So while the superintendents are still the most frequent users, it is available to project managers, pre-construction personnel, and anyone else who wants to be able to save a file locally and try to learn from it.
While the software has been an invaluable and productivity-boosting tool across all the contractor’s jobs, Havins says projects in some verticals have stricter scheduling requirements that require their contractor to have the most robust policies and tools in place.
“I would say that higher education, healthcare, and industrial work rely on very stringent approaches to viewing and vetting their schedules, even around reviewing payoffs and cost-loading schedules,” he says.
However, the software can import and export out of other scheduling software to allow Bartlett Cocke to meet some of those requirements with its in-house enterprise system and platform. “Our project teams do not have to become fluent in yet another scheduling application in order to fulfill those requirements.”
The ROI
In terms of quantifiable return on investment (ROI), the time-saving aspect of this PM platform has proven to be a major plus.
“We experienced a lot of downtime with our old software, not just running the application but also in getting and reconciling multiple people working on the schedule,” says Berumen. “Those were cumbersome tasks that consumed somewhere between four and eight hours a month of unnecessary downtime. That is something we do not experience anymore.”
And the time it took to re-create a corrupted file is now a thing of the past. “The bottom line was, we had an old clunky computer program that was no longer supported. None of these issues was a surprise to us.”
Berumen notes the networking benefit the new software provides in terms of sharing information with all members of a project team. “It gives us an advantage over our competitors because it allows the average project team and user to pick up and understand critical path method (CPM) scheduling more efficiently and quickly than a more robust platform,” he says. “If you did not go with a cloud solution along with one of the more popular software packages, you would essentially have a standalone database on every single person’s laptop, which is costly and becomes challenging to manage. Through this platform, you get a networked solution, so everybody has access to the same information.”
Havins says Bartlett Cocke likes to refer to the cost and schedule as “the heart and lungs” of its projects. New cost management techniques will undoubtedly keep the heartbeat strong. And through the new software, the lungs are already breathing much easier.
David Hernandez is the head of U.S. for Elecosoft, LLC, a provider of innovative planning and scheduling solutions for the construction industry. For more than 15 years, Hernandez has been involved in virtually all aspects of the commercial construction industry. From business development to running his own business, he brings diversified experience to his role at Elecosoft. Based in Houston, Texas, Elecosoft offers solutions developed by construction professionals for the construction industry, revolutionizing project planning, tracking, and delivery.
