Elecosoft Helps Bartlett Cocke Keep Process Improvement Plan “On Schedule”

Some construction companies and general contractors make a conscious decision, after much deliberation, to switch to a new project management software platform. For others, the decision gets made for them.

Such was the case with Bartlett Cocke, a leading, employee-owned general contractor based in San Antonio. The software that the company had been using for over 15 years was being “sunsetted” and would no longer be supported, so a switch was mandatory. But for Luis Berumen, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation for Bartlett Cocke, the discontinuance of the current project management package occurred at a rather fortuitous time.

“We have a steering committee comprised of members from each business unit in each of our departments,” he explained. “When we were discussing overall process and technology improvement, a few topics quickly rose to the list.

“The first and foremost was cost management, followed by business intelligence or analytics. But scheduling came in at a strong number three, So, it was the perfect time to re-evaluate our scheduling platform.”

According to Rob Havins, Bartlett Cocke’s Director of Integrated Construction, once scheduling had been identified as a priority for improvement, the company used this opportunity to completely rewrite its scheduling policies and procedures.

Originally, the company employed a few in-house schedulers who created every schedule from scratch. But that became impractical when the volume of jobs became overwhelming – the company has some 50+ active jobs going on at any given time. Additionally, the schedulers were not necessarily in tune to the day-to-day cadence of what’s happening on each of the jobs.

Ultimately, the task was turned over to the superintendents, which was a satisfactory arrangement for a while. However, during the company’s extensive reevaluation 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 including, a critical change since everyone looks at a project from a slightly different angle.

With that change in place, Berumen began the search for a new scheduling platform.

“I happened to see a case study from a large, well-known general contractor talking about Elecosoft’s Powerproject,” he said. “I reached out to talk to them about it. The contractor had recently gone enterprise-wide with the product and was getting great results.

“So we started a series of demos, then eventually undertook a more formal evaluation. We found a company called Project Analytics, a reseller of both Powerproject and another high-profile software platform.”

Mary Williams of Project Analytics led the “showdown” between the two, performing a comprehensive evaluation on both contenders.

“We based our decisions primarily around ease of use and ease of implementation,” said Havins. “We felt like Powerproject would provide the easiest path to migrate to without being overly disruptive but would also leave us room to grow.

“More specifically, we knew that Powerproject 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 roadmap that helped make us comfortable with the purchase. Plus, the fact that Powerproject was about a third of the cost of the competitive product made the decision relatively easy.”

Berumen added, “Basically, we were looking to democratize the scheduling effort, and we felt like this application would allow us to do that better, more easily, more effectively, and more cost efficiently.”

One of the things that Powerproject provides to Bartlett Cocke is a way to “templatize” each of its schedules. So, 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. They’ve also built out task pools in order 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. Thus, 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 Power BI data visualization tool.

Schedulers, says Havins, 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. 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 the schedule 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. Because the company has reached the point where its data is consistent across the entire project portfolio, its data visualization tool can perform 80% to 90% of those checks automatically. This leaves schedulers’ time open for more nuanced project analysis.

Bartlett Cocke also developed a unique function for Powerproject. Operations managers can highlight a single project activity and download real personnel into it to check their availability, find any gaps in assignments, etc. All that data is tied to the Power BI application, effectively creating a digital resource management tool across all jobs.

“We took the Powerproject CPM application and just repurposed it,” said 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 company is doing the same thing across its portfolio of precon schedules. All that information is now fed into a precon status report in Power BI. So they’ve now got 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 aren’t running a separate spreadsheet of bid days and who’s assigned to them. The company was able to repurpose Powerproject in some unique ways to digitalize some of its processes.

Powerproject 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 break it or learn from it.

While Powerproject has been an invaluable and productivity-boosting tool across all of the company’s jobs, Havins noted that projects in some verticals have more stringent 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 schedule,” he stated.

“But Powerproject’s ability to import and export out of other scheduling software allows us to meet some of those requirements with our own in-house enterprise system and platform. Our project teams don’t have to become fluent in yet another scheduling application in order to fulfill those requirements.”

In terms of quantifiable ROI on Powerproject, the time-saving aspect of the 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,” said Berumen. “Those were cumbersome tasks that consumed somewhere between four and eight hours a month of unnecessary downtime. Now extrapolate that over our whole inventory of projects. That’s something we don’t experience anymore.

“And we can’t forget the time it took to re-create a file that somehow got corrupted. 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 that Powerproject provides in terms of sharing information across 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 CPM scheduling more efficiently and quickly than a more robust platform,” he said. “If you didn’t go with a cloud solution along with one of the more popular software packages, you’d essentially have a standalone database on every single person’s laptop, which is costly and gets challenging to manage.

“Through Powerproject you get a networked solution, so that everybody has access to the same information.

Havins noted that the company likes to refer to the cost and schedule as “the heart and lungs of our projects.” New cost management techniques will undoubtedly keep the heartbeat strong. And through Powerproject, the lungs are breathing much easier.