Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! OK, maybe it's not as dramatic as President Reagan's 1987 speech but when you're a construction company and have to make changes to a project – like tearing down a wall you just built – it can be expensive.
Modern companies, especially those that manage a lot of projects, can't afford to wait for phone calls or faxes to update information. They need immediate access to the latest specs – and they need it from anywhere at anytime.
D-A-S Construction is a local commercial construction company with over 18 years of experience as a general contractor, construction manager and design builder. John David Pumper, D-A-S vice president and CFO, is credited with bringing the company "into the computer age."
D-A-S handles a lot of projects and, whether serving as project managers or pounding hammers, their employees are out of the office 50 to 60 percent of the time. Pumper says, "It was difficult to communicate with our mobile workforce before. We needed to move information faster and more seamlessly."
They had been using an accounting package dedicated to their construction market, but it was strictly for employees and had to be accessed at their office, not on-site. So project managers, and others, had to leave a job site and travel to the office to get needed information. And only employees could have access – not clients or architects or others they worked with.
Pumper faced a choice. He could try using a remote terminal service so that a project manager in a job trailer could connect to the office application. Or he could use a Web-based portal solution built on Microsoft SharePoint technology.
Enter Broadview Heights based Avvenire Solutions. Avvenire focuses on business and collaborative solutions on the Microsoft platform. Mark Lisi, director of solutions technology, worked with D-A-S to craft a Web portal solution that was rolled out for the House of Blues project.
So what is a portal? Scott Young, vice president and partner with Brulant, defined a portal as "that one Web gateway into your organization where you want to direct your constituents. Portals have a personalized experience component – allowing things they want to see or you want them to see."
You may be familiar with personalized, customizable portals like My Yahoo! or MyMSN. Portals may offer links to other Web pages, access to shared calendars or other documents and even collaboration tools.
A portal for a construction company would have password-protected pages dedicated to each project where all the latest documents – specs, change orders, progress reports, job photos – are stored and available for viewing anytime via the Web. Working from different specs or having documents stored in various locations could be a nightmare whether you have one or numerous projects. Portals can also offer features for people to work together on documents.
Jeff Mack, Avvenire's director of business development, says, "The key benefits of this solution included a quickly deployed, feature rich portal solution that provided secure collaboration for project team members, significant cost savings by eliminating duplication of effort creating and locating project documents."
Pumper chose Avvenire and SharePoint as "the best-fit solution for the time." He liked that SharePoint was already web-based. It allows them "to share documents of all shapes and sizes with not only our people but extended project personnel – architects, subcontractors, clients."
In about a week and a half, Avvenire created a project template to allow D-A-S to easily create new sites for each of their new projects. Pumper says that you don't have to have a dedicated IT person to manage sites and set-up new project sites. "If not, you can train someone, with support from Avvenire, how to manage security, populate documents, etc." Since D-A-S already had a network administrator, he put the onus on her to set it up.
Pumper says that they save a lot of time in turning around decisions they need to make on a daily basis. No more trying to reach people by phone or fax. "Now we can exchange documents and collaborate," he said. "We can make decisions in minutes versus hours or even days." Out-of-town clients can pull up, via the Web, project photos and reports on a daily basis. When everyone is working from the most current documents, fewer expensive change orders – and torn down walls – will be needed.
Another major selling point was security. D-A-S had a laptop stolen just prior to implementing SharePoint and Mack said, "They did not want to have that risk again with the sensitivity of the information that was being stored on the local hard drive."
Pumper says he "felt more secure with SharePoint in inviting clients, architects and others outside the company" to look at the project documents. Because SharePoint runs on its own server, D-A-S is "more comfortable" in sharing some documents with outsiders without compromising the integrity of their own network.
D-A-S is still learning and working with SharePoint and using it at different levels. Pumper says, "Normally, especially for a local project, the project manager would be at the office and a superintendent would be on the job site. The House of Blues was the first time we could have the project manager on site. He could access the entire e-project files and could do, for the most part, all that he could do at the office."
Current projects such as the Walgreens in Salem and Alliance are the first projects where they invited clients to come in and view the sites and it is "working out real nice," says Pumper.
D-A-S is happy with the Av-venire/SharePoint solution. Now their project managers and superintendents travel with their laptops and can download daily reports, schedules and job progress photos that are posted on their portal site.
Mack says that this solution is scalable. Even a company like D-A-S with hundreds of projects won't outgrow it. The next step is to add more collaboration. Now clients and architects are just looking. They can also make it interactive to have more collaboration and tweak the project schedule, for example.
But Pumper says, "We are taking baby steps. Once you know someone from the outside can change things, maybe in the wee hours of the night, you wonder do we really want that?"
Sometimes you do want outsiders to make the changes themselves. Con-sider the nonprofit, vendor-neutral networking group Community of Minds, currently sponsored by Thomson Hine and REI.
When it began during the dot-com boom, Minds didn't have a Web site, let alone other customer friendly ways to let attendees know about the event. Mark Maslar works with the group and said while it was not intentional, "It was almost like a secret to get on the mailing list." Not the best way to build attendance.
They would send out an e-mail blast stating, "If you want to attend, please send e-mail to so-and-so." Then someone would have to manually process the names and type them in for nametags. Besides being labor-intensive, the manual efforts didn't offer other benefits.
Blackpants Design Group was chosen to develop a Web site that included online registration. The Web site helped repair the secret handshake model that seemed to be in operation previously. Meetings and agendas, not to mention sponsor listings, were now easily accessible.
By opting in to an e-mail message, people are sent an announcement about the next event. In the body of the message is a link that takes them directly to the Web page for registration. A popular feature is to have the reminder directly added to your Microsoft Outlook calendar.
Event planners and sponsors can see, in real time, how many and who will be attending. This makes the planning much more accurate and cost-effective. The old manual pro-cess didn't allow for examining previous event's data but the new system lets them make food purchases based on historical data.
Plus, the manual process invariably led to some mangled spellings on nametags. The new system captures the name and company that the attendee enters and displays the sample nametag. If there is an error, they correct it themselves.
Maslar says it is a "much more professional experience" and when your audience consists of business professionals, they expect that.
By using a database solution, they can "slice the data in different ways" and send out a "Sorry you missed last night's event" note to a no-show.
The event coordinators can concentrate on the program, speakers and other meeting details rather than spend resources on tracking data and attendee logistics.
Maslar sees a real benefit in the scalability of the solution. For an event with six people, manual processing is no problem. But when you grow to 50 or 150 or 750, "you rapidly get to the point where you just can't do it manually."
And there is nothing more effective than IT to come to the rescue of manual processes – whether large-scale construction projects, small-event planning or your own business problem.