PDG Corp Benefits from Procore's Feature-Rich Environment

The Challenge

PDG currently partners with the City of Melbourne on two key builds—Boyd Village and the Munro Development in the Queen Victoria Market precinct. It also collaborates with Tier 1 builders across high-profile commercial projects, for instance, Elizabeth North in Melbourne’s world-class education and biomedical precinct. The company previously relied on Aconex, however, was becoming increasingly frustrated by the system’s limitations including a lack of potential integration, innovation roadmap, and poor ROI.

The Solution

PDG implemented Procore Project Management and Correspondence management tools on the Elizabeth North project—which actually aligned with the builder’s preference to also use Procore.  "During our 12-month review process, Procore was so strongly recommended by industry colleagues. We felt compelled to consider it, and we saw the opportunities it could give the company. To gain integration synergies between Procore and our other implemented systems, such as Sage 300, Salesforce and Bluebeam, out of the box was very significant for us," said Richard Rhodes.

The Story

PDG wanted to take the opportunity to let the Elizabeth North project measure the end-to-end effectiveness of the Procore platform in a real-life scenario—from tendering to defects. 

PDG deployed Procore Project Management for PDG’s design and project management teams. The central platform has helped them stay on track by better managing tasks, reports and documents. It also allowed for a more streamlined collaboration between PDG and its builder, Probuild, as Probuild invited the PDG team to their Procore tools for RFI and drawing sets, offering insights into both complex site information or day-to-day requirements.

Rhodes considers this to be a success as he and members of his team "can't remember the last time the platform experienced an outage, unlike Aconex."

Understanding the Impact of COVID-19

Having one platform provide greater visibility across all projects has helped PDG understand the impact of COVID-19 on schedule and budget. "COVID-19 and subsequent mandated site shut-downs have inevitably had an impact on the extension of times. And for property developers, this is what we want to stay on top of—how the project is tracking and how the extension of time will impact the build and our financials. It’s particularly reassuring to know we own and control our underlying data – which gives us one less thing to worry about," said Rhodes. The ability to interlink the CRM, ERP and collaboration tools with Procore was the breakthrough the team was looking for to support its build to sales lifecycle. PDG’s holistic approach often sees it responsible for sourcing landmark tenants and commercial and residential owners. It needs to be able to link its sales, marketing and finance business solutions into its project management platform.

"We had zero ability to integrate with anything in Aconex. With Procore, we can link to our business tools in real-time—helping manage timelines for sales and marketing campaigns and beyond. Procore’s understanding of the tools we are using comes in handy when we do link construction and sales or finance to streamline our offering," he said.

Correspondence tool a highlight

Crucial for PDG was also Procore's recent development of the Correspondence management tool. Being a building owner meant this tool would maximise the communication with all parties across significant projects. PDG was thoroughly impressed with the local development team’s approach to the Beta program. "I would say this is a feather in the cap for the local DevOps team. They sourced the feedback of everyone in the trial, including PDG, and they made changes based on what we liked. It’s rare for developers to partner with customers like this and at the end of play, deliver such a workable solution."

Getting the culture right

One of the most beneficial changes for the PDG team has been the uplift in support from the entire Procore team. 

"Everyone we deal with has been pretty helpful, and Procore’s follow-the-sun approach mean whenever we need out-of-hours support, someone from the US picks it up and works with us. The Procore team has a considerable appetite to evolve the platform and our use of it. Their pace of innovation gives us great confidence in the future," concluded Rhodes.