Standardizing processes to boost project quality and safety

The Challenge

Adolfson & Peterson recently embarked on fulfilling a commitment to operations to define standardized processes and procedures, along with providing a state-of-the-art business application to their four regions. They were looking to create process consistency, and reporting, across all AP jobs, especially when it came to operations processes, safety and quality management.

The Solution

By implementing Procore, an integrated construction management platform, AP is working to standardize processes and best practices across all jobs—which will provide consistent data for better reporting and continuous improvement.

The Story

Adolfson & Peterson is a company that continuously strives to improve. But with four different regions—each a separate company within the AP family—improvement wasn’t a mere line item that could be checked with a few simple changes. A company-wide initiative was undertaken, with all key stakeholders weighing in.

"We ended up with an extensive list of business requirements for a potential project management solution. Our IT folks also developed a list of technical requirements. All of that got packaged into an RFP that was sent to the top tech providers. However, we didn’t limit our assessment to just business and technical requirements – we also considered intangibles. What’s the reputation of the company? How responsive do we think they are to requests for improvement? What’s their budget for research and development?" says Rick Poston, Director of Construction Management and Processes at Adolfson & Peterson Construction.

"Once we had settled on Procore—because Procore rose to the top—we were given an implementation team, and that team did a wonderful job getting us on board. Once implemented, the users of Procore became so enthusiastic about using it that teams on jobs that were already in-flight asked if they could use Procore. Of course, they weren’t going to transfer all of their data for the last year into a new Procore job, so we devised a way to give them access to just the functionality they could begin using right away: agendas for meetings, punch lists, daily logs, and so on. The platform spoke for itself," says Poston.

Doubling Down on Quality & Safety

AP runs company-wide initiatives called CMaP (Construction Management and Processes) projects. They’re currently on CMAP IV, part of which involves a company-wide safety and quality improvement initiative. In the quality arena, they’ve begun with quality control, inspection checklists, and observations and will move into further defining their quality assurance program, with the goal of using Procore for recording, measurement, reporting, and analysis, all for continuous improvement.

"Our goal in the safety arena is to give the all teams guidance on what to report, when to report, and how to report it, in Procore. That way teams can be more focused on safe activities and less on trying to figure out when they should record something, how they should record it, where they should file it. Procore helps us standardize, which is giving us better reporting and more consistent measurement criteria," says Poston.

But more importantly, according to Poston, is enforcing a quality and safety culture—what leadership is required and what involvement is needed from different people.

"While I don’t think any organization will ever completely eliminate injuries and incidents, it’s important to strive for that as a goal––to develop a culture that speaks to avoiding incidents and injuries––and develop practices around that goal, that’s what we are about. We talk about safety on every jobsite, in every office. We see safety as something that you should live, so the culture of safety is what we’re striving for," says Poston.

Poston continues, "Our belief is that the analytics will show a safe environment if we focus on practicing a safe environment. The thing that we stress is that we want everyone around us, all of our colleagues, the employees of the trade partners that we have on jobsites, owners that visit, or anyone else that visits a jobsite to go home safe at the end of the day."