Procore Accelerates the City of Memphis

The Challenge

The City of Memphis, Tennessee, was on the brink of major change. In 2020, a $200 million capital investment plan designed by Mayor Jim Strickland was approved by city council. This plan, called Accelerate Memphis, included significant improvements to parks, streets and other city-wide assets—all within two years. To pull this off, the City needed the right software to manage all these projects.

The Solution

The City was bogged down by complicated internal processes, lack of collaboration and visibility, and more importantly, difficulty reporting across projects to leaders, taxpayers and other stakeholders. The City required an intuitive solution that could provide the analytics and insights needed to pull off Accelerate Memphis—and projects beyond. They found Procore.

The Results

• Procore’s unlimited user model allows the City to securely include all stakeholders with custom permissions, enhancing collaboration without extra costs.
• Heightened visibility in Procore reduces the need for status meetings, enabling stakeholders to view all Accelerate Memphis projects in one portfolio.
• Procore helps the City monitor project schedules and responsibilities, ensuring accountability across numerous tasks within Accelerate Memphis.

A legendary city and an unprecedented CIP

“Home of the blues & birthplace of rock 'n' roll,” Memphis, Tennessee is known for some of the best music and barbecue on the Mississippi—and for Elvis Presley. With approximately 650,000 residents, the City of Memphis has sought in recent years to improve the lives of its citizens and the historic streets, parks and public assets they use every day.

In 2020, Major Strickland pitched and received approval from the city council for a $200 capital improvement plan (CIP). This CIP allocates $75 million to “Activating Memphis 3.0,” which is the city’s first comprehensive plan in two decades, funding the improvement of signage, light pole banners, bus shelters, crosswalks, streetlights and more. Another $75 million is dedicated to improving Memphis parks, and the final $50 million goes towards revitalizing city-wide assets, such as the Liberty Park youth sports complex and the Historic Melrose mixed use/library/housing development.

However, there was a significant caveat—the projects that made up this CIP had to be completed in two years. Craig Hodge, a project manager for the City, remembers the pressure—and the relief of finding a solution to manage it all on: “We were asked to do five times our annual CIP budget, given to us at one time, and we were supposed to complete all these projects in two years. The only way that was going to be possible was if we had much higher visibility into the projects. With Procore, you can create a project in a day, you can add everyone to the project, add the deadlines and you can have much greater portfolio visibility than what we previously had.”

From siloed to a successful, single source

As a municipal government, the City had difficulty sharing project statuses with stakeholders due to heightened security and permissions. “Previously, we did not have a way to share document repositories with outside organizations to report across project portfolios to division or city leadership, to track meeting, agenda or task items across divisions—anything that could have been in a silo was in a silo,” recalls Hodge. Without everyone able to be on the same page, it was challenging to make plans that could be shared across the board. 

“One thing that the City had struggled with prior to having Procore was keeping a large number of projects on track, especially when they involve permissions to outside government agencies, whether it's our state transportation department or our city utility,” says Hodge. “[We didn’t] have a way to see all projects and the steps required for each project in a single source—they lived in a folder on each project manager’s computer.”

When the City implemented Procore, they realized the benefits of providing access to all required stakeholders on each project. Whether a specialty contractor or a city official needed insight into a project or plan, Procore’s Project Management tool could readily provide it. “Shifting to Procore has allowed us to get everyone on a project team—internal, external, leadership and people in the field—working out of the same platform. It’s allowed us to view project schedules across entire portfolios and deadlines,” reports Hodge.

Unlimited users, unlimited potential

Among all the silos that the City was experiencing was a lack of interaction among stakeholders. In many instances, this was due to lack of licenses and the use of point solutions. With Procore’s unlimited user model, the City is able to add anyone to any project with the right permission levels so information can be both accessible and secure—and best of all, at no additional cost.

“One of the main benefits of Procore is the ability to add members of external organizations to the project teams in Procore,” says Hodge. “In city government, our internal Microsoft Office 365, Excel and everything is pretty locked down, and makes it hard to share documents across teams and organizations. Just being able to add all the project members to the interface at a single location has been very valuable.”

Getting teams connected in a single solution has improved quality of life across the board. This visibility has made an impact on day-to-day operations for everyone involved in Accelerate Memphis, from trade partners and contractors to city leadership and project managers like Hodge.

“As an owner, we want to know if a project’s on track, if a project is on budget, what a contractor needs from us and what we are asking of the contractor. We can do all of that within Procore,” says Hodge. “We have a lot of complicated internal processes that we force on ourselves. Being able to document that in Procore and create workflows in Procore can really simplify that, and makes it a lot easier when people shift in and out of projects. Everyone’s already on the same page and knows what steps are needed to get a contract signed or to get a permit—so I think it’s fantastic for owners.”

Improving operations with analytics and financials

The City leans on Procore’s analytic tools to facilitate monthly performance reviews with pre-built dashboards. The team can configure tools to work for their business processes without needing to hire a technical consultant to customize. “Procore allows people such as myself, with no coding experience, to build your own correspondence type and customize pretty easily,” shares Hodge. Procore provides the City with actionable insights and data in one convenient location. Procore has also made an impact on how the City manages their budget. With a CIP of unprecedented size, it was necessary to carefully steward and track every dollar. “With Procore Financials, you can make a change to the project budget in two seconds,” says Hodge. “You can also document who made the change, why the change was made and who approved the change—everything is immediate and available. It’s been very helpful to be able to highlight key milestones from project schedules. As Accelerate Memphis continues, it’s important for the City to inform citizens about project updates, and with project information at their fingertips, the City can do just that.

Providing insights for success, Procore continues to help Accelerate Memphis today and beyond.