Revitalizing Cleveland’s skyline with streamlined construction

The Challenge

Cleveland Construction was burdened by labor-intensive manual processes. As a company that strives to efficiently produce high-quality projects and provide their employees with the best tools available, they knew they needed a better solution.

The Solution

With its ability to automate previously laborious manual tasks, Procore has given Cleveland Construction the edge they need to build more efficiently and deliver premium quality projects.

The Story

Elliot Christiansen is a part of something bigger than himself. As Vice President of Construction at Cleveland Construction, he’s been involved in restoring what Forbes has called one of the Top 15 Emerging Downtown Cities. And their contribution is significant.

"In the last 12 years, we’ve done more historic adaptive reuse projects than any other contractor in Downtown Cleveland. We’ve restored some of the biggest buildings: the Terminal Tower, the Schofield Building, the Halle Building, the Calfee Building, and taken a 100-year-old building and adapted it to something that today’s generation can use."

Elliot recounts with pride the experience of preserving the beauty of these historic buildings, "It is fantastic to drive around downtown and see buildings that were once boarded up and see now that they’re vibrant with people living in them and know that we were a part of it." But there was a time when their successes were clouded by problematic systems.

It was 2008 when Elliot joined Cleveland Construction. At the time, submittal and RFI tracking were manual processes, and the results were frustrating: "We would just have this master spreadsheet that said, ‘This is the day you received it from the trade contractor. This is the day you sent it to the architect. This is when you got it back.’ And as soon as you update that spreadsheet, it’s outdated."

So in 2015, they began looking for ways to combine each of their solutions in one place. Their search brought them to Procore, which stood out for its unique unlimited user model. "Being able to give access to everybody and not have a peruser cost made it so we can give access to our architects, our engineers, the cities that are doing inspections, the Ohio Historical Society, our clients—everybody has the same information all the time."

Cleveland initially ran three pilot projects: an outlet mall, an airport renovation, and a distribution center. Each had a different project team and different experience levels with the company. The feedback was unanimously positive: "Some of our oldest superintendents, people that have been with the company for 40 years and are starting to retire, who—when I first started working with them—could barely turn a computer on, were some of our biggest advocates for it."

After six months of trial, they decided to implement Procore across all of their projects. Elliot believes their success is directly tied to how it enables and empowers their teams: "Procore allows us to automate the labor-intensive data entry. It allows us to get everybody on the project on the same page. There are constantly things changing: drawings change, RFIs, tons of submittals—but making their jobs easier by using technology is really what we’re here for."

"There are three things that are really important to us. One is our workers’ safety—proactively preventing injuries so that everybody goes home in the same shape they showed up. The second thing is quality—turning over a very quality project to our clients. And the third thing is making sure it’s on time and on budget. Procore allows us to do that."