How Clinton National Airport saved time and reduced risks with Procore

The Challenge

With an economic impact in central Arkansas of $1.6 billion per year, Clinton National Airport’s (LIT) complex operations and infrastructure needs resemble that of a thriving city. After a 2017 annual audit of the state’s largest airport revealed the need for more checks and balances and greater control over the capital budget, LIT decided to transition to an automated system for managing their vast array of construction projects, including their largest — the $60 million Taxiway Charlie project. LIT sought a better way to track project and compliance-related documents and correspondence along with project financials and costs. It was also essential that the solution integrate with their ERP.

The Solution

LIT chose Procore for its ability to adapt to LIT’s compliance tracking and reporting requirements while providing reliable financial controls. With Procore’s project financials and analytics capabilities, LIT can effectively track and manage its funding sources and DBEs (Disadvantaged Business Enterprises) while standardizing and streamlining its invoice process. As a result, LIT can efficiently and accurately report on project progress and every financial detail of the Taxiway Charlie project to stay in compliance with funding requirements and in lockstep with their stakeholders and board.

Procore helps LIT stay compliant.

Prior to Procore, LIT did not have an efficient way to manage its various reporting requirements, which made compliance a significant challenge. As Tom Clarke, Deputy Executive Director of LIT explained, “We have multiple funding sources as a public entity. We get the bulk of our funding from the FAA or Department of Transportation, and when you're using DOT and federal money, there are other federal strings attached. You have to make sure you're complying. Procore Work Breakdown Structure allows us to do just that.”

Increases Visibility Across Stakeholders

With a customized framework of unique segments and rules for tagging, tracking, and reporting, WBS’s granularity allows LIT to accurately report real-time financial information to anyone who needs to see it. “You can track your funding source across all your projects, and you know your spend out of these buckets of money,” explained LIT Project Analyst Douglas Bennett.

Additionally, LIT is able to track and report on DBEs — a requirement of federal financial assistance from the Department of Transportation. Clarke explained, “the FAA mandates that you report that on an annual basis, and rather than giving our seven-member commission a quarterly report that's two or three months old, we can give them a report that’s accurate as of today. If they want to know how much we've paid to a certain entity this month, both in total and to our DBEs, we can run it. This allows us to engage with not only our internal stakeholders, but our policy people, the city board, and the larger community.

Streamlines Complex Invoicing and Reimbursement Process

WBS has enabled LIT to not only track and report on multiple funding sources and DBE participation in real-time, but also to completely transform its complex invoicing process. When working on large-scale civil projects, such as runways and taxiways, hundreds of unit price pay items are paid by quantity installed and accepted. “When you do flat work, it's based on cubic yards of earthwork, square feet of pavement, lineal feet of drainage pipe that you install, “ says Clarke. To translate quantity-based contract values into a company-based Schedule of Values (or SOV) (used to list and track each individual cost throughout the project), LIT again uses WBS. Clarke shared, “the thing that's different from an owner’s perspective is that the construction contract for a unit price contract has hundreds of lines of items. The owner doesn't really care about each of those lines, but the owner does care intently about how we’re paying that contractor and each of his subcontractors. We have to make sure they are being paid according to the original agreement and being paid timely. Work Breakdown Structure allows us to track that information.” Invoices are now generated and approved in Procore and paid through an integration with their ERP, Microsoft Dynamics 365 — a process that has streamlined LIT's payment procedures so that payments that once took six to eight weeks now take less than 30 days. “We're processing every one of our architects, engineers, and contractors’ invoices in Procore,” said Bennett. This integration has proved critical for LIT as it not only allows them to pay invoices, but to apply for reimbursement from the federal government. "If you're a public owner, you're very familiar with SF-271. You use it to get reimbursed for all your projects. You have to be able to track that data and plug it into the right fields. We used Work Breakdown Structure to do that in a way that met the requirements of our finance department,” said Clarke. With the automatic population of the SF-271 via the distribution of their costs spreadsheet, LIT can easily request reimbursement without spending time and resources on manual data entry. Bennett added, “If you determine what you want to do and what you want to report on and set it up with those things in mind, the sky's the limit.”