Keeping projects on track and teams engaged

The Challenge

HITT Contracting needed a way to keep owners informed on progress and enable project teams to get ahead of risks to schedule and budget.

The Solution

An early Procore adopter, HITT expanded their use of the platform to give stakeholders visibility into project status and surface early indicators of potential problems so they can mitigate them.

The Results

• Enhanced owner engagement through interactive dashboards promotes timely decision-making and collaboration
• Real-time reporting and on-demand data provide a comprehensive view of project status, improving overall transparency
• Proactive risk management allows teams to identify and resolve potential issues early, minimizing disruptions and delays

With Procore, HITT actively involves owners in the construction process

HITT knows that many project owners consider new and expanded buildings an extension of their brand – they want to get it right. That means being actively involved from the beginning to see progress and participate in the decision-making process. According to Karl Sorensen, Director of Project Solutions, “Procore has become that platform where we can foster and cultivate that collaboration.” HITT creates dashboards that owners can track in real time. When changes come up, they have information at their fingertips to understand the issues and implications for schedule and cost.

Shared information from a common, single source of truth means that everyone is looking at the same information to reach common goals. “Giving access to these different portals in Procore allows owners and partners to not only be involved with the construction process, but then more intimately involved with the decision-making process, which has been very impactful.” This is especially important as designs get more complex, such as HITT’s areas of focus including data centers, laboratories, and industrial spaces.

Founders Warren and Myrtle Hitt sat around their dining room table in 1937 to get the business off the ground. Now, entire project teams – owners, HITT team members, and specialty contractors – sit at meeting rooms tables around the country and virtually envisioning new projects and overcoming day-to-day challenges to bring them to completion. “Because construction is no longer a black box, owners want to see the process of what we are doing,” Sorensen says. “Procore provides that vehicle of transparency that they’ve been looking for.”

Even when they aren’t meeting together, the entire team has information at their fingertips to solve problems more quickly. Unresolved RFIs could be a bottleneck to moving forward with building. But Procore’s RFI log streamlines and tracks correspondence, sends automated reminders, and provides visibility on open items in a dashboard. What’s more, the impact of any pending changes are captured in the budget, making it easier to manage cost impacts.

HITT uses Procore to streamline processes and drive accountability so they can deliver on their commitments

As HITT has found, Procore is a one-stop shop for collecting data, organizing project information, extracting the right metrics, and making mission critical decisions. Project managers and business unit leaders have a built-in feedback loop with on-demand data and real-time reporting. Sorensen says, “It’s a fantastic organization and efficiency tool.” In portal dashboards, teams can easily see the number of open actions and set reminder notifications for team members to automate key parts of the accountability process.

Rather than piecing information together from various sources, HITT’s team members can leverage information from change orders and daily reports to make sure schedule and production are matched up and they can view progress against timeline. This way they “make sure that we’re producing and being as productive on job sites as we set out to be, ” says Sorensen.

HITT uses Procore to foresee and mitigate risk to keep projects on track

Being forward thinking is core to the way HITT works, whether that means imagining the possibilities of new technology or proactively managing project risk. With Procore, they “not only manage and control the variables in front of them, but once that’s controlled, they can start being proactive in the future.” That means more time to get ahead of issues before they become problems.

Without Procore, a project manager’s time and efforts could be consumed with worrying about what could happen. HITT has found that by using Procore, project managers have the bandwidth to interface with stakeholders in more productive ways, due to the time savings from efficiency gains. In fact, many of them use Procore to manage projects that fall below the threshold requirement they have set, saying “my projects run best when I’m using Procore.”

For example, with Procore’s Inspection tool and Observation reports, users can identify safety risks and better manage their job sites. Sorensen says, “Procore makes risk not only manageable but incredibly mitigated.” HITT team members use insights from their data to proactively take action to reduce risk at the project level and in a way that helps all stakeholders. That same information, along with inspection reports, helps control quality.

Having this kind of process control gives HITT the structure needed to test and deploy new technologies without causing disruption on the job. At Co|Lab, HITT’s innovation center and dedicated research and development space, the company develops and tests out materials, performance, methods, and new technology with a goal of advancing the building industry and designing solutions to support day-to-day operations teams. HITT’s R&D team works with Project Solutions to ensure a smooth handoff and integration into existing workflows to keep the company’s high performance standards now and in the future.