Streamlining project management with smart integrations

The Challenge

McCownGordon, an early adopter of the Procore platform, has grown from $50M to $800M. Over time, this degree of scaling has come at a price — emergent pain points and unanticipated issues that may not be addressed by the platform’s manifold capabilities, however robust.

The Solution

Far from a static construction management solution, Procore’s App Marketplace makes the platform a powerfully nimble hub into which hundreds of niche solutions may be easily integrated to knock down each of McCownGordon’s varying project pain points as they arise.

The Results

• Achieved over 50% of document signatures within 12 hours, a significant improvement from the week or more previously required
• Selected the most effective point solutions from hundreds available in Procore’s App Marketplace to address specific needs
• Unified various best-in-breed solutions on Procore’s open platform, enhancing overall construction management efficiency

McCownGordon Knows Their Way Around Procore’s app Marketplace

In distant 2012, construction technology was in its arguable infancy — and warily regarded by a hesitant construction sector. That was the year McCownGordon’s Dustin Burns made his fateful pitch to the bosses. They bit. “When we signed up with Procore in 2012, we might have been around $80m in revenue and maybe 100 associates. Fast forward to today. We're approaching $800m with about 600 or so associates.”

Employee-owned McCownGordon Construction is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri with offices in Manhattan, Kansas, Wichita, Kansas and Dallas-Fort Worth. They are a tech-forward GC whose project types include civic, education, healthcare, manufacturing, mixed use, and public projects, among others. A thought leader in the industry, particularly around the subject of construction technology, McCownGordon’s VP of IT Dustin Burns is a frequently requested speaker. He realized early on the value of Procore’s integrations, as well as the novel power of gathering many competing solutions around one platform for the benefit of the Procore user.

“Was anybody doing an App Marketplace before Procore?” he asks rhetorically. “I don't think so. Back in the day, it was such a closed system on those products, everyone hunkered down around their solution.” Procore’s open API allows hundreds of niche construction point solutions to be seamlessly integrated into the Procore construction management platform. Procore’s App Marketplace is exactly that: a virtual browsing space where individual point solutions may be selected and implemented, according to the builder’s project needs. McCownGordon has made rich use of this ecosystem.

From Drones to DocuSign, McCownGordon’s Integrations Covers the Bases

Burns has been a believer from the start, both in Procore and their integrations. “I always told people in the beginning that Procore was going to become THE best in breed construction technology. Today that’s been proven. And having those tools at your disposal is great.” Integration that links McCown’s ERP to Procore, for instance, creates an airtight approval seal. “When the systems don't talk, a change order can just get passed through in a stack of papers,” Burns says. “That doesn't happen for us anymore. If you think about it, we have 40 to 50 active construction projects at any given time, 15 to 30 trade contractors on each one, we’re talking thousands of invoices per month effectively.” Integrated connectivity grounds the process—and also gets the trades paid faster.

“Construction is structured as ‘pay when paid’,” Burns says. “So if our owner pays us late, that just goes downstream. And so we want to make sure we can release those downstream payments immediately.  because --  well, everybody refers to the paper trail, but it's not a paper trail anymore, it’s a digital trail. Everything’s teed up, visibly approved and ready to go. Money comes in, money goes out. We want to make sure our trades get paid quickly.”

McCownGordon is taking full advantage of Procore’s open platform to cover every contingency, and it shows in the variety of integrations they use. “We just saw a lot of value in the DroneDeploy integration during the pandemic,” Burns says. “This project was a million square feet and we had 10 months. These were 16 hour days, roughly 10 million dollars in revenue per month of work. And the project teams, the architects, everybody was from out of town. Nobody can travel, right?” Enter the DroneDeploy integration.

“Our field engineer was the pilot on site,  able to fly at a minimum once a week, sometimes a few times a week. That allowed us to share the data out, so that our client could verify the actual progress with crystal clear visuals.” Less dramatic but just as crucial was McCownGordon’s use of the DocuSign integration. “With the implementation of DocuSign, our average time to return a change order was about a week to week-and-a-half. It’s within a day to 3 days now. That’s a big deal. And so that's how we process all of our contracts, too.”

Integrations are Solutions. You Can’t Have Too Many.

Certain integrations are a gift to the project owner. “When someone puts up a building,” Burns says, “20% of the cost is the construction phase. 80% of their total cost ownership comes after we're gone. And so, what we've done in leveraging integrations like StructionSite, is we’re able to leave behind for the owner 360 degree interior photography and videos that they can use over the lifespan of the building. We can absolutely service the building, but we also know the value to the owner of O&M autonomy. Leaving that thorough documentation behind gives them the ability to manage their own building—their own investment—more efficiently. There is an integration for everything and every persona.”

The sheer array of available integrations in Procore’s app marketplace is one thing—their mediation through the Procore platform assures connectivity of workflows and the end of silos. “You may have 5 wonderful, non-integrated point solutions,” Burns says, “and now you have people hopping back and forth between 5 applications to do their job. Procore’s integrations give you the solutions without sacrificing the collaborative transparency.”

He cites LaborChart as another integration success story. For years, Burns and the McCownGordon team used the integration to sync Procore project data into the LaborChart workforce management platform.

“The integration between LaborChart and Procore allowed us to forecast what we needed for each project,” says Burns. “It has allowed us to forecast out the work that we need. Just knowing how many people you're going to need six months from now is very valuable."

McCownGordon wasn’t the only contractor who found success with the LaborChart integration. The powerful connection between the two platforms helped prompt the acquisition of LaborChart by Procore in 2021. The integration has since been replaced by a new Procore product offering known as Workforce Planning. Today, McCownGordon and other contractors around the world use this tool to bridge the project and workforce information gap.

“We're trying to solve the knowledge gap with data,” Burns says. “Workforce Planning allows us to filter by tags that describe our labor needs, whittling 200 people down to 20 people.  In the past, we would have had to thumb through a spreadsheet and not know exactly where that person was assigned to right now."

Procore’s integrations are solutions. Burns and McCownGordon have a longstanding relationship with Procore, and have truly optimized the integrations. Since that day in 2012 when Burns made his case for Procore, one could say the guy has been vindicated. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

“We developed the budget module with Procore, we developed the ERP integration with Procore. There are so many things— Procore is not a vendor to us, not just software. They're partners. We can take our concerns to Procore and they provide solutions. And now we get to reciprocate by being on the customer advisory board. Obviously it's been a very fruitful relationship.” Burns pauses. “Bottom line—Procore and their integrations have been there to help us scale the organization.”