Case Study
Taming a complex build with a unified digital solution
Suffolk's Boston Children's Hospital enhanced team collaboration with Procore, enabling a seamless construction process
The Challenge
Suffolk’s Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) Hale Family Building project—the long-anticipated cornerstone of the healthcare institution’s $3 billion capital plan—would be built on an unforgivingly tight footprint in the center of the fully operational BCH campus, amid delicate pediatric surgeries, sensitive patient care, and a construction-stopping global pandemic.
The Solution
Procore’s cloud-based construction management platform neatly contained, consolidated, and clarified every aspect of this fluid and complex project, offering the project team’s 600 workers mobile data access in the field, instantaneous communications, single-source document management, and project progress even when COVID mandated a 7-week jobsite stoppage.
The Results
- Established a single source of truth that brought all project data together, making it easy for everyone to stay accountable
- Made it easy for stakeholders to access real-time project status from anywhere, keeping everyone in the loop no matter where they are
- Fostered better transparency by connecting all stakeholders, breaking down silos, and shining a light on potential risks
“When you have so much data being shared, you really need a platform that can sustain and handle all this information in an organized fashion. That's where Procore comes into play. It's the tool that turns what could be a disastrous flood of information and documents into an organized space that allows our team to collaborate efficiently.”
Robert Morsi
Superintendent
Suffolk
Suffolk Builds a Facility that will Offer Hope for Ailing Children
Suffolk senior project manager Jason Lansberry sees Boston through a builder’s eyes with an understating of the city’s size and compact neighborhoods. "In Boston, we don't have the opportunity to work in wide-open spaces. The surrounding buildings and streets usually date back to the 18th century so there's just not a lot of room to maneuver. For example, how do we lift generators up to the 12th floor of a building using a huge crane on a tiny street? How do you get a 100-foot column down a little alley, and then pick it up and set it in place?"
Boston Children’s Hospital’s long-anticipated Hale Family Building project is testing Suffolk’s ability to work in these close quarters—with particular sensitivity and precision. The Suffolk project team is endeavoring to "softly" build Hale’s 15 floors on a tight footprint in the middle of the bustling, fully operational BCH campus. Suffolk must raise the complex structure—the country’s most advanced medical tower—without impacting Boston Children’s Hospital’s life-giving mission or disturbing doctors, nurses, staff or the young patients.
"The hospital is treating very sick children," says Suffolk’s safety manager, David Clegg. "The client wants the construction impact to be minimal so there is a lot of pre-planning that must take place to make sure that happens. Everything must be perfectly coordinated. On a project this complex, if you're unorganized you're going to fall behind. Procore has been absolutely essential."
Taming Complexity with Consolidated Truth
BCH’s Hale Family Building is the centerpiece of a 10 year, $3 billion capital plan intent on saving and bettering the lives of ailing children from around the world. The beautiful lines of the tower will conceal life-giving technological intricacy—and high human stakes. Project manager Pablo Juarez sums it up, "The mechanical and electrical systems that go into a building like this are some of the most complex in the world. They were designed and built to never fail."
Six hundred workers on site tackling the varied complexities of a build like this cannot work in silos. Even remote stakeholders must be able to see progress reports for themselves in real-time, including the project’s hourly status 24 hours a day. How is this done? Procore’s platform gathers the teams and the project’s 10,000 moving parts into a commonly viewable, organized virtual space. Transparent workflows and unimpeded communications minimize risk, giving teams real-time information and task status, accountability, and the momentum and peace of mind that comes from shared project clarity.
"Where does all the project information live?" Jason Lansberry asks rhetorically. "The answer is Procore." The Procore platform offers both project cohesion and collaboration. "We have everyone on the team working within Procore, including all our subcontractors, the project owner, and the architect. Procore is where the contract documents live and are always being updated. I think we've had over 2,000 different documents updated for this project. It all lives in Procore." The platform houses the living, dynamic project data, whose aggregation through the build’s life cycle also creates a detailed document of record, and a deep pool of project data awaiting strategic analytics. There’s even a visible archive of the build’s evolution. "You can see the history of everything in the drawings tab of the project," Lansberry says.
Jobsite Lockdown No Barrier to Progress
On St. Patrick’s Day 2020, all work on the project site was stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For approximately seven weeks the physical Hale Family Building project was shut down. But work on the project continued remotely.
"At first, working from home seemed unthinkable," said project manager Evi Mandalou. "You typically need to be onsite all day, every day to manage the project. But with technological advancement there is still a lot of work and preparation you can do remotely."
"Using Procore we were able to use our submittal and RFI tools to organize what we needed to get done during those seven weeks of work stoppage," said David Clegg. "Without Procore we would have been doing it by hand using spreadsheets. But a spreadsheet doesn’t send you reminders of what needs to get done and when. Procore does that. This kind of technology is opening doors of new opportunity for project management."
Suffolk returned to work at the Hale Family Building site seven weeks later, fully armed with the plan and knowledge gained during the preparation work during the project shutdown. Safety manager Clegg oversaw a responsible return to the site that included the implementation of sophisticated safety technologies and strict safety protocols throughout the project site. Suffolk picked up ahead of where it had left off. By leveraging the Procore platform, the team kept the project moving through seven weeks of an idle jobsite.
Suffolk project manager Griffin Pharr is convinced. "In today's world with all this available construction technology, there are hundreds of individual digital tools that address one challenge. Procore is a project management solution that fulfills the role of so many of those tools in one single platform."
The Hale Family Building may be the perfect illustration—both in its construction and its healing mission—of technology’s ultimately humane power. Pharr, for one, sees more than a building.
"To me, there's a higher purpose to this. To play a role in building a facility that will help families and children when they need it most has had a big impact on me."
