The objective of any owner implementing a software like Procore is to see increased efficiencies across their business. Whether that is through increased productivity from employees, time savings in delivering projects, or data transparency across the business, the desired key results are often the same.
If you have achieved a successful Procore implementation in one division of your organization, you may be considering expanding your usage of Procore to additional divisions of regions across your larger business. Several recurring themes have emerged among conversations between Procore and successful Procore customers regarding the learnings they would offer to other owner organizations seeking to align their teams on adopting Procore, expanding usage, and the key results that they have achieved in doing so.
Here are some of their insights:
Scalability Begins with Standardization
Each project run within your portfolio needs to be governed, performed, and tracked consistently. This process will enable your organization to scale the efficiencies achieved through an initial implementation across divisions, regions, or even internationally. Although there may be variations in process across the business, this concept remains true, and it all begins with standard operating procedures.
“I can urge you, if you’re in the throes of [implementation], or starting out: crawl, walk, run is the best approach. Take one module at a time, or a few at a time, get your stakeholders involved, train the trainers, and then roll it out. We have achieved full buy-in with that approach and when you have that, you’ll get results much faster. The difference in the data that we get after having customized our SOPs and having customized the fieldsets in the Procore modules that we have, is that the standards across each construction site are identical. There isn’t one site team doing their own thing,” said Chris Howe, Senior Manager of Airports and Parcel at Vanderlande, a subsidiary of Toyota, in a recent customer spotlight.
When your processes are standardized, your team is more efficient and effective. From there, the expansion of usage becomes more simple. Communicate standard operating procedures from one division to another, making process revisions when necessary. The translation process becomes less daunting once you have established a baseline for comparison.
If writing SOPs is proving to be a challenge, consider investing in Procore’s Professional Services.
“Something that’s arduous for anyone is writing an SOP. Procore’s Professional Services team makes it easy. The interaction with the professional services team is: here is how we operate, so how do I document these processes in a clean way and make it specific to my organization? By partnering with the Training Center team, I was able to document our processes not only per Procore module, but by individual role. We have our SOPs broken out by Project Coordinator, Project Manager, Scheduler, Site Manager, Superintendent. If you were to click into your role, you would have your own specific SOPs documented. When you break it down by role or by deliverable within a task, you give more clarity as to who is doing what, and how the tools are supposed to be used by your team,” shared Howe.
Procore Analytics Can Identify Your Champions
At scale, Procore is vastly capable of reading your user input data across your portfolio, in turn providing you with a detailed overview of which employees are adhering to process successfully, and where team members may need assistance. This method can be applied to the analysis of both internal and external performance.
AMLI Residential’s Construction Technologist shared in a customer spotlight how their team: “[uses] Procore to recognize where there are growth opportunities for people. It’s not a ‘Big Brother’ tool, it’s a ‘let’s all get better’ tool. It makes it really easy to see where someone might be struggling in a particular area that is a requirement of their position. We use that as an opportunity to educate people and learn. ”
On the flip side of the coin — use your data to recognize and reward power users. Procore Analytics can enable your team to identify who is investing into the processes you have outlined for them, enabling management to reward compliance as you scale.
Consistency of Process Mitigates Risk
Simply put, a clearly defined standard operating procedure leaves little room for error. When the process is identical from project to project, you achieve redundancy of process, and in turn increase the efficacy of any individual stakeholder working on that project.
“Procore gives me peace of mind as a vice president that information is being collected in the same fashion across the organization on every project. That consistency allows us to create efficiencies in the business because our processes are performed correctly and our employees are using Procore in a consistent fashion. From there, our liability starts going down,” said Michael Clark, Thompson Thrift’s Vice President of Construction/Commercial Division.
There is an inverse relationship between risk incurred and the number of employees, divisions, or teams adhering to a like process. As you scale your adoption of Procore across the business, the financial implications become clear.
“You start adding all of these little things together, the value of that for us as an organization the size that we are, that creates hundreds of thousands, probably millions of dollars of savings a year,” said Clark.
Collaboration brings success and we recommend adding Procore as a recurring conversation piece during meetings to continually refine your processes and share learnings.
Repeatability Enables Trend Analysis
When your projects adhere to mandated processes, your organization will become more capable of comparing budgets, schedules, tasks, and costs in a consistent manner across your divisions. From there, the objective of achieving a central data repository for all stakeholders, from your executives to your project managers, is not far off. When each project has the same scorecard, you become more capable of effectively benchmarking the performance of your portfolio. The repeatability of any owner’s reporting processes are absolutely critical to enabling a successful expansion of Procore usage.
“[Vantage is] building in new regions, and we need to understand what it costs and how long it takes in certain regions so that we can determine things like how much is spent per megawatt in a particular region. Then, we can use that benchmarking when going into a new market,” said Abhilash Kunnatoor Margabandu, Director of Solutions Architecture & Engineering at Vantage Data Centers, in a recent case study.
From there, their team has become more capable of performing “data analytics and benchmarking to see how a project is doing, whether it’s in Montreal, Quebec, California, Virginia or Berlin. It [provides] the platform needed to capture data to see how [Vantage] is tracking on KPIs that are important to the company,” explained Margabandu.
When you are more easily aggregating standardized data across your projects, your team is spending less time compiling data through more manual methodology such as digging through various spreadsheets, thereby knocking down divisional data silos.
The learnings from all of these owners are clear: if all processes and reporting methods are operated through a single system in a consistent manner, you are set up to drill down through your data from a very high level all the way down to minute project details which should be translatable from project to project across your divisions.
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