When Thompson Thrift’s construction arm initially began using Procore, their commercial division was quick to see the value in adopting Procore for their development and preconstruction processes. Michael Clark, Vice President of Construction at Thompson Thrift, leads these projects from preconstruction through project completion, including property management after tenant turnover.
Elana Jack, Senior Construction Project Coordinator at Thompson Thrift, not only focuses on working with the commercial division’s owners representatives, but manages compliance within Procore to ensure all stakeholders are using it effectively and consistently to Thompson Thrift’s standards.
In a recent Procore webinar series entitled, Owners Customer Interview, Cassandra Gibson, Procore’s Product Marketing Manager, got the chance to sit down with these two members of the Thompson Thrift team to discuss how Procore has benefitted their business.
Improving efficiencies through consistency
When asked why the commercial division chose to onboard Procore, Clark had the following to say:
One of the key factors of leadership in managing teams is consistency. I think that’s the number one thing that Procore brings to the table. With Procore, regardless of your role, the process is the same from project to project which brings redundancy, and from there, increases efficiency. What allows us to continue to improve that efficiency is having Procore as a one-stop shop for all project information.
We can operate all of our processes through a single system. For example, having a documentation process from the land acquisition processes all the way through turnover to the tenant. Procore Analytics has enabled us to take the data one step further and drill down into our data from a very high-level view all the way to minute project details. Meanwhile, our field teams are consistently entering information into the system so that all stakeholders can access this information at any point. Having access to this information 24 hours a day through Procore improves communication. In our industry, we often don’t communicate well – Procore allows for that improved communication.”
– Michael Clark, Vice President of Construction at Thompson Thrift
For Jack, it was a matter of keeping everything to a higher standard of organization. She highlighted the value of moving away from having multiple softwares to centralizing all of their data in a single place while noting increased performance from their general contractors as they required them to use Thompson Thrift’s instance of Procore.
If you look at our list of tools when you open a project in Procore, it’s almost like a checklist of project information. From documents to the daily logs, it creates a checklist to help our construction managers to operate in a consistent manner from project to project. What’s more, if someone is not using it to standard processes, the reporting system makes it easy to find those flaws and correct them.”
– Elana Jack, Thompson Thrift’s Senior Construction Project Coordinator
She continued, noting that Thompson Thrift’s Corporate Operations team has taken notice of the increased level of accountability and standardization delivered through Procore’s reporting abilities, specifically with Procore Analytics.
Now that they understand the powerful tool that Procore is, they’re utilizing it for reporting upwards to the executive leadership team and getting a lot of their data from the system. We went from having several different construction technology platforms to having all of that connected under Procore. The ease of being able to access this data has been helpful not only for us, but for the executives that need insight into what we’re doing.”
– Elana Jack
Mitigated Risk Means Massive Cost and Time Savings
For Clark, the value of this increased level standardization and reportability stems from Procore’s ability to mitigate risk:
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. Keeping consistency leads to compliance at the highest level.
[For example,] we’ve in the past had issues where we had the wrong set of drawings for the civil site, and luckily we caught it before installation. If you’re in this industry as an owner, you know that it takes a couple of different versions to get permits issued, so access to version management in the system has created great cost savings. This past error represented hundreds of thousands of dollars of risk. 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.”
– Michael Clark
We asked Clark to expand on the cost savings of Procore.
Our biggest savings is in time. If we can cut a month out of the delivery of a project – given general condition fees and the interest that we’re paying at closeout – then holding accountability becomes a cost reduction in itself. When we deliver early and hand our keys to the tenants, that’s the success story. In a lot of our preferred development agreements we have with our tenants, it’s the first thing they say: they like how we manage things by using Procore. That’s a huge plus for us as a company because we show up as a leader and set ourselves to a high standard.”
– Michael Clark
Return on Investment
To wrap up our conversation, the Procore team revisited an idea that came up during its initial discovery sessions with Thompson Thrift — the concept of “getting out of Procore what you put into it.” We asked Thompson Thrift what their partnership with Procore taught them about software implementations in general, and what has been most helpful in gaining increased adoption and standardization within their organization.
Clark shared the following:
What Procore does more than anyone else is Customer Service. From the initial implementation, Procore’s team engaged with us to help us get everything working correctly, and answered our questions, and that’s what people need to realize is the difference between [Procore and] other options.
It’s one thing to have something that works well, but another to have that support. When we make recommendations for changes or mention a feature that would be helpful to see in the software, Procore reaches out to us and wants more information. They want to make the system better. Procore listens to the consumer better than any other organization I’ve interacted with in my career.
We spend less than three percent of our total revenue to have technology that offers consistency and protection. If you want to grow your business, Procore is a great tool to allow yourself to grow. It allows new people to step in and perform a lot quicker. When we first started, I felt it would take our employees about six months to get up to speed, and now with Procore, within 30 days or less, I find they are more up to speed and able to produce much quicker. That’s another cost savings you see during the onboarding process of new employees.
As a consumer, you have to educate yourself to make sure you get buy-in. Doing your homework and talking to other Procore customers is very important. The Procore family is a network of people who believe in what they do — using Procore is a credibility point when I’m vetting contractors. Are they really investing in their company and cutting down on their liability? You have to have a champion, if you don’t put the effort into the system, you’re not going to get the result that you want.”
– Michael Clark
For Thompson Thrift, the value of Procore lies primarily in its ability to increase standardization of processes and reporting to decrease their organization’s liability.
To learn more about Thompson Thrift and Procore’s partnership, you can watch the entire interview, including additional interview questions from the audience, by clicking here.
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