ProNovos Director of Sales Brennan Medford is stoked about our new direction in 2022.
“We’re focusing on the technology and data needs of subcontractors in a way that is overdue for the construction industry,” said the former Procore sales and business development specialist. “For ProNovos, 2022 is set to be the ‘Year of the Subcontractor.’ I’m super-excited about it.”
Medford uses an analogy to explain what the shift is all about.
“Imagine collaborating on a tough project for several months using Google Sheets or some similar tool,” he said. “You’ve spent long hours on that shared document, but you try to login one day and find that the ‘owner’ of the file has canceled your access. You can’t view, edit or keep what you’ve done. The work is lost.”
This is typically what happens to subs after they wrap up projects in which they have been required to use the GC’s instance of a project-management platform.
“Historically, subs have been at the mercy of whatever platforms their GCs decide to use,” explains Medford, who lives in the fast-growing tech hub of Austin, Texas. “ProNovos is the first company to take the approach of putting the subcontractor’s needs first. It allows subs to own their data even as they maintain the same workflows that their GCs are accustomed to.”
— Brennan Medford, Director of Sales at ProNovos CIC
It’s all thanks to our new Procore data-syncing feature, which we’re rolling out as an update to the ProNovos Construction Intelligence Cloud toward the end of Q4 2021, with a ramped-up focus on the initiative in 2022.
NOTE: We are currently giving subs free early access to an initial version of the updated platform, no commitment required.
When all updates are in place, subs will be able to glean powerful new insights into their project and company performance by taking advantage of ProNovos’ data-driven project-management tools (Operations Manager) as well as our corporate performance-enhancing solutions for data-warehousing and analytics.
While the initial focus of this push is on Procore data, our best-in-class analytics engine has broad potential to offer the same capabilities to subs whose GCs employ other project-management solutions.
But first, a bit more about why subcontractors tend to lose their data in their collaborations with GCs.
The Incentive to Close Off Data Access
In a perfect world, GCs could let subs use their instance of the project-management software indefinitely, allowing subs to slice and dice that performance data in creative ways over the long term.
“If you want to become more efficient, you need to first understand where you are not efficient,” Medford notes. “Having access to that project data would allow you to answer questions like ‘how long did it take us to respond to those submittals or RFIs? And if they are taking too long, what is the root cause of that?’”
Access to such historical data can also give subcontractors an advantage when submitting bids. “They can use hard numbers to prove their success on past projects,” Medford says.
But in today’s construction software marketplace, many PM software providers use a pricing model that essentially forces GCs to withdraw data access from subs as soon as possible.
“Let’s say that, hypothetically, part of the GC’s management team does want to keep the project open and allow subs to work with that data over the long term,” Medford said. “The CFO is going to push back and say, ‘Look, we can’t keep paying the software provider for a sub that has finished its portion of the project, and we certainly can’t do that for a project that has already closed.’”
Additional Benefits of Syncing Procore Data
Data-syncing represents a way around this impasse. Here are a few concrete examples of what this approach allows subcontractors to accomplish.
