How McClone Construction went paperless and mastered resource management

El Dorado Hills, Calif.-based McClone Construction Co. used the project management and analytics platform to transition from traditional methods (paper and Microsoft Excel) to advanced, intelligent resource management. Founded in 1975, McClone specializes in structural concrete and concrete formwork and has completed well over 1,200 projects across the United States, with offices in California, Washington, Hawaii, Colorado and Texas.

About 100 McClone team members, including PMs, superintendents, engineers, estimators and c-suite executives, now use ProNovos resource-management tools. McClone began rolling out the platform in 2018 and has managed more than 200 projects in the system. The subcontractor also leverages ProNovos to better determine which projects to target for bids.

McClone previously relied on the approach used by most contractors seeking to track and manage projects, personnel and equipment: using paper records (such as safety forms), typing data into static spreadsheets, and endlessly emailing photos, drawings and RFIs.

Like many of today’s subs, McClone was also using more and more construction apps, a situation that was on the verge of creating some problems. ProNovos, by contrast, integrates multiple streams of resource and project-planning data into a single, cloud-based interface. The dashboards are accessible from any location or device.

“It’s huge to be able to go in and know, without jumping systems, what your equipment and personnel needs are or what RFIs are hanging out there, all in one spot,” Kanouff said. For example, a project manager using the platform to review drawings might realize that a certain piece of concrete-forming equipment will be needed. “Without leaving ProNovos, that person can jump right over to the equipment section, see where that item is located and where it’s going, and then use that information to plan for the job,” Kanouff said. “Integration makes a very big difference.”

One of the subcontractor’s final steps in “going paperless” came in 2021 with McClone’s company-wide adoption of ProNovos’ custom form-builder module.

Across the industry, many subs either print and scan paper forms or work with writable PDFs for safety, inspection, waiver and other forms. Writable PDFs eliminate some friction, but they have distinct disadvantages — for example, they cannot be written back to a database. The ProNovos form-builder allows subs to create all kinds of custom forms just by dragging and dropping different elements, and the form data collected is ready for analysis, now and in the future.

“You can look up and inspect anything on the form and track historical trends,” Kanouff said. McClone, for example, uses ProNovos to track how frequently different topics are covered during weekly safety meetings. Likewise, subs can use ProNovos analytics to bend the curve downward on lost-time incidents and injuries, near misses, or violations — tracking this kind of information over time for the entire company, by project and by superintendent.

McClone has been using ProNovos’ custom form-builder for 95 percent of its former paperwork. “Now you take out your iPad, click to sign it, hit the email button and put your iPad away,” Kanouff said. The calendar view allows the company to see precisely what paperwork was completed and when. “So instead of going back and trying to look in a file folder to make sure that everything was done on certain dates, you can just look at the calendar view in ProNovos to see if anything is missing.”

Busy superintendents and PMs are now handling forms much faster, saving McClone thousands of dollars in labor hours every year. “But it’s not just the greater speed,” Kanouff added. “More of our paperwork is getting done simply because it is easier. People don’t put it off the way they might have when it was more labor-intensive.” The form-builder also makes it easy to attach photos to inspection and other forms, automatically logging metadata as proof of compliance, and puts form revisions into everyone’s hands simultaneously.

According to Kanouff, ProNovos has made it far easier for decision-makers at McClone to determine whether to crew up or crew down from week to week. They might use the system to find out if a particular superintendent is over-allocated during a certain timeframe, or look to see how many hours an engineer aims to spend on a specific project on a given date. “You want the right person for the right job,” he said. “By giving us greater transparency into our resources, ProNovos really helps us gauge and understand our active projects.”

In the same way as users update their “status” on social media, McClone’s teams use Operations Manager to quickly refresh key information. Decision-makers can access data related to overhead, materials, bids, costs, active projects, workloads, equipment and more at varying levels of detail — and evaluate present and future workloads of key managers, superintendents and engineers at a glance.

Subcontractors often struggle with construction equipment tracking. And yet when it comes to staying on schedule and on budget, knowing when and where a particular trencher or backhoe will be at a given time is important. In worst-case scenarios, subs shell out thousands of dollars in unnecessary rental costs, or inadequate equipment forecasting creates costly delays on multiple job sites. “If you have 10 or 15 different jobs going on and everyone requests the same equipment at the same time, the result can be a problematic bottleneck,” Kanouff notes.

Having tried various apps and spreadsheet-based approaches, McClone worked with ProNovos to implement a more efficient system. Simply by launching the app, McClone’s team members can now track and follow equipment wherever it is. When a team member successfully requests a given piece of equipment for a certain time period, that equipment no longer registers as available in the system. The shift to more efficient construction equipment tracking has saved McClone tens of thousands of dollars in rental costs since switching to ProNovos.

McClone also uses a ranking system to optimize the bidding process. In ProNovos, the contractor assigns a “1” ranking to estimated projects under negotiation, a “2” to those jobs it most wants to pursue and a “3” for estimated projects that are still uncertain. The rankings are based in part on how well present and future project resources align. This approach has allowed McClone to avoid misallocating its resources — a capacity that is particularly important in hot construction markets or those in which the company maintains smaller offices.

Transparency also helps during negotiations with customers. ProNovos allows McClone to show prospects that it has quantified all resources needed for the job. “Customers appreciate knowing that you can back up your promises with carefully compiled and analyzed data,” Kanouff said.

In addition to resource management, McClone also uses ProNovos to run analytics on its projects and operations. “We’ve been using historical data to run reports on things like equipment costs or jobs with similar characteristics. It has yielded valuable insights for us,” Kanouff noted. With offices around the country, McClone also values the way individual teams can use ProNovos to self-manage their resources. “You can track, manage and analyze your resources by individual area, not just the entire company,” Kanouff explained.