Partner event with ProNovos and Outside The Lines, Inc., focuses on the benefits of doing deep dives, running predictive analytics and building bridges between the office and the field.
ATLANTA (01/26/22)–Subcontractors can better cope with challenges such as the employment shortage and materials crunch by taking a holistic approach to construction data, said participants in a webinar hosted by Foundation Software.
The presentation by Atlanta-based construction analytics firm ProNovos and Anaheim, California-based design-build firm Outside the Lines, Inc. (OTL) highlighted the benefits of breaking down data silos. Experts provided anecdotes from the office and the field to illustrate how cloud-based project-management and analytics platforms can enable subs to bolster transparency, improve communications and better manage their personnel, materials and equipment.
Ramping up efficiency is even more imperative for subs given the intense challenges facing today’s construction industry, said Bruce Orr, ProNovos’ founder and Chief Data Scientist, during the half-hour event. A Foundation Software Partner, ProNovos spent much of 2021 honing a new suite of project-management and analytics tools focused specifically on the needs of subcontractors.
“Why should only large GCs have access to the latest technology that gives them a competitive advantage?” Orr said. “I come from a long line of hardworking subcontractors, and I know their struggles, challenges and risks—the ever-changing labor schedules that seem beyond your control, the escalating materials costs. I could go on.”
The first half of the webinar focused on innovative approaches to such challenges as implemented by J. Wickham “Wick” Zimmerman, CEO and Co-Founder of OTL, a design-build contracting firm known for its rockwork, themed environments and specialty water feature projects for commercial properties all over the world.
From the onset of the pandemic, Zimmerman noted, OTL has relied on slicing and dicing FOUNDATION® data in the ProNovos platform to manage critically important labor resources. “We self-perform our work, so we are constantly moving people from project to project,” the CEO noted.
Sharing his screen, the veteran construction executive showed the audience some of the custom dashboards OTL uses to run “best-case,” “worst-case” and “most likely case” scenarios in areas such as labor, bids, the project backlog, estimating, business-development, PM supervision and overhead.
He was then joined by his former employee Kevin Bright, who managed dozens of complex and high-profile projects in his 7-year career at OTL. Now a Solutions Engineer at ProNovos, Bright described how he and other OTL PMs have integrated data from Foundation and other leading industry applications into ProNovos to better manage projects.
That included closer tracking of RFIs, submittals and punch lists, Bright said. “Those are sometimes leading indicators of where you might be headed on a project—where you might have trouble,” he told the audience. “But something that always used to drive me crazy as a PM was when I had to jump across six different systems to get all that information and see it in one place. ProNovos was able to put that information in the data warehouse and give me analytics across the whole project.”
Bright concluded by describing the benefits to subcontractors of integrating data from the GC’s Procore instance into ProNovos—a topic that Orr will cover in-depth at the Foundation User Conference, March 6-9 in Orlando.
Eric D. Vittardi, Market Development Manager at Foundation Software, moderated the Foundation Partner webinar. The Jan. 12 event is available in its entirety here.