The Challenge
Over the course of 25 years, growth in both scope and scale has made the Astra Group a highly respected, deeply involved player in the U.S. southeast region’s infrastructure. Astra Group’s multi-state footprint of offices and projects, though, has stretched the contractor’s connectivity, communications, and collaborative cohesion—threatening not just critical efficiencies but company growth itself.
The Solution
Procore’s cloud-based construction management platform offers a unifying, all-access hub for collaborative delivery of public works projects. From team communications and cross-portfolio visibility to a centralized ticket repository for public works inspectors—Procore’s platform turns the complex public works project into a single-source collaborative ecosystem.
The Results
Inspection docs where you can find them
All project documents collected in one virtual location for public works inspectors to access needed tickets and paperwork.
Button clicks versus staple remover
Pushing multiple RFIs with multiple photos to the engineer is a button-click, as is the engineer’s forward to city planners.
Unwasted expertise
Senior Managers pivot focus from typing, scanning, paper-clipping and approving to project delivery.
“The City of Savannah has numerous departments, and every department has a hand in our project—whether that's traffic engineering for our signals, or watershed, or Parks and Rec. We can all collaboratively discuss conflicts or problems without having to bounce around a multitude of emails, where maybe a thread gets lost somewhere and one piece of information gets dropped. It’s been really helpful.”
Theresa Rivera
Senior Project Manager
South by Southeast: Astra Group’s Growing Pains
"So…I didn't exactly fight Procore. I just wasn't really, you know, sold on it 100%." Theresa Rivera—Senior Project Manager at Astra Group—is delicately explaining her early hesitation with the construction management software. The 25-year-old company’s infrastructure arm had been progressing steadily since its founding, but the past five years had seen them through a rapid growth phase that tested their limits. Resources, offices, and municipal stakeholders were stretched across several southeastern states. Astra Group had earlier brought HCSS HeavyJob into their technology suite in an attempt to modernize and leverage new efficiencies. "At that time, we were still doing paper time cards and issuing paper paychecks," Theresa explains. "That was fine when we had two crews. We had 6 guys within about 20 minutes of the office. They were very easy to manage. Then almost overnight we had 13 crews spread all over the state of Georgia."
Integration Integration Integration
HeavyJob settled some of Astra’s more immediate paper issues, tracking productivity and allowing timecards to be entered in the field. "The problem," Theresa says, "was that it was—separate." HCSS HeavyJob could not integrate with Astra’s accounting and project management systems, leaving process gaps that slowed things down. Theresa brightens. "Enter Procore! Now our people have access to everything! We have plans on Procore, drawings on Procore, all the RFIs are out there. Submittals are at the touch of a button. It just made things so much easier. Procore is the glue that's holding everything together for us."
Time = Money
And what of Theresa’s early Procore hesitance? "Yeah, I have to work a technology fee into the project’s budget for some of our software as a job cost," she says. "But for a couple of hundred dollars on a $7 million project, for something to automate my life and make it so that I'm not typing things, I'm not scanning things. I don't need a stapler. I don't need paper clips. I don't need any of that other stuff. It’s just . . . it is amazing how much time it saves. It became very necessary to figure out a better way. And as everyone knows, in construction time is actually money. Every day we're out here it costs us money."
