Giving owners a permanent record they can trust

The Challenge

IPI works as an owner's project management firm — sometimes known as a construction manager as agent — hired directly by the project owner to oversee delivery while general contractors and trade partners contract directly with the owner. That arrangement made it difficult to get consistent, accurate reporting across multiple contractors: without a common project management platform and consistent processes, project data was scattered across shared drives, paper folders and inconsistent software.

The Solution

IPI made Procore a contractual requirement, running every project through its own instance rather than relying on a general contractor's. That gives IPI, and the owners it represents, a single record of cost, schedule and documentation that belongs to the owner permanently, independent of any general contractor's systems.

The Results

• Gave owners a permanent record of project data independent of general contractors’ systems
• Brought consistent reporting to prime contractors who previously worked from their own separate systems
• Increased owner confidence with a transaction-based system for financial data
• Provided the capability to organize and coordinate projects involving multiple engineers of record and dozens of vendors

Built for megaprojects, without holding the risk

IPI operates as a construction manager as agent, hired by owners to oversee some of construction's largest projects — typically $1 billion to more than $4 billion, running two to seven years. The company built its name on automotive megaprojects for international manufacturers, work that later led it into aerospace and defense, energy solutions, mining and metals, advanced manufacturing, and mission critical. 

IPI typically doesn’t hold contracts with the general contractor or trade partners. Instead, it's the company’s fee that's at risk — a structure meant to keep IPI’s incentives aligned with the owner's. "We have no motivation to do anything but help the owner succeed," says Shane Hanson, VP of Project Success. 

That structure pays off for owners in efficiency, too. When the company ran its first project for a major aerospace manufacturer — not the kind of company that maintains an in-house construction crew — it fielded a team of just 50 people. The client later estimated that the same work would have required 200 of their own staff. "We’re more efficient because this is all we do,” says Mark Shutters, VP of Estimating & Project Controls. “We’re not distracted by the day-to-day of running a huge company.”

A paper-heavy process

Before Procore, IPI's project data lived wherever it happened to land — a NAS box in a site trailer, one platform for RFIs, another for submittals. "We had multiple platforms, and information and workflows were in their own place," Hanson says. "Generally consistent outcomes, but inconsistent processes."

On the cost side, that meant paper. A lot of it. 

One employee's job was to walk folders — color-coded by invoice, change order and contract — from desk to desk for signature, then note where each one stood on a spreadsheet. "That's the environment we operated in at one point," Shutters says, "physically moving paper folders with a person's time." 

One record, owned by the owner

IPI's answer was to make Procore the backbone of its process – and a condition of doing business. Every prime contractor now reports through IPI's instance, a requirement built into the contract itself. "Getting contractual commitments from the prime contractors up front is what allows us to do our job well," Hanson says. "It means we can keep the curtain pulled pretty far back on performance and overall project health for the full span of the project."  

That structure means owners never have to wonder whether they'll have their own data when it counts. On a GC-led project, an owner typically has to extract and reconstruct their own data once the contract ends — and the GC's Procore instance often disappears with it. Because IPI runs the instance on the owner's behalf, that data stays with the owner. "You own the data," Shutters says. "There's not a potential conflict of interest in turning it over, whether it's been handled by us or by the GC."

That consistency has helped streamline the finances, too. "It forces a rigidity into the process," Shutters says, "but it gives our clients a whole lot more confidence in the data." Because every transaction is tracked, IPI can show an owner exactly who made a change and why — including, on one recent project, tracing a flagged budget issue back to a misassigned cost code and reallocating it before it delayed any approvals.

Carrying the model into mission critical

IPI's moves into data centers and other mission-critical work followed a pattern it had seen before: contractors overwhelmed by volume, spreading their best teams too thin. While hyperscalers mostly manage that work themselves, the gap that IPI found lived a tier down, with developers building data centers to lease back to bigger tenants, without dedicated staff to manage delivery.

These new kinds of projects put more pressure on the same system. One active project can have three separate engineers of record, depending on the part of the site, plus a long list of long-lead vendors feeding information back into the design — all coordinated through the same platform. "It's already a herding cats scenario," Shutters says. "I can't imagine doing this work without Procore."

A tool built for delivering trust 

Ask what IPI would miss most about Procore, and the answer is more than a single feature. "Nobody would know where their files were," Shutters says. Construction Technology Manager Tom Briggs puts it more bluntly: without it, the company would be back to "digital duct tape" — stitching together different platforms, some good at one thing, some with no answer at all, "and then you're going back to being an Excel wizard."

For a firm whose most valuable product is trust, that permanence matters more than any single tool ever could. "Procore isn't something we bolt onto a project,” says Shutters. "Our whole business is telling owners the truth about their project, and Procore is an essential part of delivering that.”