Digital Plan Management and the One-Minute Reply

The Challenge

During a ground-up elementary school build, an electrician’s question for the project superintendent threw a pause into the schedule. The full plan set was needed to answer the question, and that was back at the jobsite trailer. So they started walking. 15 minutes to the trailer, a 25-minute collaboration, and a 15 minute walk back to where they started added up to about an hour’s worth of elapsed project time.

The Solution

Procore’s mobile, cloud-based construction management solution puts all project data in your hands, wherever you are. A single digital plan set—common to all and viewable on iPad or smartphone—puts the project picture in your pocket and goes where you go, while offering a real-time window on project status to the offsite owner.

The Results

Consistency

Standardizing process from project to project closes efficiency gaps and lowers costs.

One Project Truth

Single-source solution means plans and project details are everyone’s to see.

Accountability

Punch list ball-in-court and other auto-reminders encourage contractual accountability.

How to hit the ground running.

In 1994, founder Wes Reeder rolled up his sleeves and—in a hair-raising example of determined "Can Do”—tackled Reeder General Contractors’ (now REEDER Construction) very first project. The remodel of a storied old library in Hillsboro, TX would require exact replication of the building’s historic but timeworn elements. Reeder scribbled his proposal on a yellow pad, got the go-ahead and dove in. It’s fair to say he was in some instances innovating on the fly, reproducing the 4-inch thick wooden doors in his barn.

Before he could install the required elevator, a crew of 12 laborers spent 10 brutal days smashing a hole through two feet of 90 year-old concrete, then hit ground water while drilling the shaft. They pumped the water out, of course—at five gallons per minute. This took four months of 24/7 pumping. At the end of the project, Reeder quietly hitched his jobsite trailer and towed it home. Which is all to say, REEDER Construction did not gently tiptoe into the business. Today’s REEDER thrives on that same energy.

Spending an Hour on What Should Take a Minute

REEDER’s work today is largely in the public education sector. Their K-12 renovations and ground up construction are based in the metroplex area of Dallas-Fort Worth and surrounding independent school districts. As outlined in the origin story above, the company doesn’t shy away from decisions. What brought REEDER to Procore and the world of digital construction management technology? Lane Reeder—Chief Operations Officer and Vice President—can boil it down to a single incident.

"It was Birdville Elementary School; a $20 million, brand new, ground-up replacement school on campus. I was walking with the superintendent on the project, and the electrician approached to ask him a question. The super says, ‘Let's go look at your plans.’" Reeder raises an eyebrow of foreshadowing. "We went over to a dusty set of scaffolding that had only the electrical plans. The super says, ‘Well, let's go back to my trailer. I have a full set of plans.’"

Twenty five minutes of collaboration and solution-finding in the trailer were followed by the long walk back. Reeder estimates the process took 45 minutes to an hour of expensive project time. "I said, there's got to be a better way to communicate plans between the office and the field. This was the inception of why we wanted to go to a digital platform. It was about plan management."

In typical REEDER fashion, they indelicately hurled the Procore platform into the mix. "We created a Procore committee," Reeder says, then grins. "We used the biggest project we’d ever had as the first project to adopt Procore."

RFIs, Submittals, Plan Management, and the Cat’s Meow

"Procore’s document management is absolutely astonishing." REEDER Senior Superintendent David Rorrio was on the committee that both researched Procore and decided how best to put the software through the wringer. "It was a two-year, multi-phase, nine-building project. The drawing set probably had 350 pages of drawings, so Procore’s drawings tool was perfect for our superintendents—from day shift to night shift, good communication, RFIs, pictures; everything. It really worked out great."

The committee had decided on a practical, phased approach to Procore, one that spoke to familiar REEDER pain points. Lane Reeder recalls the thinking. "Let's take a look at the most important parts of how we manage a project—RFIs, submittals, plan management—and tackle those first." Rorrio recalls rolling the system out, and the immediate benefit provided by the several Procore tools they’d opted to start with.

"Instead of lugging drawings around, we have our iPads," Rorrio says. "We all work from the same single set of plans in the field. Getting the project engineers' buy-in was key to making sure the drawings were always updated, and included any new ASIs or SKs." The size and complexity of the project perfectly suited the stress-test REEDER intended for Procore.

"It was the right timing," Rorrio says. "Procore also had the best tools for communicating to the owner. There were hundreds of RFIs on that job. There were hundreds of proposal requests and ASIs. Procore helped us manage all that—versus trying to manage a job like that with spreadsheets and handwritten daily reports." The Procore tools they’d chosen fit the project hand-in-glove, to borrow an old expression. Rorrio adds his own. "It was great. These four or five Procore tools that we started using, the teams were like—'this is the cat's meow!’"

Frictionless Consistency

"From a holistic standpoint of how the company manages a project now," Reeder says, "there's a lot more consistency on how we do RFIs, how we do submittals, and how we manage plans." Procore’s construction management solution makes standardization effortless, so project-to-project, the workflows and processes form an actionable template. This helps immensely when someone else needs to step into the project wheelhouse and assume control, as Lane Reeder explains.

"Before, it was very challenging to step into another superintendent's position, you know. Where are his daily log forms? Where are his RFI forms? Where's the safety checklist? You would have to track down all these elements. But now that each and every team member is using Procore, it's not that tough to jump into a project, because they all look the same. It's, ‘Here's all the plans, here's all the RFIs’—so they don't have to log in to a virtual private network and scroll around, looking for everything. Consistency. That would be the biggest Procore ROI for us. And you know with consistency comes cost reduction and increased productivity."

A tool that makes the task clearer helps everyone. Reeder gives one example. "We have a pretty stringent punch list policy that coincides with our subcontractors’ contract language. They’re issued a punch list item and they have 14 days to contractually finish that item. I tell you what, they get these items done. Prior to Procore you could drop them a note, but that was often a waste of time. Everyone’s busy. Now when we write a punch list item, it's very clear—it's got pictures, it's got a location. And I tell you, when it comes to the end of the job, it's a lot quicker."

Procore is the one construction management solution designed by and for the construction industry. Procore’s suite of digital tools help eliminate project inefficiencies by bringing collaborative clarity and workflow transparency, from precon to closeout. And as demonstrated by Reeder on the now-legendary Hillsboro Library job, REEDER is going to deliver a beautiful project, come heck or high water.

"Pop's worked really, really, really hard to create a foundation," says Lane Reeder. "And we've really come a long way in the last four years—we understand that when we're building a project, we're building it with Procore. There's really no other way to do it"