Winchester Construction Optimizes Paper-Free Productivity

The Challenge

With a small team of just 20 workers in the field and a steady pipeline of projects coming in from the entire state of Washington, living up to their mission statement of a "commitment to excellence” takes a team working in tight synchronization. To gain an edge in such a competitive market, all hands must be pulling together as one to bring in projects on time and on budget. Small businesses know better than anyone that time is money, but the company struggled with inefficient reporting and billing procedures that ate up precious time.

The Solution

By implementing Procore, Winchester Construction was able to boost profits by maximizing the effectiveness of their team, leveraging the platform to gain better insights from project data, improve reporting, and build more competitive bids. By freeing up time previously spent juggling reporting and billing paperwork, Winchester was able to focus on winning new business, building better client relationships, and optimizing labor productivity––ultimately leading to better profit margins.

Spend Time On The Business, Not The Paperwork

Like most construction companies, Winchester Construction was mired in the usual mix of spreadsheets, stacks of paper haphazardly jammed in manila folders, and frequent trips back to the office to collect a missing document. Taken together, these outdated processes sapped the company’s time and resources and split their focus that would be better spent building bids and winning new business. 

For a small company, lost time has a magnifying effect that can wipe away profits and blow carefully crafted schedules. "That’s really why we got into Procore, so that we could spend a lot more time on the road securing more accounts," says Barry McClure, VP of Operations for Winchester Construction. "This product enabled us to free up time and create more balance with all of the other business needs we had to worry about." Procore’s 24/7 support included at no extra cost also helped free up McClure and owner Bart Carstensen to pursue new clients, rather than spend time offering tech support. "I always want to be the first point of contact, but if there’s a question I can’t answer that’s above my pay grade I can say ‘let’s ask the experts,’" McClure said. "It empowers people, giving them the tools they need to succeed. If they have it in their hands and know who their point of contact is, you don’t have to get involved."

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Another limitation to traditional, paper-based processes is you never know for sure that you’re working from the most up-to-date set of specs or information. Without a centralized, cloud-based repository of the latest project data, the odds increase that someone along the way will be working from incorrect information, forcing frequent trips back to the office for McClure or Carstensen to double-check something. For a small team covering such a large territory, this time spent battling traffic or rifling through file cabinets was eating into Winchester Construction’s bottom line. Managers of small companies often feel like they have to be in multiple places to keep everything on track, but Procore allows workers to take and send pictures from the site that the leadership team can view from anywhere. 

"Instead of having to go out in the field and set your eyes on something, it’s the choice between 2 hours of traffic or 3 clicks of a button in 30 seconds," McClure said. "If a plumber needs to come and remove something, a picture is worth 1,000 words, so he sees exactly what you’re talking about. That’s something we’ve been able to utilize when referring back to our blueprints, sometimes it’s like, hey, this is drawn out this way but the existing structure is not the way the blueprints are drawn."

Using Data to Learn from Past Mistakes (and Successes)

It is exceedingly rare for any construction project to get from pre-planning to handover without a single mistake, but how early those mistakes are caught and rectified can make the difference between a minor scheduling hiccup and having to perform budget-obliterating rework. Procore’s ability to shed new light on project data helped Winchester Construction be proactive, rather than reactive, in addressing errors. 

"Instead of planning in the dark," McClure said, "now we have all of this archived history—all these past details we can reference and learn from. You know—maybe we could have saved a few days by scheduling lumber drops better. Or perhaps a project detail was a little bit over a particular team member’s head. Having all this stored data means we can continually improve based on what’s gone before."

Getting a more comprehensive look at their data also enabled Winchester to learn from what went right, allowing them to repeat successful processes on future projects. "You can look at the data and say, ok, this day was on point, the crew was on point, this is the way it’s supposed to be every time. So it kind of helps paint a vivid picture of what worked. Otherwise it’s the definition of insanity: repeating the same mistakes hoping for different results."