Managing financial and commercial (e.g. contracting and change management) processes, data and reporting for capital projects is far from easy, and many facilities owners and developers running construction projects simply get by with their current status quo, systems like email, shared folders and Excel. That is, until something (or someone) happens that forces the organization to address this pain and risk as a priority for improvement. Hopefully that “something” isn’t an extremely costly or damaging occurrence, but more often than not it is, so why wait for that negative experience?
Times have changed - Assess your Current State
The first step towards improvement is a current state assessment where you take an honest look in the mirror and identify the risks, challenges and overall maturity of your processes and technology tools around planning, building and operating projects. This helps you determine the improvement opportunities to focus on, and gives you the business case to ignite the change and a baseline to track against as you implement it. To put it bluntly, the goal posts have shifted significantly over the past 5 years, and a successful path forward requires modernization across your technology and the related processes it supports.
In completing this assessment, many of you will identify problems including:
Siloed and disparate data
Friction in stakeholder collaboration
Fragmented and delayed project visibility
Inconsistent and potentially erroneous reporting
Insufficient processes and tools to control the project
Inability to leverage historical data to improve future decisions
Trouble connecting stakeholders across the field, office, and enterprise
Difficulty managing risk and maintaining visibility into potential change in the field
Lack of data standardization blocking the ability to compare across projects and teams
Consider how this impacts your ability to deliver consistent, high quality, successful projects.
So, how can you improve? If you’ve got the right people in place, then it’s time to look at maturing your processes and technology as the next step.
Take the next step, with Procore
There are three key pillars of project delivery success: People, Process, and Technology. Even if you have the best people in the world and know what your processes should be, the technology your teams leverage must support those people and processes or you will fall behind your peers. The Procore platform does exactly that!
I would have loved these solutions in my Asset Management days when I was spending countless hours chasing information through email, relying on complex manual spreadsheets, and trying to leverage commercial real estate accounting software that was not helpful for project management. It was also quite rewarding to implement Procore Financial solutions for my consulting clients, such as Boston Children’s Hospital
So how can capital project owners and developers leverage Procore for success with financial management? There are three primary ways:
Digitize your business processes
Utilize purpose-built solutions
Standardize and connect your data
Digitize your business processes
With Procore, streamline collaboration with your business partners, end users, and any other internal or external stakeholders by providing a central hub for all project data and communication. Across the Procore platform, information is available to the people and processes that need it. The platform is designed to boost productivity and transparency with a digital thread of linked data and documentation.
Procore’s solutions are easy to integrate with other software through our open API (check out the pre-built third-party applications available in Procore’s marketplace). This promotes incredible cross-functional collaboration and real-time data capture across the project lifecycle that you can leverage to monitor, control and improve in many ways.
Procore’s ball-in-court tracking keeps everyone on the same page with real-time visibility into current status. The automatic change history, including digitally captured workflows and approvals provides an easy way to trace the full story from start to finish.
With Procore’s powerful Mobile capabilities, valuable field data can be captured in real time on site, and is instantly available to other stakeholders and integrated systems.. And vice versa, field personnel have the latest documents and communications at their fingertips at all times.
This process connectivity, centralized data source, and streamlined collaboration are key to how owners can leverage the Procore platform to reduce risk, and increase efficiency, visibility and control in financial business processes.
Utilize purpose-built solutions
Historically, many project teams have endured piecing together project information from a mish-mash of sources. In addition to the manual spreadsheets referenced above, many are stuck trying to leverage email, public file sharing tools, and corporate ERPs built for Finance, Accounting, and Procurement teams. It’s time to change the status quo and give your teams what they need - a dedicated solution for construction management.
At Procore, our strategy is building solutions that truly solve our users’ problems, and improve the lives of everyone involved. The result is purpose-built solutions that are highly configurable to your needs and designed to seamlessly integrate with other business applications such as your ERP.
What does this really mean? Here are three (of many) examples:
Streamline key tasks
When you combine connected data with tools built specifically to solve key tasks such as forecasting, you can drastically reduce administrative burden and create more time to focus on higher value aspects of their work.
For example, advanced forecasting is one way Procore streamlines an otherwise highly manual task. This solution makes it easy to create monthly cash flow forecasts across the project lifecycle by leveraging connected budget, commitment, and cost data, along with efficiency boosting functions such as multi-line selection and date driven spreading curves. The result is more accurate and current information produced with a fraction of the effort and pain.
Integrate seamlessly with the rest of the business
Procore customers are able to achieve a single source of truth across the business through robust API-powered integrations. The platform is built with maximum extensibility in mind, which means we invest in the ability to seamlessly connect Procore with other applications that are essential to your business, such as corporate ERP systems, and pretty much any other software that can send or accept data. More than 95% of Procore customers utilize at least one of the third party application integrations available in Procore’s marketplace
Report and analyze with ease
Many of us are too familiar with reporting that takes days, or weeks of manual data compilation from various sources into complicated spreadsheets and rigid templates. That pain is compounded by the fact that what you produce is only somewhat accurate, hopefully complete, yet likely outdated when it’s done.
Procore aggregates all of your project data in real time as stakeholder collaboration flows through one platform. This puts you in the driver's seat with a complete picture you can monitor and report in any way you need across your projects, programs and portfolio(s). Within the financial management solutions, users can leverage out-of-the-box templates, or easily configure custom views and calculations. With Procore, users have accurate, complete, and current reporting at any time with a few clicks.
Procore’s Analytics solution provides an easy way to extract powerful insights on scope, schedule, and budget from all the data across your tech stack. Quickly and accurately answer fundamental questions such as where is the budget today across projects and the entire portfolio? Or use the anticipated costs report to determine what is going to be spent. Learn more about Procore Analytics for Owners here
Standardize and connect your data
Spreadsheets can be powerful tools, but even the best “Excel ninjas” will tell you they are error prone and near impossible to keep aligned with the rest of the business or across a portfolio. It’s time to help your teams get out of the land of manual spreadsheets and siloed data that is holding them back. Procore’s solutions save time, reduce risk and keep all stakeholders on the same page with synchronized current information.
Procore is configurable to your needs, so you can establish standardized data structures, templates, reports, and processes aligned to your way of working. Combine this with Procore’s permission structure and you’ve got a solution that eliminates the time sink and errors present in more manual methods, while enforcing your processes and controls across various projects and teams.
Set your teams and stakeholders up for success
Don’t wait until that “something” bad happens that forces your organization to address the risk and pain in your current status quo. Be proactive in taking the next steps to improve across your portfolio with Procore’s financial management solutions.
Learn more about Procore’s financial solutions for Owners in the product overview video below and request a personalized demo today to see how you can leverage the power of the Procore platform for success.
