The Pike Company uses COINS to drive project improvement

LATHAM, NY (06/04/2010)(readMedia)-- What once took days is now instantaneous for the project teams at The Pike Company. Automated alerts and reports replace spreadsheets that were manually compiled and packaged into emails. Mauricio Riveros, Pike's Vice President of Project Controls, says "Pike has saved days per month in compiling data that we are now able to use to analyze and take action on jobs that are not performing well."

The Pike Company has always been disciplined in their process for reviewing job metrics and project management. Pike's Project Managers meet monthly with Mauricio to review their jobs' performance. To prepare for the project meetings, Mauricio used to spend days compiling spreadsheets and reports that would be emailed to PMs in advance of the meeting. Mauricio was looking for a better solution to both reduce the amount of time to needed to compile the job metrics and to have more timely data for review each month. The COINS OA Designer toolset from Construction Industry Solutions (COINS) provided the answer to both.

Teams from Pike and COINS sat down to discuss the current process and define the requirements needed to support the review of projects. As an ENR Top 400 General Contractor with a combination of self-performed and subcontracted work, labor productivity, subcontract management, and variance from budget are all key to a job's success. The design resulted in a dashboard with four main areas including: Red/Green Report, Subcontractor Risk, Productivity, and Unit Cost. In addition, a series of reports are automatically generated and emailed to PMs in PDF format each week.

PMs are able to review the reports via email and make changes and updates to their forecasts prior to their weekly meeting. Then the dashboards, which include drill down to supporting detail, are used during the meeting to access up to date information including any recent changes made by the Project Managers. Using the dashboards, a variety of Items are reviewed on a project.

  • The Red/Green Report uses color coding to highlight cost codes that are behind or ahead of budget. Trend graphs show the margin, cash flow, billings and costs on the job for the past 12 weeks, illustrating weekly fluctuations in these key areas.
  • The Subcontractor Risk Report highlights in red any Subcontractor compliance items such as expired insurance, unsigned contracts and overdue bond submission, with a yellow indicator if compliance items are within 30 days of expiration.
  • The Labor Productivity Report and Graph analyzes the hours and quantities installed for the week by cost code to establish a Unit Rate per hour. This Unit Rate is graphed for the past 10 weeks and compared against the Budgeted, Forecasted and Job to Date values to spot any trends.
  • The Unit Cost Report and Graph analyzes the costs and quantities installed for the week by cost code to establish a Unit Cost. The Unit Cost is graphed for the past 10 weeks and compared against the Budgeted, Forecasted and Job to Date values to spot any trends.

Pike's quality and cost control procedures used in conjunction with COINS automated alerts, reports and dashboards have improved job performance management. According to Mauricio, "The system has allowed the Project Management Group to identify, discuss, and resolve cost related issues on their projects."

About The Pike Company:

The Pike Company is one of the oldest general contracting firms in New York, in continuous operation since 1873. The company provides a range of services including construction management, design-build, facility, and general construction. It works on commercial, industrial, institutional, educational, and health care projects throughout the Northeast.

About COINS:

Construction Industry Solutions provides business software solutions to the construction, engineering, service and property sectors. A privately held company headquartered in Slough, UK, COINS globally supports over 50,000 users from its offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. COINS successfully partners with major organizations within the construction and service sectors in their core business processes: winning and performing work, managing cash flow, enhancing customer relationships, maximizing job profitability, improving employee performance and eliminating inefficient processes - all with a desire to reduce costs, increase margin and improve client experience.