"The Cream of the Crop for 2004"

Constructech Magazine

Constructech Magazine; Construction Coordinators
www.coordinators.com

November 2004

Construction Coordinators, Needham, Mass., founded in 1991, provides construction services for commercial and institutional clients. Projects are often of short duration and are highly detailed interior-construction projects such as building lobbies, hotel public spaces, restaurants, and stores.

For awhile, some of the sophisticated cost-control systems seemed out of reach, so the company used an old accounting system to keep track of costs, and a lot of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to prepare estimated cost-to-complete reports.

All that changed when Feeley & Driscoll, Boston, Mass., performed a systems review of the company. Considered a novel solution, Timberline, Beaverton, Ore., a technology company 20 years older than Construction Coordinators, gradually provided software to implement into the company’s processes.

Construction Coordinators expresses special appreciation for the contributions of Feeley & Driscoll, whom it terms one of New England’s most respected public-accounting and business-consulting firms.

Construction Coordinators used Excel templates to prepare estimates, and importing the estimating data into Timberline was a snap. Job-cost information is updated with commitments.

Crystal Decisions, Palo Alto, Calif., also provided Custom Crystal Reports software, which was created to match the industry-standard or custom forms (purchase orders, subcontracts, insurance certificate expiration notices, lien waivers, and so on) that it had produced with Microsoft Word.

As employees enter requisitions from subcontractors and suppliers, they are matched against commitments and all job and category coding is applied, thereby eliminating the tedious and error-producing matchup and lookup process that Construction Coordinators used to employ.

Since estimating data and commitments are fed automatically into the job-cost system, cost-to-complete reports are very simple to complete, reducing hours of work into minutes.

Feeley & Driscoll also recommended a monthly financial indicator service to the company. Once again, Construction Coordinators created a custom Crystal Report to replace the Excel spreadsheet that it had once used. Eliminating time, effort, and mistakes allowed it to concentrate on what the information meant, not how long it took to prepare.

Construction Coordinators is looking at several improvements for the future. It expects to implement Precision Estimating software to provide tighter integration and historical cost data between estimating and job cost.

It plans also to use bid management and procurement buyout to automatically request quotations from subcontractors and suppliers, track responses, and then generate purchase orders and subcontracts without having to reenter information.

As features are added to the project-management module, Construction Coordinators is ready to take advantage of the added functionality and further streamline the document-control process.

Constructech Vision Award judges see that proper business and financial consultants can help builders overcome the lack of technological inexperience.

To contact Feeley & Driscoll, please click here or call us at 1 (800) 392-6192.