Not long ago, if a project manager made a change to a plan, that change could take hours—maybe days—to reach the superintendent at the job site.

Thanks to some innovative thinking within our company and an investment in technology, this can now be done in seconds.

“Even just three or four years ago, communication was slower. A lot of times, things would happen in the office and it would take days for that information to reach the field,” says Project Manager Aaron Fisher. “Usually, a phone call would be made. But it would be really difficult to get the visuals out in a timely manner. We could call the superintendent on-site and tell them of the change. That’s one thing. But it’s completely different to be able to give them the visual of the change.”

Superintendent Nathan Pfeifer remembers, “I would have to wait for a new plan to be printed off and brought to the job site.”

Aaron and Nathan have led the charge to change the way we do things, implementing new methods, new equipment, and new ways of communicating. Documents at project managers’ desks are now synced to apps on superintendents’ iPads. When changes are made to plans in the office, they’re updated immediately in the field.

“The big change came from our last job at Jaymes Academy,” Aaron says. “Once we got done building it, Nathan and I had a discussion about how we could do things a little differently and better with the tools that we already had.”

Plans change all the time, and Aaron and Nathan realized there was a need for superintendents to always be looking at the exact same set of digital plans that were on project managers’ computers.

As Aaron and Nathan started working on their next project, Family Pet Health, they decided to start implementing these methods, which have been rolled out to all project managers, superintendents, and subcontractors. They say it’s made a major difference.

“Whenever I look at plans in my office, Nathan is looking at the same plans on his iPad,” Aaron says. “I can make changes in the office, save them, and boom, it’s there.”

 “This new use of technology has real-world implications that are saving clients time and money,” Nathan says.

“On this job, we were roughing in for electrical and the owner came in the first day and we already had boxes everywhere for the outlets,” he says. “We ended up having 50 to 70 changes on the electrical stuff. That day after the meeting, Aaron was able to mark up the plan and send it to me. I was able to go through it with the electrician that day and make all the changes.”

Aaron adds, “In the past if that were to have occurred, I would’ve had to call Nathan and tell him to tell the electricians to stop all work right now. But because I was able to mark up that plan in real-time and send it to Nathan as soon as that meeting was over, the electrician was able to keep working. We probably saved the owner $10,000 in change orders from all of the various changes.”

As we continue to look for ways to improve through new technology, Aaron says that both our staff and our clients will benefit.

“It allows us to keep our schedules tighter and communicate in a faster manner,” he says. “It makes us more efficient.”