Reducing costs and increasing productivity
through streamlined document management

Founded in the 1920s, Superior Construction is a fourth-generation, family- owned business with a long history shaping the America we know today through infrastructure projects across the country. Despite its age, with nearly a century of history behind it, the company is nevertheless forward-thinking in its commitment to using the best and most innovative project design and delivery methods to complete their projects.

With capital projects growing in complexity and thousands of documents being transmitted and shared among stakeholders, the need for a collaborative document management and control solution has never been greater. Superior Construction recognized this and followed through on its commitment to lead the way in the construction industry through its use of next-generation technology to improve project performance.

THE CHALLENGE

When Superior Construction signed on to work on a $320-million infrastructure project for the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), they knew it would be a massive undertaking. The interchange project in downtown Indianapolis, known as the North Split project, entailed rebuilding the entire I-65/I-70 interchange, including roadways and bridges. Superior’s role on the project included coordinating the design phase, as well as construction, which meant the team would be managing thousands of documents over several years.

INDOT had traditionally used SharePoint™ to manage its project documentation, but the limitations of employing a general-purpose point solution on a large-scale, multi-year project such as this were well known to the project controls team at Superior.

“SharePoint is not a document control system,” says Josh Kistner, project controls manager on the North Split project. “Anybody who’s dealt in document control understands its limitations. It’s just a storage system. You can handle letters and correspondence using SharePoint, but you can’t pass a design package from person to person to person using SharePoint. It doesn’t work,” he says.

Fortunately, it was written into Superior’s project contract to purchase a professional document management and control solution. The company obtained quotes from InEight and several of its well-known industry competitors in the document control space.

“You can handle letters and correspondence using SharePoint, but you can’t pass a design package from person to person to person using SharePoint. It doesn’t work.”

Why InEight?

Kistner had used InEight Document (then called TeamBinder) before and knew it to be an intuitive, easy-to-use system. It was also more economical than competitive solutions, all factors which let them to ultimately choose InEight. “It was kind of an easy selection process,” he says. “I’ve got experience with InEight Document, I know what it can do, and it’s cheaper, so it was kind of a no-brainer.”

The ability to customize and contour InEight Document to fit its unique business needs was another factor that led Superior Construction to choose InEight. “I don’t see anything that we required that was not present or available in the software, either upfront or as a customization,” says Kistner. “Everything we needed was either available or we were able to request that with the support team.”

And training and setup time were minimal, lasting only three or four weeks, says Tejas Borse, project control engineer at Superior, so teams could become self-sufficient fast and get to work on the project at hand.

 

Project Success

Even by the halfway point of the North Split project, the choice of InEight Document was yielding considerable benefits through increased efficiency, reduced costs and access to unique functionality not available with other tools.
With only 50% of the project design complete, the Superior Construction team had already processed more than 1,300 documents through the course of its work.

“If we didn’t have InEight Document, we would be processing everything via paper,” says Kistner. “We would have to physically take a huge packet of design drawings that people need to review – in this case 1,350 of them – and print those out so people could mark them up by hand just to rescan them and send them back to the engineer. It doesn’t work.”

In fact, Kistner estimates it takes at least four times longer to process a submittal on the owner’s SharePoint-based system than with InEight Document. Many of the efficiency gains realized derive from the tool’s ability to automate the process of recurring submittals, which constitute about 80% of the project’s total submittal traffic, saving team members hours of time wasted on repetitive processing tasks.

“If we didn’t have InEight Document, we would be processing everything via paper,” says Kistner. “We would have to physically take a huge packet of design drawings that people need to review – in this case 1,350 of them – and print those out so people could mark them up by hand just to rescan them and send them back to the engineer. It doesn’t work.”

“I also think we’ve saved a lot of time on reviewing,” says Kistner. Whereas it used to take a week or more for design drawings to clear internal team reviews and get sent to INDOT for approval, by leveraging the review module in InEight Document, that review cycle has been cut by more than half, to a mere two or three days. “From seven days to three days – I think that’s a lot of time we’ve saved. That, I think, is one of the most highlighted efficiencies of the system.”

The QR code feature has also added value, both in terms of efficiency and safety. Through InEight Document, all of Superior Construction’s design drawings are assigned a code. “That way, we don’t necessarily have to go to a site and audit each and every document physically because anybody having access to a camera could just scan the thing and know if the documents are the latest or not,” says Kistner. “I think that has helped a lot in reducing interaction, maintaining distance and trying to be safer than before.”

In addition to efficiency gains, InEight Document has lightened the load on staff and kept personnel costs in check by eliminating the need for a large and costly document control team. “I don’t know how many contractors out there right now are trying to accomplish document control without using a program like this,” says Kistner, “but I do remember what document control looked like 10 years ago. We literally had six or seven people in the document control department, and each person had a specific task so we could keep everything straight. Now, you’re talking about one person – two max – to control a very large design-build or EPC-type project.”

Even if you’re spending tens of thousands a year, that’s still less than employing a large document control team to accomplish the same result, notes Kistner, who says the total cost of ownership makes this system a wise investment. The fact that everything is stored in one place and organized and numbered correctly as well gives you a better result for equal or less money overall, he says. “InEight Document takes the document control people aspect out of a project. It’s definitely worth it.”

Summing up, Kistner reflects on the value offered by tools such as InEight Document, which he feels have become all but indispensable within the industry these days. “I could never imagine living without a document control system like this because you can’t get to where you need to be at the end of the day without having this type of program from the get-go,” he says.

“You don’t really know what you need until you have it. This is what we’ve always needed, what we’ve always wanted, and now it’s available and you can’t live without it, and you’re not going to live without it in the future – not on a design build or EPC project. You’re not going to live without this type of program.”

“I could never imagine living without a document control system like this because you can’t get to where you need to be at the end of the day without having this type of program from the get-go.”

 

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About InEight

InEight provides field-tested project management software for the owners, contractors, engineers and architects who are building the world around us. Over 300,000 users and more than 750 customers worldwide rely on InEight for real-time insights that help manage risk and keep projects on schedule and under budget across the entire life cycle. From preplanning to design, from estimating to scheduling, and from field execution to turnover, InEight has powered more than $400 billion in projects globally across infrastructure, public sector, energy and power, oil, gas and chemical, mining, and commercial.