The County of San Bernardino Hospital Replacement Project is a $650 million hospital construction effort funded by a local bond issue. The project involves 12 different employers with more than 60 managers, 80 contractors, and 800 construction workers on site.

The Problem

Large construction projects are traditionally paper-based and, once underway, difficult to manage because of the overwhelming amount of information going to project managers. The systems for running large construction projects are often reactive: they do not control costs or bring the benefits of technology to a largely manual process. The project owner is not well protected from cost overruns, scheduling delays, or performance failures.

Once the project is running full steam, general contractors and subcontractors often don't have an adequate picture of what's going on. A subcontractor may try to shift losses from under bidding onto a change order. Sometimes contractors and subs end up in litigation and contractors and project managers have to go through an expensive and time consuming discovery process to retrieve the labor records and related documents required to contest claims.

The Solution

The County and its construction manager, JCM Group, decided to develop the Construction Project Management Information System (CPMIS) so all types of construction documents could be transmitted electronically between the owner, construction manager, architects, consultants and general contractor. The objective of CPMIS would be to provide a set of tools that would enable the San Bernardino Hospital Replacement Project to be developed with as few cost increases, delays and post-construction problems as possible.

The foundation of CPMIS is DOCS Open. The document management component integrates with email and workflow, using Banyan BeyondMail, and client/server technology using Oracle SQL server. An additional 30 off-the-shelf applications integrate with DOCS Open, Oracle and VisualBasic to support the complete range of documents and functionality needed on the project.

The primary user interface for CPMIS is through the email/workflow in box and VisualBasic screens. Documents are created, logged, opened and sent through the email presentation. Users can respond to documents through email, attach drawings, images or other written documents, or record a voice annotation. Predefined rules route documents to appropriate staff and managers, even if the documents are incorrectly addressed.

Requests for information, change orders, submittals, specifications, daily reports, test requests, and incoming and outgoing correspondence, including electronic mail, as well as voice annotations, drawings and photographs are all maintained in electronic files. CPMIS stores and tracks all documents, routes information electronically, and tracks all "conversations" between users. The system proactively provides reminders if an expected reply is late.

With the push of a button, managers can generate one of dozens of pre-configured reports summarizing effort, activity status or the chain of communications on any "conversation" on any section of any building by any subcontractor for any activity in any time frame.

There isn't a piece of paper that isn't available on the system electronically. All relevant information is on the system. Each document has a home, a purpose. It's analyzed when it's created or when it comes in. Each is profiled for relevance.

The system integrates a 9,000-activity construction schedule, all other construction scheduling operations, change order control, and document management.

Additional functionality designed into the system includes:

• measuring response times for submittals, requests for information and other contract documents
• relating manpower data from the schedule, the access gates, and the actual time reported
• generating a wide range of information for the monthly management report
• relating all documents that refer to a construction issue, even though the activities have been changed many times in the construction schedule

Because the County requires all the principal participants in the Hospital Replacement Project to use CPMIS exclusively for written communication and document control, data collection and reporting is standardized and audit trails can be generated immediately for any written transaction in the construction process.

Strategic Advantage

CPMIS applies manufacturing reengineering principals to construction project management. The all-inclusive document library in CPMIS provides tools for immediate feed back on performance, costs inventory and scheduling. It enables managers to catch defects quickly and respond to changes in customer demand. The system can help pinpoint where things go wrong as they happen - not months later when complaints come in. The Request for Information (RFI) procedure, the most common type of transaction used in construction management, has been reduced from 64 steps in a traditional manual system to 17 using CPMIS. Managers using CPMIS can quadruple the time spent on construction management and double the time communicating with other principals compared to managers using traditional methods. Automated document management and routing have reduced clerical time by half. After two years of work, the project is more than four months ahead of schedule and under budget.

For more information, please contact
David Horwatt at General Networks Corporation. (818) 249-1962. dhorwatt@gennet.com