Customer success story: Hoar Construction

Hoar Construction started this project in March 2011 with paper-based document control. However, midway into the project, they realized that their paper-based workflow was incredibly difficult to maintain and began looking for a way to replace it with something more efficient. After a short evaluation period, Hoar Construction deployed PlanGrid as a document control solution and had spectacular results.

To get our time savings data, we conducted a survey of Hoar Construction personnel asking how much time using PlanGrid, instead of paper plans, saved them personally. Thirteen members responded, and on average they said that they saved 11 hours, 9 minutes per person every week. This is pretty amazing when you consider that 11 hours is more than 25% of a regular full time work week. Multiplying these time savings by salary data resulted in a net savings of $478,872 per year for the thirteen users combined.

The paper budget for this project was $60,360. This number may seem high for those used to smaller projects, but when a full set of hospital drawings cost $1,700 and a half set runs $875, the costs adds up quickly. Prior to PlanGrid, Hoar Construction printed 3 full sets and somewhere between 20 to 30 half sets of drawings. Since they’ve implemented PlanGrid, they proudly say they have stopped printing paper sets completely.

Rework is one of the hardest things to measure, yet it’s huge impact makes it something that can’t be ignored. On large projects, rework is a constant and expensive problem. It is common for workers to build off outdated drawings due to the difficulty of printing and distributing constantly updated sheets. According to a PhD thesis written for UC Berkeley by Dr. Peter Pei-Yin Feng, the cost of rework directly resulting from “poor document control” can range anywhere from 0.12% to 0.72% of total project costs. This means that on a $175 million project like the NEA Baptist Hospital, on average they will lose $735,000 to rework directly due to building of outdated plans. PlanGrid’s automatic syncing, distribution, and versioning of new sheets eliminates this problem, resulting in large savings.