Customer success story: TEECOM

TEECOM designed all of the low voltage infrastructure for the hospital, including telecommunications, security, AV, networking, wireless, and voice over IP (VoIP) systems. Mike Candler, Senior Design Engineer and Project Manager at TEECOM, was assigned to the project to coordinate all contractor installations. Due to the project’s size, Mike knew that traditional paper plans would be too cumbersome, time consuming, and costly to use--especially during construction administration punchlist and site walks.

Mike also found that other solutions just didn’t perform well enough: “Most folks were using [another tool] and it does not work. It just was not going to work for me. I have very little patience, and with [another tool] you need lots of patience.”

As well as the size of the project, one unique challenge that faced Mike was the speed at which the project went up: “The amount of area we had to walk, punch and inspect for progress was daunting. The building is so large they would try to finish an area or a floor at a time and then move to the next floor to keep the trades moving. There were huge teams of contractors on site. We had to keep up with these massive teams and keep reports going.”

After reviewing a handful of potential software solutions, Mike found PlanGrid to be the fastest at rendering and zooming into sheets: “The free trial was a plus, so I could try it out. It was available in the app store, easy to use, and fast at going from sheet to sheet or zooming in to an area. Rendering [speed] was a must.”

“The project construction was completed at the same time as the design and continued almost until they opened the doors, and there were hundreds of issuances of sheets over the course of our involvement with the project. Every week or two weeks we would issue updated plan sheets,” said Mike.

Mike took advantage of PlanGrid’s customizable issue tracking feature by creating unique stamps for each of the division specification settings (e.g. he created a custom stamp, CH, for Communications Horizontal Cabling), then assigned issues to each of the different contractors responsible. Adding photos to each stamp, placed on the relevant area of the plans, “really helped a lot in issue resolution,” Mike says. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

Mike estimates that PlanGrid saved him more than eight hours each week across the entire four year project, resulting in around 1,664 hours saved (or $250,000 in billable hours). He uploaded over 2,600 sheets, saving TEECOM around $2,000 in paper and printing costs. Mike also estimates $60,000 in non-billable hours was saved thanks to PlanGrid drastically reducing the need for rework.

New Parkland Hospital was the first time both TEECOM and Mike had used PlanGrid. Since the hospital’s completion, Mike has used it on every subsequent project.