How Granger Construction uses software to reduce costs in the field

Several key challenges were top of mind for Granger going into this project. It was going to be incredibly cumbersome to keep everyone up to date with changes, particularly if it meant running across 22 acres with rolls of printouts every time a change was made. Tracking issues was also going to be a challenge on a job that size. There were bound to be thousands of changes, and being able to easily find and track the relevant information for each one would be nearly impossible. In the big picture, it was also going to be a logistical feat to track what was happening across the entire project and keep the work flowing smoothly.

Initially, Granger was considering a software investment that would allow them to reduce costs associated with paper--reducing the amount of sheets and other documents they had to print, and the amount of time and labor required to distribute them. Project manager Greg Brand and a project engineer on his team considered three construction apps, and settled on PlanGrid, because of what they personally had experienced in the field. Even when PlanGrid wasn’t fully rolled out, they liked what they saw as early adopters, and knew how beneficial PlanGrid would be if they could get everyone on board. Before the University of Michigan’s athletics project got underway, Granger bought PlanGrid licenses for all of its subcontractors, and mandated that everyone use it across the build.

Granger is able to distribute new drawings to the entire team electronically, so they can always be confident they have the most current drawings, and no longer have to run across the site distributing endless rolls of printouts. Printing costs have dropped to negligible amounts. Early in the project, Granger used PlanGrid to identify changes that weren’t included in the CCD—there were 1,500 of them. Using PlanGrid, they were able to quickly recognize changes, notify the team, and price themselves correctly during the bidding process. This process proved vastly superior to printing out the last few versions of the sheets, and visually inspecting the different pages by flipping back and forth. With PlanGrid, they’ve used sheet compare every time a drawing changes.