McCarthy Building Companies
Increased time savings and more in-depth analysis with AutoSpecs
July 21, 2018
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Summary
Challenge
McCarthy Building Companies is an organization that prides itself on operational excellence, providing processes and technology to keep their team at the forefront of the industry. As a team, they didn’t realize that the process of creating a submittal register was as manual and time consuming as it was until their Southeast Division saw an opportunity for efficiency with Pype AutoSpecs.
The management team at McCarthy was made aware of the opportunity Pype provided, and they began to question how their own process was completed. Systems were in place for processing and housing specifications, but they were manually searched and retrieved using Bluebeam which required the project engineer to spend considerable time validating and building in Excel. There were three issues identified regarding this process:
- Frustration from project executives regarding the manual specification review process, which monopolized the team and made them unavailable for other work;
- Diminished quality, as time for analysis was lost on the tedium and fatigue of manual specification compilation;
- Difficulties with version review, as the team sifted through multiple iterations of the specs, with little understanding of the changes added.
After the Southwest Region piloted Pype AutoSpecs on a project, they provided feedback that it was efficient and had a high quality of output for specifications. “After the initial training session and initial use, I became very impressed and saw the benefits of Pype, our Project Engineers could spend their time much more efficiently reviewing and modifying the information that Pype compiled and less time reading, extracting information and retyping,” said David Heyde. At this point, a formal evaluation of AutoSpecs was ordered to determine if these qualifications were met to update their current process.
Why Pype Works for McCarthy
AutoSpecs has become an essential piece of McCarthy’s workflow. “The most noteworthy outcome for the decision to move forward with Pype was the fact that we saw a 200-500% increase in efficiency,” said David Burns. “That level of efficiency was showing twice on certain projects – once for the generation of the submittal log, and once the collection and management of closeout requirements.” AutoSpecs identified a problem they were not aware they had and provided a tool for dramatic time savings by automatically handling the tedious process of specification review. The accuracy of data supplied by machine learning creates efficiency for the project team. “AutoSpecs is more concise and efficient than the manual extraction of information. It’s a better use of people’s time and performs functions, like comparison of specification revisions, that are not usually done in such great detail.” said David Heyde. The McCarthy team is looking forward to continuing to use AutoSpecs and providing feedback to the Pype team on further areas for optimization.
“The team thought that Pype was a more robust platform overall. AutoSpecs was a mature solution with a company hyper-focused on machine learning and accuracy.”
David Burns
Director of Innovation and Field Applications, McCarthy Building Companies
