Mortenson
By comparing versions, clarifying deliverables, and fostering project understanding across teams, Mortenson easily maintains contract compliance from day one.
October 18, 2019
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Summary
Challenge
Building a submittal register can be a time-consuming and repetitive process, fraught with errors and omissions that need to be weeded out in review, and is especially painful when dealing with tight project deadlines and multiple spec versions. Like most Project Engineers, Mortenson’s Thomas Winchell used to copy and paste his way through the spec book to complete his log. He was spending hours searching for titles, due dates, etc, and manually entering his data into Procore. This process was tedious and often led to an even lengthier submittal log review. “Sometimes the first draft of a register is incomplete,” said Winchell. “It’s oftentimes missing tests and inspections, or closeout submittals like special warranties, O&M training requirements, and attic stock entirely.” As a result, Thomas would have to repeat the process again and again to build out relevant logs later in the project lifecycle.
Watch Alison Hart explain how Mortenson uses AutoSpecs to drive quality, reduce rework, and earn repeat business.
Solution
“I was involved from start to finish, gathering information and presenting it to decision makers,” Winchell said, speaking about bringing the idea of automation to managers at Mortenson and the project owner of the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Alison Hart, Manager of Project Solutions at Mortenson, and other leaders were intrigued about its potential to improve accuracy throughout the project lifecycle, and the project owner was interested in the data from using this new tool and how it could benefit other projects moving forward. “They took a chance on Pype, they tested it out on a few projects for us, and found great benefits,” Hart told us. “When we introduced AutoSpecs as one of our standard tool-sets to our project teams, we got high ratings from all of our staff. People wanted this on their projects.”
Winchell and his project team concluded that for above-average projects, there was a significant cost savings of thousands of dollars for building a submittal log inside of Pype. They also found that through AutoSpecs, they could pull submittals from the specs, and they were instantly organized. AutoSpecs automated the submittal log generation process and provided a deeper understanding into the true scope of the project by allowing the team to spend their time visualizing a more detailed submittal management roadmap. As enterprise clients, Mortenson has found that their manual process of submittal log creation yielded 612 submittals on average, while AutoSpecs finds an average 1,409 submittals. Winchell concluded that “the accuracy of the log I’m creating with Pype is the highest it has ever been.”
“Pype does a good job of separating action/informational submittals, closeout requirements, and tests and inspections. That helped me as a PE in precon, and helped the rest of the team throughout the life of the project.”
Thomas Winchell,
Project Engineer, Mortenson
