The Layton Companies: Paper Chaste (
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"As the holding company for four construction and engineering firms, Layton was being pummelled by
paper. Too many projects, bids and employees—and not enough control over estimates."
While building a multimillion-dollar structure, the imprecise choreography
between a general contractor, a dozen or so subcontractors and hundreds to thousands
of laborers is anything but graceful.
When things go awry with just about any single task—such as installing
the concrete foundation or plumbing—the fallout can bring construction
on a new metropolitan hospital or the latest chain restaurant to an unceremonious
halt. Miss one inspection deadline and a project can be set back weeks; cost
overruns can climb to seven digits.
That's what cash-flow-dependent businesses like Layton Companies need to avoid
if they're going to survive and thrive.
Layton, a Sandy, Utah-based holding company for four construction and engineering
firms, found that the typical construction delays were exacerbated by its outdated
billing system. Project managers had to wait four or five days for a bill to
be sent to accountants for review and approval. In the meantime, the next stage
in the project, such as hiring another subcontractor to hang the drywall, was
either delayed or ordered to proceed without anyone on site knowing the exact
cost.
"When you're out on a construction site, everything happens so fast, you sometimes
don't have time to think through all the implications of a single decision,"
says Alan Rindlisbacher, marketing director at The Layton Companies. "You've
got all these moving parts and a project manager out at the location trying
to keep everything straight and under budget. It's not easy."
Working with multiple subcontractors simultaneously providing a variety of materials
and services challenges even the most organized crew.
"We'd have to tell a particular contractor not to proceed with one element of
construction like the electrical work until we could get the order approved
back [at corporate headquarters]," Rindlisbacher says. "So you've already
got the next stage of construction, perhaps the interior walls and painting,
lined up for the next day. But they can't do their portion until the electrical
work is done. Meanwhile, we're paying for these contractors' time and falling
behind our own work schedule."
Managing a construction project from the initial bid all the way through to
completion is an endeavor that, until recently, relied mainly on Excel spreadsheets
and handwritten orders that were then mailed to corporate offices where an accountant
would approve any materials or subcontracting contract.
Getting an order or contract approved often took at least a day, which is a
lifetime amid the bulldozers and cranes of a construction site.
Worse, transactions on a given project were stored under one file and couldn't
be sorted by date, vendor, contractor or even a single project manager. So accountants,
field representatives and executives had to dig through green-bar paper to find
relevant data for ongoing jobs or completed projects.
Projects: Processes 
