Hensel Phelps Construction Co. is one of the largest general contractors and construction managers in the United States, ranked consistently among ENR’s top 20 contractors.
Hensel Phelps describes their process, “The Hensel Phelps Way,” as taking “a collaborative approach with proven processes, innovative technology, and effective communication in order to deliver exceptional service at every stage of the life of a facility.”
It’s no surprise that effective collaboration is at the core of the firm’s technology needs.
The Collaboration Challenge
The contracting firm would need to be able to navigate quickly through thousands of pages of documents—from drawing specifications to RFIs and ASIs.
“We’re all using the same set of drawings—the same information—to ensure quality and consistency and deliver an excellent product for the client.” Said Charlie Robben, Project Manager
ARC’s hyperlinking service does exactly that, allowing you to digitally point to whole documents or a specific element in a single document. When asked what this technology allows his team to do, Robben had the following to say:
“From a project standpoint, we’re able to share the same information across all platforms of the project as well as produce a deliverable we can hand over to facility management at the end. We’re all using the same set of drawings—the same information—to ensure quality and consistency and deliver an excellent product for the client.”
Connecting Contractors with Construction Information
For Project Engineer Morgan May, hyperlinking’s value is the connection the technology creates between the project team and construction information:
“The benefit of hyperlinking everything on this project is that we’re actually using one single set of documents for all parties. It’s a better quality control process for us to make sure that what gets put in place is what’s intended to get put in place.”
Facilitating this quality control is hyperlinking’s ability to centralize construction information in real time, across all team members’ computers and mobile devices.
10,000 Drawings, 1 Tablet
Robben stated that on high-profile projects they may be working with over 10,000 sheets of drawings and multiple volumes of specs. Carrying around and maintaining the physical quality of these documents is a cumbersome and unnecessary distraction, making hyperlinking’s mobile component a welcome change.
“With hyperlinking, we can put everything on a tablet or mobile device. All of the information is linked up to our hyperlinked set of drawings, maintaining real-time data to ensure that we’re working on the latest set of drawings, all the time.”
The Bottom Line
The value proposition and competitive advantage of hyperlinking is clear, but why ARC?
For Project Engineer Khyati Ruparelia the answer was simple: the bottom line.
“We ran a cost analysis on the project ourselves to see how many man hours it would take us to hyperlink our projects. And, in the end, we decided to go with ARC due to the cost savings, consistency, and quality their hyperlinking expertise provides.”
Part of Ruparelia’s analysis considered using an intern to complete the hyperlinking jobs but found that this approach came with a loss of time and quality assurance.
Besides the fact that Hensel Phelps’ governing body requires wet signatures on drawings, May asserts that it was best for the firm “to have ARC ensure that we got the maximum amount of performance out of those drawings as possible.”
