Meridian Systems Case Study - Winter Park Construction

Situation:

Winter Park Construction (WPC) is a general contracting and construction management firm specializing in the resort, condominium, timeshare, hotel and multifamily industry. Headquartered in Maitland, FL, WPC completes 20-25 projects each year and reports annual revenues in the $160M-$200M range. The company offers its clients a full range of services, from pre-construction and site development to in-house estimating and aggressive scheduling. WPC is #263 on ENR’s 2006 Top 400 contractors list and has been locally recognized for safety, growth and community involvement.

For WPC, a reputation for performance and excellence is everything. Part of the prevailing culture of quality is brand conformity for all documents that leave the office. The use of Microsoft products for project management made it difficult to product documentation that met the WPC standard for quality and consistency. In addition, the company’s proprietary document control system utilized multiple databases that required many levels of file saving. To make matters worse, spreadsheet-based financial reporting scattered estimates, budget reports and buyout logs.

Senior management set out to find a new solution that would address three major issues: document standardization to support the WPC brand, financial control through increased data visibility and a single database for streamlined document management.

Solution:

In early 2004, WPC purchased Prolog Manager from Meridian Systems. “After looking at all the options,” explains Craig Gum, WPC Senior Project Manager, “the management team felt that Prolog offered the most complete document control capabilities available, along with the financial capabilities needed to support our operations.”

After struggling to implement Prolog on their own, in June 2005, WPC decided to employ a more professional approach. WPC put together an in-house implementation team and hired HardHat Technologies, a Meridian Systems channel partner based in Conyers, GA, to help drive the rollout of the software. The WPC and HardHat teams designed an implementation plan that included:

• Training for the WPC implementation team so they could learn the “ins and outs” of Prolog before presenting it to the rest of the staff
  
• Designation of WPC employee Kathy Williams as the company’s Prolog Administrator and product “Guru”
  
• Identifying the specific Prolog features and functionality that would be implemented at various stages of the rollout.
  
• System configuration, database setup and customization of forms to support the WPC brand.
  
• Pilot project selection for critical testing in a live environment.

Benefits:

Within months, WPC had significantly improved employee performance by standardizing its project management using Prolog’s many capabilities including Cost Control, Document Management, Field Administration and customized reporting.

For its Preconstruction Services department, WPC recently purchased Prolog WebSite, which automatically integrates with Prolog Manager. Gum will use the Web-based project management tool to take this department’s performance to a higher level by enabling the extended project team to coordinate, collaborate and communicate better.

Although WPC hasn’t completed a job using Prolog yet (projects typically last two to three years), Williams and Gum note a drastic reduction in staff hours (especially overtime) and paper usage on active projects. “In my opinion,” states Williams, “Prolog has already paid for itself as far as the return on our Prolog investment goes, and I guarantee it’s going to be phenomenal.” Gum concurs. “Although we haven’t been at this long enough to have clear, quantitative analysis, there’s no doubt that Prolog provides a financial gain.”

View complete Winter Park PDF case study