Costs and Benefits Quinn estimates the cost for implementing the EPM system at $35,000 to $50,000, including software licenses, the required servers, and consulting fees. He considers it money well spent. “When we look at ROI, it’s not cheap, but it has justified itself,” he says. He describes the following benefits:
The bottom line: “The program relieves us of a lot of clerical activities and frees our people to do what they do best: design, estimate, and manage,” Quinn says. “And our schedules are much tighter. We pick up on small details that might have gotten overlooked in the past. And it really impresses subs when you call them a month ahead to schedule a job or a job change. They think, ‘This company is really organized. They’re going to be easy to work with.’”
Preparing the Soil Everyone at Sawhorse stresses that the EPM implementation didn’t happen in a vacuum. “Change is part of the company culture,” Quinn says. “We’re constantly discarding best practices that didn’t work.”
Sawhorse installed a Novell network (a type of local area computer network) in 1987, making the company one of the first remodelers to do so. It started using AutoCAD and Lotus Notes a decade ago, and it has built extensive estimating databases.
“We’re trying to make the company more process-driven than people-dependent,” says David Shepard, one of the company’s PMs. “You can have the best PM in the world, but if he quits and you don’t have a process that details how and when things are supposed to happen on the job, then if you get someone in there who is a bit weaker you can have problems and upset the clients. Our template shows everyone how Sawhorse wants the job to go through.”
The current goal is to get everyone working together, and the EPM implementation is a key part of that. The next steps will bring field personnel more fully into the system. “If we assign a worker as a resource to a certain job, the system automatically e-mails them. The goal is to get them to check their e-mail in the morning before going to work,” Shepard says.
Which speaks to the real task: A schedule is a sequence of events that have to be done on time, but keeping everyone on that schedule isn’t just a sequencing problem. “It all boils down to communications,” Fussell says.
Ready For Growth A lot of remodelers might contend that what Sawhorse is doing is overkill. It’s true that the Enterprise version of Microsoft Office Project is usually found in much larger organizations; Steinberg doesn’t recall setting it up for any other companies of Sawhorse’s size.
“But their scheduling problems are the same as those of a big company,” Steinberg says. “They have multiple projects and resources, and they need to optimize revenue, schedules, and quality.” He also points out that Sawhorse can grow the business and not worry about its systems not keeping up. “This was designed to handle thousands of projects and thousands of resources. They can get bigger than they ever imagined and still use it.”
And Sawhorse plans on growing. Quinn says that is one reason the company spends so much time refining processes and creating sophisticated management systems. “We may not get to be a $40 million company, but if we do, we’ll be ready.”
Charlie Wardell is a freelance writer in Vineyard Haven, Mass.