Case Study
How R&H Construction uses Planera to consistently produce 25% higher quality pre-construction schedules and improve job site safety
by Noor Lodhi, Head of Customer Success, Planera
Executive Summary
R&H's adoption of Planera has transcended traditional scheduling constraints, fostering efficient collaboration, precise bidding, and proactive risk management. They noticed that schedules created in Planera consistently demonstrated a 25% improvement in quality, reflecting the tool's role in ensuring sound logic and guiding users to create robust schedules.
Background
R&H Construction is one of the premier builders of multi-family housing units in the Pacific Northwest. In line with a growing industry-wide trend, project scheduling is done by superintendents instead of being centralized or outsourced. With that comes a focus on developing and improving scheduling capabilities across the team.
Challenges
Senior project superintendent Andy Hernandez has been at R&H for 22 years and has used every manner of charts, formats, and software to create project schedules. For Hernandez, the main goal with every project is to effectively communicate with a large group of people in a variety of different ways.
“It’s been a struggle, especially in the last few years because it’s difficult to get everybody to look at the same plan, at the same time and provide feedback immediately,” said Hernandez.
Using Gantt charts has been the most common scheduling format at R&H, but in Hernandez’s experience, many project stakeholders find them difficult to understand. As a result, he usually creates several different schedules to explain the plan to all the stakeholders.
“Anything that will help communicate the plan and project’s needs to a group of people better than we have in the past would be a huge benefit,” Hernandez said.
Transforming Project Scheduling with Planera
When he first used Planera, Hernandez said he was surprised at how easy it was to navigate the tool and how effective it was at building out a schedule.
“I was shocked at how fast I could put together a schedule,” said Hernandez.
He said working in Planera’s Canvas tool reminded him of the days when his team created schedules by drawing out flowcharts or bubble charts and sticking pieces of paper to annotate information at each step. This was a highly manual, but visually effective process, now made incredibly easy with Planera’s digital whiteboard and interface.
Easy to use, effective to communicate
More accurate bids, greater flexibility and improved safety
A major goal for R&H is to add more detail to its pre-construction schedules in order to increase the accuracy of its project bids.
“We want to have bid packages that really reflect what we're looking at, so there are no surprises,” said Hernandez. “The only way we are going to really get into the weeds on this is if we show that we understand the job, we understand the labor hours, and we understand how much time is needed so we can get real buy-in from the client.”
Getting to that level of detail required resource loading the schedule, which had been a cumbersome process in other software. Hernandez said his first pass at resource loading in Planera was “awesome” and it enabled his team to send out a bid package that contained accurate estimates of labor hours. This allowed them to have a better conversation with the clients about their needs and timing expectations.
Another advantage of Planera’s digital whiteboard is the flexibility it allows in changing or updating schedules. “I love the Versions feature,” said Hernandez. “If I’m asked to change the construction type on a part of the building, I can quickly go in and modify those pieces without changing the whole schedule, and see what that flow looks like. That’s huge.”
Hernandez said another valuable feature within resource loading was the ability to tag and identify safety concerns and high-hazard activities within the schedule. He could then take the schedule to the Environmental Health and Safety department where they could get a breakdown of the activities and provide the right level of support.
“I was able to load the schedule, filter it, and say “On this week, in this project, we will have 87 guys in fall protection and we might need some additional help then,’” Hernandez said. “It was huge for the safety team, they found a lot of value in that.”
Added bonus: a great marketing tool
Not only did Planera allow for faster, more accurate schedule creation, it boosted R&H’s brand as an innovative, and digitally forward company. “It looks different, it looks new, it looks flashy and it doesn't look like a Gantt chart,” Hernandez said. “Frankly, some of the clients we work with, they're looking for new, innovative and not maybe just the old way.”
Outcome
For Hernandez, a low-quality schedule lacks details around resources, timing, and dependencies. This leads to outcomes that can be expensive and frustrating, especially when it comes from a lack of understanding about when tasks begin and end.
“When I go back and try to find out why a job went sideways, one of the consistent issues is a poor quality schedule from day one,” said Hernandez. “If you can get out on the right foot with a high-quality schedule, they can be well maintained and communicated, that's a lot of the battle right there.”
Hernandez said his company uses a set of metrics to grade the quality of any given construction schedule before going into construction.
A consistently higher quality schedule
Testimonial
“I wasn’t shocked, but I was a little surprised to see that schedules built in Planera were consistently at a higher quality than we are used to seeing,” Hernandez said. “I believe it is because Planera helps guide the user through building the schedule and fixing some of their bad habits, all while ensuring the links in the logic are sound as they move through the schedule.” Using Planera Andy was able to instantly improve the quality of the schedule by at least 25%.
Conclusion
By embracing Planera’s intuitive interface and powerful features, R&H has transcended traditional scheduling and collaboration constraints. The team can build schedules faster, and communicate plans more effectively. It has become a catalyst for enhanced communication, precision bidding, and proactive risk management within R&H's operations. Planera's adaptability and user-centric design have empowered project stakeholders to work more effectively, anticipate challenges, and seize opportunities for optimization at every stage of the construction process.