Silverado Streamlines Pre-Construction Scheduling with Planera

Company Overview

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Silverado is a leading demolition and excavation company on the West Coast, specializing in large-scale projects like bridge removal (Bay Bridge, Candlestick Park), industrial demolition, site decommissioning, and earthwork for public works, developers, and industrial clients. Silverado is known for tackling complex jobs with expertise in safety and environmental compliance. The company offers a full range of demolition services, from building and selective demolition to marine work, and complement it with excavation, site prep, and hazardous soils removal.

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Challenge: Complex Scheduling with Traditional Tools

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As part of its standard operating procedure, Silverado’s pre-construction team members must generate a reliable Critical Path Method (CPM) schedule for every estimate and proposal. When the company first turned to Planera, it was challenged by the fact that its legacy tools presented significant barriers to speed and universal adoption:

• Steep Learning Curve: Managers found that teaching a new team member to build a schedule in Primavera P6 (P6) required significant effort.
• Inconsistent Tools: While some team members used P6 to develop schedules, others relied on alternative tools like Excel or Microsoft Project, leading to inconsistencies.
• Dual Requirements: For certain clients, the master schedule was contractually required to be in P6, but the pre-construction team needed a faster, more accessible tool for initial planning.

Solution: Embracing Planera in Pre-Construction

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Silverado has been using Planera for approximately 18 months, embedding it into their pre-construction workflow as a mandatory tool for all estimating staff.

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Key Benefits of Planera

• CPM Schedules for Proposals: The pre-construction team uses Planera to generate CPM schedules for proposals, which helps them verify overall project duration and project management/supervision time in their estimates.
• Simplicity and Whiteboard (Canvas) Feature: For Silverado, Planera's primary advantages are its simplicity and its whiteboard (aka Canvas) feature, which makes it easy for any team member—regardless of their scheduling experience—to map out and sequence their thoughts.
• Expanding to Project Tracking: For projects without a P6 contractual requirement, Silverado has transitioned to using Planera for ongoing project tracking, which helps team members to understand schedule deviations from the baseline.
• Collaborative Planning: The platform is used in a collaborative fashion on large pursuits, allowing multiple team members to handle and verify different components of the demolition and other project activities.

"The primary advantage that I see is Planera’s simplicity. To teach someone to build a schedule in P6 will take quite a bit of effort. In Planera, it’s so easy for anyone to be able to put their thoughts on the screen, link them together and put a sequence to it." - Dan Ngo, vice president, Silverado Contractors

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Results: Greater Efficiency and Team Alignment

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By integrating Planera, Silverado achieved a more efficient pre-construction process and increased adoption of formal scheduling among its estimating team.

• Standardized Pre-Construction: Planera became the required tool for all preliminary schedules with each estimate.
• User-Friendly Scheduling: The platform’s Canvas feature removed the P6 learning barrier, allowing a broader user base to quickly create and share schedules.
• Improved Communication: Preliminary schedules are now easily shared with the field team to communicate the project vision and get their input.

Conclusion

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Planera's intuitive interface and powerful scheduling capabilities have enabled Silverado's pre-construction team to quickly and consistently generate reliable CPM schedules for their most critical proposals. By making the scheduling process simple and visual, Silverado is now positioned to leverage Planera for seamless project tracking across its entire team.

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