CTL Engineering Delivers Transparency and Efficiency with e-Construction Solutions

Background

CTL Engineering is an engineering consulting firm with locations throughout Ohio. Prior to pursuing an e-Construction solution for LPA projects, the firm used spreadsheets for project management. Issues with duplicate data entry, travel time, project set-up, and stakeholder reporting led CTL Engineering to seek out a real-time, cloud-based solution for construction project management and inspection.

Solution

The team at CTL Engineering leverages a mix of Infotech software solutions to achieve their goals

• Bid Express® for secure online bidding when the firm manages the bid process for clients
• Appia® for construction management and inspection on LPA projects

Results

By using Bid Express and Appia to bid and manage local-let projects, the team at CTL Engineering has been able to expedite project set-up, eliminate unnecessary travel and data entry, and provide improved transparency and reporting to their clients. Access to a comprehensive, searchable audit trail has also made handling disputes easier, resulting in roughly $100,000 in savings on one project.

The Challenges of Paper + Spreadsheets

As Warino noted during our discussion, the infrastructure construction industry is not that far removed from doing everything on paper, so the associated challenges are still fresh in everyone’s mind. The CTL Engineering team shared their perspective on the most common issues that arose from the days of paper and spreadsheet-based construction management and bidding

On the accuracy of data:

“That’s a recipe for disaster, when you have multiple people working off the spreadsheet… you get one gap between data entries or they’re not up to the most current version… it’s a cluster to find out where the issue was.” - Joe Warino

As Warino outlined, managing a spreadsheet for daily reporting can be a nightmare due to a lack of access to shared, real-time information. Ley pointed out that a project administrator might accidentally get into a file and delete something. “It’s very nice when you don’t have to worry about losing something that you can’t recreate,” he said.

On travel and time delays:

“You’re killing a day just to go find a piece of paper you need to validate a report.” - Joe Warino

When we had this conversation, every person on the call was located in a different town throughout Ohio. The team highlighted how time-consuming this would be in a disconnected world, where project managers used to drive out to job sites for information, or inspectors had to return to an office to input report data. Ley provided an example of living in Dayton but requiring information from an Athens job site, which was a 5-6 hour round trip in the world of paper and spreadsheets.

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