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“With ProjectWise and Office SharePoint Server, we’ve been able to increase utilization and raise the revenue per employee by approximately 25 percent.” David Davidson, President and Chief Operating Officer, Barge Waggoner Sumner & Cannon, Inc.
Multidiscipline design and engineering firm Barge Waggoner Sumner & Cannon, Inc. needed to collaborate more efficiently across its 11 offices in the eastern United States. The firm deployed ProjectWise collaboration software for engineering content management, content publishing, and design review and integrated it with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, to manage business processes and additional information in its distributed environment. Now, employees travel less thanks to improved file version control that negates the need for in-person information sharing; make better use of expertise from around the company; and find the right information quicker, regardless of its location in the corporate IT environment. The firm makes better use of its people’s time and knowledge and has increased revenue per employee by approximately 25 percent annually by raising the productivity of every person.
Situation
Founded in 1955 in Nashville, Tennessee, as a civil surveying firm, Barge Waggoner Sumner & Cannon, Inc. has since expanded to 11 offices in three states. The firm offers engineering (civil, structural, environmental, transportation, aviation, mechanical, and electrical), architecture, planning, landscape
architecture, and surveying services. It peaked at over 500 employees, but since 2000, it has responded to market pressure and a shrinking technical talent pool by completing more projects with fewer resources; as employees left or retired, it did not hire replacements. To support its decreased headcount of 400 people, the company made technology investments to help increase productivity. With fewer employees—but the same amount of work—the company needed to address several issues that made productive collaboration difficult. Difficulties Sharing Files Across Offices Architects and engineers at Barge Waggoner require a managed environment for their projects, and they also need to collaborate with colleagues and clients outside of their project teams and in other geographical regions. Teams shared files across a wide area network (WAN), but performance for file sharing was poor. As a solution, employees often copied the files that they needed and then stored them locally, which meant that edits to files had to be communicated and incorporated into the original files manually. Teams also copied computer-aided design (CAD) drawings and other project files onto CDs and mailed them between offices. This incurred postage charges and, by the time a CD arrived at its destination the data was anywhere from two to seven days out-of-date. People often did not know if they were
working with the correct and current versions of files. Changes made to files were not always completely or quickly reflected throughout the system. Paula Harris, Corporate Marketing Director for Barge Waggoner, says, “Too often, we had versioncontrol issues. We would waste money and effort editing or printing outdated documents—work that had to be redone once the mistake was caught.” Redoing work is very costly because the time spent comes out of the company’s profit margin—clients only pay to have the work done once. Efficient change management is also important because clients often ask for new features as projects progress, and deadlines require that collaboration happen in as close to real time as possible. The company tried to eliminate the drawbacks of sharing files across the WAN by temporarily relocating employees to the offices where their projects were based, but often those employees were not fully utilized while they were there, and the offices that had loaned them lost 100 percent of their time during the projects. In addition, the employees who traveled lost productivity to travel time, and while waiting for IT staff to set up their computers at the new office with the right combination of software that they needed. The company uses approximately 500 applications—from a simple fan-selection program to specialized and sophisticated tools for designing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems and conducting structural analysis—so making sure that everyone had access to the right programs took considerable IT time and effort. This also meant that the company had to pay for more licenses for software that was sometimes used only for a few weeks. Between the lost productivity and difficulties in sharing work, Philip Newby, Corporate Technology Director of Barge Waggoner, says, “Our process was very inefficient. It resulted in a low return on investment for software licensing and a lot of resistance to sharing
work.”
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