Construction-Specific Success
CMiC
Toronto, Ont.
www.cmic.ca
Years voted a “Hot” company: ‘05, ‘06, ‘07, ‘08
Not many companies can lay claim to having a 100% client retention rate. Yet CMiC, www.cmic.ca, Toronto, Ont., touts that it falls into this elite category, asserting its systems have never been replaced by a competitive product in its history.
Looking to add to that record, CMiC added 13 new clients in 2007—its largest customer increase—including The Walsh Group, www.walshgroup.com, Chicago, Ill.; Haselden Construction, www.haselden.com, Centennial, Colo.; Pizzagalli Construction Co., www.pizzagalli.com, South Burlington, Vt.; Pirtle Construction Co., www.pirtleconstruction.com, Davie, Fla.; and Palace Construction, www.palaceconst.com, Denver, Colo.; among others. All of these construction companies were looking for a fully integrated technology solution that can handle construction-related tasks with construction-specific technology.
A quick run-through of CMiC’s product portfolio demonstrates it has the needs of a construction organization well covered. CMiC Enterprise brings together the core functions for running a construction business—financials, projects, human capital, asset management, and customer-relationship management—under one integrated platform.
CMiC Project Management puts project control into the hands of project managers via the ability to qualify opportunities, assess initial risk, and prepare accurate project proposals and budgets, among other actions. Cost and budget management, bid and procurement management, document management, site management, and collaboration are all components to this solution.
CMiC Integration includes modules for imaging, workflow, business intelligence, as well as mobile capabilities and the tools to facilitate business transactions with clients. The imaging and workflow components have been particularly successful throughout the past few years, as companies discover the value provided by this technology for increasing efficiency and enforcing standards across the enterprise.
The company is highly devoted to improving its offerings, and invested 25% of 2007 revenue in research and development. As a result of its continual reinvest efforts, two interesting products came to market in 2007.
CMiC BPi (business process improvements) is a service offering that helps users eliminate wasteful steps during the software implementation process. This nine-stage process can also be used by existing customers when implementing additional CMiC modules. The service is delivered in one of two ways: Institutional, which is a total implementation of CMiC solutions; or Focused, which targets selected areas.
Another service offering developed in 2007 is CMiC Advantage. This unique offering allows users to compare current operational processes against processes performed with CMiC solutions in order to see firsthand which method provides more value.
CMiC Advantage identifies 18 core business processes, including job forecasting; job budget creation; and revenue recognition, and through a measurement method called ‘effort units’ allows companies to calculate how CMiC’s software solutions would fare compared to current processes.
Gord Rawlins, president, CMiC, says this has proven to be a very eye-opening experience for many companies. He says, “Let’s say you do one unnecessary step per subcontract that you process on a job. Take that and multiply it by the number of subcontractors you have on each job and then multiple that by the number of jobs in a year, and take an hourly rate and it can be staggering the amount of money that is being wasted in the year. If you don’t take the time to quantify it, then you will never realize just how much money is being lost.”
CMiC also strives to extend its solutions to new market areas. In 2007 it released CMiC Specialty Solutions to help electrical contractors manage labor, materials, and financials. This comes on the heels of its release of CMiC Emerging a year earlier, which provides firms as small as $100 million in annual revenue with an integrated project and financial management application.
Govan Brown + Associates Ltd., www.govanbrown.com, Toronto, Ont., falls into the “emerging” category. The company implemented CMiC Enterprise and CMiC Project Management in 2005. At the time, its revenue was around $40 million, but today has soared above $140 million. The company believes Web-based, integrated technology gives it a leg up against others in its segment of the market, and it is preparing for the next upswing.
“We are in the middle of a lull before a big stream of work will come along in 2009 and 2010 so we decided to wait to bring up CMiC 2006 version, which we went live with in March (2008),” says John Brown, president, Govan Brown. “We are starting to get ramped up now with protocols and such.”
Aside from the core modules, Govan Brown has recently implemented or is in the process of implementing CRM, imaging, and collaboration modules from CMiC that it believes will further catapult it ahead.
“The big differentiator will be collaboration,” says Brown. “In our market there are not many contractors doing an online collaborative effort and for us, once we roll it out and it gets working we see it helping us become five years ahead of the curve within our niche market. Our goal is that when things start to soften in Toronto, which should be 2010-2011, more customers will look to us because the technology has enabled us to become more efficient.”
Govan Brown plans to use the Project Collaboration module across each of its three offices—Vancouver, Ottawa, and Calgary—and with all clients.
So what does the future hold for CMiC? For a company never satisfied resting on its laurels, it comes as no surprise that it is fast at work on a solution that falls directly inline with one of the hottest trends in construction these days, BIM (building information modeling).
According to Rawlins, the company expects to release a collaborative product later this year that takes all of the data from multiple technology systems associated with the BIM process and bring it into a single database.
“The responsibility associated with different steps in the construction process is managed one way in the paper world. Now in the digital world, there will still be the same requirements to back things up as with the traditional paperwork,” says Rawlins. “You still need to ensure there is accountability and audits on every approval and every change that was made. We just extract that from any BIM system, including those used by the architects and specialty contractor, and create a nice view, from a database perspective, for the general contractor.”
Rawlins wants to be clear that the company is not developing a modeling system, but rather a collaborative database that extracts every transaction that occurs and stores each into a collaborative BIM database. It is the first step in answering the question of how project management fits into the grand scheme of BIM.
“BIM is the future of what is happening in collaborative construction and with that change, project-management systems will also change,” continues Rawlins. “From our perspective project-management systems still need to be there for (auditing) and verification of each step. If not, the project managers are putting themselves at a huge risk. We just have to make the project-management systems compatible with the systems they are working with.”