... help users understanding how the company is doing on a real-time basis, he adds.

“A few years ago, I found many companies had point solutions. Customers were happy with them, they just wanted them to work better together. Our architecture lends itself particularly well to that,” Johnson-Clague says. “We are finding the ERP mentality is not bearing fruit,” and improving integration may make full-blown ERP systems obsolete, he says. “That’s where we are focused. We look at our solution like a USB hub, cohesively bringing a lot of the point-source solutions together,” he says.

Growing firms need an enterprise view to manage rapid change, retain qualified people and track resources, Johnson-Clague says. That makes sense to Steve Padilla, president of Hunter Contracting Corp., a heavy highway and water utility contractor in Gilbert, Ariz. He is rolling out a companywide implementation of Hard Dollar Enterprise.

Hard Dollar will interface with Hunter’s Dexter + Chantey financial management system and Primavera scheduling, but job-cost accounting and resource allocation will come “real time” from Hard Dollar, thanks to daily reports updated from the field, Padilla says. “We will track labor and equipment utilization as a company and find what didn’t work on a given day so we can we put those resources to better use.

Tom Sawyer/ENR Proliferating servers, islands of data.

“Accounting and job costs are two different worlds,” Padilla says. “Accounting is exact, but in our environment, we work off job costs—more of an approximation and indication of whether we need to change our approach or continue what we are doing. The key is to integrate  [job cost] information in one place, independent from the accounting process, and let the field have the data without having to wait for accounting to update. We want our people to know no later than the next day where they are on their project.”

“Software like this is improving the quality of life,” Padilla says. “It’s eliminating the frustration of waiting for someone else to tell you what’s going on.”

Another enterprise innovator is Newforma, a Manchester, N.H.-based company whose offering is based on the idea of “purpose-driven exchange.” CEO Ian Howell says Newforma is tackling the enterprise data challenge not by piling everything into a massive database but by using indexed searches to deliver information on demand.

“Design people are not particularly disciplined in where things are filed,” Howell notes. “CEOs told us, ‘I can’t get these guys to fill out their time sheets, much less assign metadata tags to everything.’ So, with increasingly complicated projects and information management requirements, we decided to index the network so you can search for the information you need, regardless of where it is. It’s suddenly making people very productive.”

“There will always be multiple databases,” Howell contends. He says it does not make sense to compile purpose-driven architectural, analysis, engineering and construction models into one set, for instance, as long as users can find specific information they need.

“Indexing can reach into projects and archives and search for details within drawings, attached to e-mails, locked up in zip files and xrefs, and give people powerful access,” Howell says. Newforma also has a viewer to display documents in a wide array of formats without launching authoring programs.

Configuration consists of installing an indexing server beside existing servers to index and mine the data. Early adopter John Watkins, senior vice president and corporate production director at Atlanta-based engineering firm Jordan, Jones & Goulding, is installing them at each of JJ&G’s 15 offices in the Southeast, with high-speed communication links and a master index at headquarters in Atlanta.

The high-speed link is another development driving enterprise innovation, says Watkins. The company is using a data transmission optimizer from Riverbed Technology Inc., San Francisco, which Watkins says drastically improves network performance. “I don’t have a clue [of] how it works, but it does,” he says. He expects Riverbed to let JJ&G access files, “even huge GIS ones,” in one location from any other location, just as if they were on a local area network.

Newforma’s software also routes project e-mails with attachments into the appropriate job folders, taking them out of in-boxes and moving them into the project domain. Watkins says this turns out to be a “killer enterprise application.”

“It has huge impact,” Watkins says.   “You do a ‘file/save-as’ in Outlook, select the project from a list, hit the button and boom, it’s gone to a project file accessible by all the other team members, which is different from sitting in my in-box where I am the only one who can see it. My folks love it, and it is searchable.”

But Watkins says he thinks Newforma’s most attractive feature is its light touch on his existing system. He calls it a “drape” that overlays JJ&G’s databases and helps them communicate. “If you decide you don’t like it, you can just pull it off and go back to the way you were doing things,” Watkins says. “It’s not like other enterprise systems, where you have to throw a bunch of stuff out, and if it doesn’t work, you’re still committed.”