Join, a project information and collaboration platform focused mainly on design-build and construction management-at risk projects, has released Insights, a dashboard for general contractor executives that provides users a view into preconstruction project health. It is built on top of Join’s project platform.
The preconstruction phase of a project has become a focus of several construction technology startups looking to illuminate schedule, supply chain and other constructability problems earlier. Join's platform uses a contractor's own data to give executives the project health view, particularly those not used to tracking the day-to-day progress.
The data-rich view into preconstruction allows a user to assess whether a project has a path to remain on budget and to understand the impacts of past-due and upcoming decisions. Dashboard dials and graphs help visualize whether a projects is at risk for overdrawing allocated contingencies or allowances.
"The construction team is engaged earlier and earlier, and, what we're seeing, is that owners are demanding more and more transparency, More decisions that used to be handled just by a single stakeholder are now coming up at the owner, architect, contractor and team level," says Andrew Zukoski, Join co-founder and CEO. "It's really important to the business in many ways and can be painful. These stakeholders, potentially with different interests, [are now] coming together."
Using Insights, a general contractor can evaluate decisions made (or not made) on a weekly or even a daily basis. They can assess if design contingency is burning down too quickly and can react to negative cost trends between milestone estimates to help support a project team earlier.
Clark Construction is using Join on an enterprise-wide license, introduced to the firm by Mohammad Mozaffarpour, a preconstruction to executive who oversees its southern California project development, who has used it for more than three years.
"We're using it for CM-at risk, design-build, a lot of value engineering requires different stakeholders to be involved," he says.
One such project is the University of Southern California Football Performance Center. One of two university athletics projects Clark is working on, the performance center's design has three levels dedicated to team operations. as well as a rooftop hospitality deck and player lounge. The school is also adding a second full-length practice field as part of the project.
Mozaffarour said there are six or seven groups of stakeholders on the project and on Clark's other university athletics project, a soccer and women's lacrosse venue. Each decision made needs to be vetted across different groups of project stakeholders from the university, the athletic programs and design teams.
"We have 350 analysis items on the USC football project," he says. "The owner’s rep is looking at cost sheets, [and] every week there's a quick call to go over items. All information is on the same page with Join and all history of that information is there."
As owners opt for more design-build and CM-at-risk delivery methods, platforms such as Join are becoming more important to early decisionmaking, especially when contractors are not sharing information with stakeholders who read plans or 3D models every day, says Mozaffarour.
