Skanska USA Improves Project Management Processes with ...



|Overview | | |“With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we’ve developed more efficient project management… That’s going |

|Country or Region: United States | | |to lead projects to coming in ahead of schedule and positive impacts to the bottom line.” |

|Industry: Construction | | |Allen Emerick, Director of IT Applications and Integration, Skanska USA Building |

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|Customer Profile | | | |

|Skanska is a Fortune Global 500 company with | | | |

|annual revenue of U.S.$20 billion. Skanska | | | |

|USA Building, the third largest builder in | | | |

|the U.S., has 4,100 employees and U.S.$3.7 | | | |

|billion in annual revenue. | | | |

| | | | |

|Business Situation | | | |

|Skanska USA Building wanted to give project | | | |

|teams access to information and facilitate | | | |

|collaboration. The solution needed to scale | | | |

|to projects with budgets ranging from U.S.$15| | | |

|million to $1 billion. | | | |

| | | | |

|Solution | | | |

|After using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® | | | |

|Portal Server 2003 to develop collaboration | | | |

|environments, Skanska used Office SharePoint | | | |

|Server 2007 to scale those environments for | | | |

|large, complex projects. | | | |

| | | | |

|Benefits | | | |

|More efficient operations | | | |

|Better change management | | | |

|Time and cost savings | | | |

|Simple adoption and use | | | |

|Flexibility to scale up and down | | | |

| | | |Skanska, a Fortune Global 500 company, is one of the world’s leading construction companies. One of |

| | | |its United States business units, Skanska USA Building Inc., is the third largest builder in the U.S.|

| | | |To facilitate efficient collaboration, Skanska needed to give external and internal project teams |

| | | |access to timely, reliable information, while maintaining the scalability and flexibility to handle |

| | | |more than 1,500 active projects with budgets ranging from U.S.$15 million to $1 billion. In 2004, |

| | | |Skanska used Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 to develop internal and external |

| | | |collaboration portals. In 2007, the company deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to scale|

| | | |its collaboration portals for larger, more complex projects, improve change management processes, |

| | | |save time, reduce costs, and improve coordination with clients, subcontractors, and other project |

| | | |partners. |

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| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

Skanska USA Building Inc. is a United States division of Skanska, one of the leading construction and project development companies in the world. A Fortune Global 500 company with total annual revenue of U.S.$20 billion, Skanska employs 56,000 people in operations in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, South America, and North America. Skanska is the third largest builder in the U.S., with U.S.$3.7 billion in annual revenue, 4,100 employees, and operations throughout the Eastern Seaboard, Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest.

Skanska manages major construction projects including medical centers, corporate campuses, and large public facilities. Significant Skanska projects include the Delta Terminal A at Logan International Airport in Boston, and the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey, home of the New York Giants and New York Jets professional football teams.

Skanska often manages all phases of design and construction. Project teams include Skanska personnel, subcontractors, architects, engineers, consultants, and client teams, varying from 10 people at a single site to thousands of members spanning time zones, regions, and countries.

Inside Skanska, projects are broken into phases, from sales to pre-construction to operations to closeout. Internal teams can span offices nationally and globally, and some team members can span multiple phases of a project. Team members move frequently as new teams form and old teams finish their phase of a project. Effective communication between teams could be limited by distance, time, and organizational complexity. At Skanska, communication was further complicated by specific processes and some legal restrictions that could impede information flow across team hierarchies.

Skanska wanted to give everyone working on external and internal teams access to timely, reliable information, and facilitate efficient collaboration between project teams often working in multiple locations and across project phases. “We have to make sure everyone has access to what they need to perform their job correctly and successfully,” says Allen Emerick, Director of IT Applications and Integration at Skanska USA Building. “Coordinating all these people with the information they need can be challenging.”

The company needed a solution that had the scalability and flexibility to handle more than 1,500 active projects, ranging from relatively small, $15 million buildings to multiyear mega-projects like the New Meadowlands Stadium project, with budgets exceeding $1 billion. Skanska needed technology that was powerful, yet simple enough to accommodate a wide range of IT resources and technical know-how among the many partner organizations on project teams. “Each project is really its own business with its own set of challenges, its own set of issues,” says Emerick. “We must have flexibility to satisfy the needs of any particular project.”

Solution

In 2004, Skanska developed an internal environment using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 at the front end of its enterprise architecture to deliver company reports, business intelligence, forms, and applications through the Office SharePoint Portal Server interface. The company then began using Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to develop both internally and externally facing collaboration sites for specific clients and projects.

Skanska developed central project team sites where internal and external teams from each project phase are able to collaborate through an entire project life cycle, where documents and other information can be stored in one central location, providing continuity through every phase of the project. Many Skanska clients have multiple projects, so the company used Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to develop client portals, where a client can gain access to all the information related to all of its Skanska-managed projects on a single portal.

The company enjoyed success with Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, developing 200 client portals and 1,500 individual project sites, and in 2007, Skanska began updating its collaboration architecture and migrating its internal environment to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. “Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 exceeded our expectations,” says Emerick. “Once we got a few sites out there, the operations community fully embraced the technology. Part of our fundamental business strategy is to follow product updates and become early adopters of new Microsoft technologies. Office SharePoint Server 2007 has emerged as the preferred way we collaborate across the project teams.”

Skanska was interested in taking advantage of new enhancements in Office SharePoint Server 2007, including more granular security capabilities, more comprehensive and automated alerts, and improved search functions. Although the company had developed thousands of collaboration sites for moderately sized projects, it had experienced some challenges scaling the sites to very large and complex projects. The next step was to scale Office SharePoint Server 2007 to develop a project site for a truly large and complex project.

Skanska developed a collaboration portal to help facilitate designing and building the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey. “We knew that if we could use Office SharePoint Server 2007 on a project at the size and the scope of the New Meadowlands Stadium, we felt it could handle any size project we might face,” says Emerick.

Skanska used native capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to develop several sites and features in the New Meadowlands Stadium portal. Team members can use the portal home page to launch into other areas of the site, through links to document libraries, subsites, and other applications. Without particular security permissions, most team members have access through the home page to updated performance logs, reports, permits, and renderings, generally posted weekly to monthly. Users can access a file transfer site for sharing files too large to e-mail.

In the New Meadowlands Stadium Sketch Library, permission-approved project design partners can post architectural and engineering sketches for each of the construction disciplines. When new drawings are posted, automated alerts go out to the teams working in the relevant disciplines, so that project managers, project engineers, and superintendents can review and implement changes in the field almost immediately. Skanska used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to develop a cost management site on the New Meadowlands Stadium portal where the client can post change requests. When a change is posted, alerts go to the design and estimating teams, who can generate new cost estimates and coordinate the change management process.

On the Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) team site, each MEP subcontractor provides three-dimensional (3-D) models of work layouts. Each week, Skanska can review the site to check the models for potential clashes in routing, structure, or scheduling that could create installation difficulties, delays, or avoidable changes.

Building the New Meadowlands Stadium will ultimately require the fabrication of more than 13,000 pieces of structural steel, each with its own shop drawing. Many teams have to review, potentially change, and approve each of those drawings. To simplify the management and coordination of that process, Skanska developed a Steel Shop Drawing site on the New Meadowlands Stadium portal.

The site has individual libraries for each party that needs to review the shop drawings. In one library, the steel fabricator can post up to 400 drawings at a time on the site. Then structural engineers, architects, and erection and construction teams are alerted so that they can review each drawing, make needed changes, and pass it on to next team library. Each of these separate collaboration sites on the New Meadowlands Stadium portal has helped Skanska control workflows, save time, and reduce costly mistakes on the project.

Benefits

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, Skanska has developed additional enterprise capabilities to meet its existing business needs, and importantly, to move forward on ever larger and more complex projects. The portals that Skanska has developed have provided a better client experience and improved operational efficiency. Skanska has been able to use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to improve its change management processes, lower costs, save time, and improve coordination with its subcontractors.

“We’ve fully integrated Office SharePoint Server 2007 into our processes,” says Brian Tighe, Director – Project Controls at Skanska USA Building. “We’re using it for more construction-related items, not just pictures and documents. On the New Meadowlands Stadium project, we’re tracking ahead of schedule. One reason is through effective use of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to improve communication and collaboration.”

More Efficient Operations

By providing a single site where all team members can get information and changes in real time, Skanska can get critical information quickly and automatically to project managers that they can then relay to subcontractors to get pricing or to implement changes almost immediately. By using the automated alert system in Office SharePoint Server 2007, Skanska has significantly cut down distribution and collaboration time.

“With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we’ve developed more efficient project management in general,” says Emerick. “The more you can reduce field conflicts, the less rework you have, and the more efficient you are. That’s going to lead to projects coming in ahead of schedule, and positive impacts to the bottom line.”

Better Change Management

In the past, Skanska had to manage change requests through e-mail, ground mail, and courier, with no common place to organize all change documents. This could result in delays or even costly construction mistakes.

By using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide one place to go to find change issues and responses for a project, Skanska has streamlined the change management process. By creating a central change history for projects, Skanska can reduce conflicts between clients, partners, and subcontractors, saving time and expense, and potentially even avoiding litigation.

Time and Cost Savings

On the New Meadowlands Stadium project, by using Office SharePoint Server 2007 to coordinate mechanical, electrical, and plumbing construction, Skanska can review for conflicts in routing or scheduling, and resolve them before the work gets into the field. That reduces costs by avoiding rework, and saves time and effort in coordinating those processes. “Say we find a clash between plumbing and ductwork,” says Tighe. “By having the 3-D models in one central location, we can take a whole model of a system, and move it up or over 6 inches, and see how it works, right there in real time.”

By developing the Steel Shop Drawing site, Skanska saved three to four days on each drawing submission for the New Meadowlands Stadium project. In the past, drawings were printed, marked by hand, reviewed, approved, perhaps reprinted, and then couriered to the next team. Now drawings are submitted and reviewed electronically, and moved on to the next team instantly. The company has been able to reduce printing and shipping costs, and create significant time savings. Approximately half-way through the New Meadowlands Stadium project, Skanska was ahead of schedule on structural steel processes, and by controlling workflows in the process had avoided potentially costly mistakes.

Simple Adoption and Use

“One of the things we like about Office SharePoint Server 2007 on the IT side is that we set it up, train people in how to use it—and then IT can get out of the way so people can use it to solve their business problems,” says Emerick. “It has really given power to people to communicate and collaborate, to use information and technology in the way that they want to.”

Because Skanska has no control over the technology environments or expertise of external partners, it needs to keep the interface and access to project sites simple. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, Skanska developed sites that subcontractors and other external team members could access without having to download separate applications; all they need is an Internet browser. “I sometimes lose sight that this is a new application for some people because it’s so easy,” says Tighe. “Generally we can train external users in a ten-minute conference call, and once they’re in, it’s very familiar and easy to use.”

Flexibility to Scale Up and Down

Skanska is confident that if it can make Office SharePoint Server 2007 work with the New Meadowlands Stadium project, one of the company’s largest and most complex projects, it can make it work for any project. However, because the solution is simple to manage and easy to use, Skanska can scale it to the smaller and midsize projects.

“It’s one thing to isolate a particular project, but what we’ve really been able to do is use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to develop an overall strategy and a change in our company,” says Emerick. “This is not a one-time incident; this is now a consistent part of our business process.”

Microsoft Office System

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“We have to make sure everyone has access to what they need to perform their job correctly and successfully. Coordinating all these people with the information they need can be challenging."

Allen Emerick, Director of IT Applications and Integration, Skanska USA Building

| |

"Once we got a few sites out there, the operations community fully embraced the technology. ...Office SharePoint Server 2007 has emerged as the preferred way we collaborate across the project teams."

Allen Emerick, Director of IT Applications and Integrations, Skanska USA Building

| |

“On the New Meadowlands Stadium project we’re tracking ahead of schedule. One reason is through effective use of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to improve communication and collaboration.”

Brian Tighe, Director – Project Controls, Skanska USA Building

| |

“One of the things we like about Office SharePoint Server 2007 on the IT side is that we set it up, train people in how to use it—and then IT can get out of the way so people can use it to solve their business problems.”

Allen Emerick, Director of IT Applications and Integration, Skanska USA Building

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| |Software and Services

Microsoft Office |Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 | |

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published August 2008 | | |

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