Procore Technologies
Vanguards Construction of Tech

A visit to Santa Barbara can give you a scintillating view of Procore Technologies’ beautiful office which many newbies may find fanciful. The building architected with triangular conference rooms and diagonal, splayed hallways succinctly depicts the delicate art of construction. However, when CEO of the firm, Tooey Courtemanche realized that his firm needed a bigger workplace he went to the Kingdom Industry to build a bigger headquarters for his firm. After several team meetings and brainstorming sessions, architects designed a minimalist office which looked like a toppled pile of Chinese tangram puzzles. In the building, everything was crafted at a 30-degree angle where workers can easily get disoriented and lost. Ironically, Procore makes cloud-based management software that assists construction firms to create bids, handle budgets, revise blueprints, and monitor projects.

So why does a company transforming the construction space end up building a labyrinthine office? Procore’s office experiment highlights that no designing formula can guarantee good work. Construction is a chaotic space and is one of the late boomers when it comes to technology. The safety concerns in construction sites added with project delays and unfavorable contracts terms often blocks construction work and bring forth unnecessary downtimes. Procore entered the market to streamline all of these processes. The firm assists construction professionals in simplifying project management with start-of-the-art collaborative software. Started in 2002 with six employees, the firm has now over 600 employees, 2.5 million active users and footprint in 92 countries.

However, the journey wasn’t that easy for Procore.

In the starting years of the firm, Courtemanche was facing difficulty in finding prospects as the internet was still blooming in those days. As digitalization in construction market was in infancy, Courtemanche had to convince contractors to set up WiFi on construction sites so that users could easily access Procure’s software. As time passed, the firm prospered in the market and found home to thousands of users in construction projects in several sites including industrial plants, office buildings, apartment complexes, university facilities, and retail centers. Today, with a diversified business model, Procore offers a myriad of products for Construction Project Management, Construction Financials, Quality & Safety, and Field Productivity. Procore enables construction firms to overcome the challenges of paper-based documentation, email chains, and spreadsheets through streamlining and mobilizing project communications and documentation.

The firm provides Project Management tools to aid contractors in gleaning real-time data and mitigating the unwanted downtimes to bolster productivity. With Procore’s Project Management tools, construction firms get comprehensive visibility to find the loopholes in a project. With the bidding tool of the software, Procore enables companies to keep track of bidding and track package. Using this tool, project managers can automatically attach all the mails sent or received from the vendor.

This tool also allows them to analyze documents including plans, specs, PDFs, and other files from other construction software packages such as CAD applications or spreadsheets.

An Exemplary Approach to Safety

In construction sites, security remains as one of the paramount concerns among managers. To this end, Procore offers quality and safety software that renders real-time data and enables project managers to detect and deter the potential hazards with real-time reporting dashboards. With Procore’s quality and safety solution, users can create customized reports and promptly take action on those reports to stop risks associated in any of the construction work. The Daily Log Tool of the software allows contractors to keep track of routine tasks such as labor, communication, equipment, materials, and job site events. By examining the working hours of workers, contractors can supplement the uptime and subsequently improve their productivity.

Along with real-time labor productivity, the Daily Log Tool improves the data entry work through enabling bulk entry of an entire crew at once. This tool also displays pre-scheduled tasks and allows subcontractors to analyze what percentage of planned work has been completed every day. The data stored in the tool is automatically archived and can be saved to multiple server hard drives and exported as PDF file as well.

Procore enables construction firms to overcome the challenges of paper-based documentation, email chains, and spreadsheets through streamlining and mobilizing project communications and documentation

Adding to this, Procore also enables construction companies to eliminate time wasters with a Forms Tool. The other essential component of the quality and safety software —Incidents Tool allows organizations to manage risks, identify trends, and glean actionable insights to obliterate the unfortunate accidents and subsequently take preventive actions to stop it. This tool enables companies to utilize incident data and gain insights of near miss situations and injury patterns of workers. The actionable insights garnered through the Incidents Tool allows construction sites to eliminate toolbox talks, onboarding, quarterly training, and other safety-related learning programs. With the Incidents tool, project managers can continually work to improve their safety program and subsequently avoid any catastrophic events. One of Procore’s testimonies reads, “The Incidents tool is key because when you have an incident you need a central location for that documentation—in the end, it can save you a lot of money.”

Procore Construction Financials

Often, in construction sites, financial managers come across several challenges while administrating multiple projects simultaneously. Procore introduced Construction Financials to change all that and bring unprecedented benefits to project managers, CFOs, and other key financial stakeholders.

This product gives project managers a unified platform to record, report, and track real-time cost impacts and allows construction personnel to improve decision making. Field teams get all the necessary information while the accounts department maintains the overall record of projects and company finances. So whenever a change is implemented, Construction Financials automatically informs the concerned persons about the impact it can have on the bottom line.

The Quintessential Helping Hand

During its journey of more than a decade, the company has scaled to new heights owing to its customer-centric approach and unique value proposition in the market. In one instance, Robins & Morton, a construction firm specialized in complex healthcare, commercial, and education projects approached Procore to mitigate the complexity of their document retention process. Before their association with Procore, Robins & Morton purchased four different software solutions to run their quality and safety programs successfully. However, as there were four software solutions, they were facing problems to withheld vital information coming from different data sources. The firm was looking for a centralized system that can aid them to overcome the existing challenges and can house all the project information starting from drawings and punch lists to specs and observations. Robins & Morton participated in Procore’s beta test and developed new quality and safety tools along with eradicating the complexities of document retention.

In another instance, Lennar Multifamily’s project teams were having issues in garnering updated information in their projects and were looking for a solution that could help them transit from their existing internal accounting software to a hosted collaborative project-centric software. The primary problem was the software didn’t always reflect the most recent project information and was bringing unnecessary downtimes on several construction projects. To eliminate the time-consuming process and discrepancies in the accounting software, Lennar Multifamily approached Procore. The client deployed Procore’s cloud-based project management software and mobile app platform to store and share project data, drawings, and documentation— without being tied to an in-house server. Adding to this, Lennar Multifamily also encouraged its users to build custom apps and integrations with Procore API. It brought forth endless integration opportunities in their projects and helped them to address the technical, financial, and other business challenges.

"Procore offers quality and safety software that renders real-time data and enables project managers to detect and deter the potential hazards with real-time reporting dashboards"

Continuing Excellence

Since its genesis, the firm is committed to excel in the market and always looks for partners who are passionate about building software solutions and can play an impeccable role in digitalizing the construction sphere. Some of the firm’s prominent partners include Calance, ChainSys, Cosential, Dexter + Chaney, DocuSign, smart sheet, and Raken. Recently, the firm collaborated with Sage, a market leader in construction accounting software to optimize business management for construction and further strengthen their current relationships. This partnership will aid construction professional relying on Procore and Sage 300 CRE to do their jobs. The firm also has an Innovation Lab where engineers, designers, and product managers work in a collaborative environment to build creative solutions that can solve the problems happening in the construction management.