Providence (Healthcare System)

Goal

Providence, a large health system operating facilities in seven U.S. states, needed a streamlined system to track capital projects, costs, and documents.

Challenge

With many projects scattered across geographical regions, the solution needed to facilitate communication between internal and external stakeholders, including general contractors and architects.

Solution

e-Builder’s comprehensive solution allows Providence to digitize processes around invoicing, change orders, initiating new contracts, and closing out completed ones.

Ongoing Benefits

The solution also provides a wealth of project data that’s useful for high-level decision makers at the organization.

“We now have a technical standard, so they have to follow the approval chain of command for the invoices, for change orders, and for new contracts. It helps everyone remember to keep their data updated—which makes our reporting more accurate.”

- Nancy Carl, Data Manager for Real Estate Strategy & Operations (RESO), Providence

Providence is a large healthcare system with 52 hospitals and 1,085 clinics across seven U.S. states. In 2013, the organization decided to seek a centralized construction project software platform to manage projects in their capital program. After weighing their options carefully, they selected e-Builder Enterprise.

Today, Providence uses e-Builder to manage costs and documents, and to track new contracts, change orders, and invoices. Some regions also utilize the solution’s time tracking, scheduling, and bidding capabilities. IT leaders at the organization have integrated e-Builder with a financial analytics platform and are rolling out a new integration with their ERP software in 2022.

Nine years after initial implementation, Providence has about 1,200 active projects in e-Builder, including new construction, maintenance, remodels, and other projects. Around 200 users have access to e-Builder, where they can share documents and complete processes, saving time and ensuring that construction projects continue to move forward.

Generating Clean Data

One advantage of a centralized solution such as e-Builder is the ability to generate clear and accurate reports. Nancy Carl, Data Manager for Real Estate Strategy & Operations (RESO) at Providence, works to ensure that everyone follows processes and provides the right information in the correct format. “We do a lot of reporting from the e-Builder data, so I ensure that data is clean and that we’re providing fields within forms that are useful to our design and construction managers.”

Not everyone was on board with using e-Builder until a few years ago when the organization standardized several processes within the system, helping to ensure adoption and generate better data.

Today, Design and Construction Managers are required to use e-Builder to get invoice approvals. “We now have a technical standard, so they have to follow the approval chain of command for the invoices, for change orders, and for new contracts,” says Ms. Carl. “It helps everyone remember to keep their data updated—which makes our reporting more accurate.”

“We do a lot of reporting from the e-Builder data, so I ensure that data is clean and that we’re providing fields within forms that are useful to our design and construction managers.”

- Nancy Carl, Data Manager for Real Estate Strategy & Operations (RESO), Providence

Reports are compiled using e-Builder data and sent out to capital program leaders at least once per week, providing information on construction team performance, workload distribution, and needed actions such as signatures and approvals. Reports are also provided to program support specialists who need to be able to follow up on invoices awaiting payment or similar items.

Improving and Expanding Processes

Utilizing e-Builder’s processes has sped up payment delivery to vendors. “It’s also made it easier to track those invoices that were not getting paid,” says Ms. Carl. “That’s made a clear difference.”

In the future, the RESO Data Management team at Providence hopes to implement more processes, including one for project entry and another to assist with budget management.

While external vendors currently have access to e-Builder for viewing and uploading documents and sharing information, they are not yet part of the organization’s official processes. That will soon be changing as they add the DocuSign feature within e-Builder.

“We’ll be building out the ability in our new contracts to send documents out to external vendors to sign as part of our change order process,” says Ms. Carl. “They will then come back through the Providence approval process.” Nancy sees this expansion as valuable because it will remove some pressure for construction managers. “The system can keep track of whether the vendors are fulfilling their part of the process and alert our construction managers if they aren’t.”

“We’ll be building out the ability in our new contracts to send documents out to external vendors to sign as part of our change order process. They will then come back through the Providence approval process."

- Nancy Carl, Data Manager for Real Estate Strategy & Operations (RESO), Providence

About e-Builder

e-Builder has more than 25 years of experience supporting owners like you in managing capital improvement projects.

e-Builder Enterprise automates information handoffs between designers, contractors, consultants and owners through a best-in-class workflow engine that transforms old paper processes to digital.

The best way to understand how e-Builder Enterprise can transform your capital program management is to see it for yourself.