CPPI Breaks Down Data Silos and Boosts Efficiency with Egnyte and Autodesk Construction Cloud

Charles Perry Partners, Inc. (CPPI), established in 1968, is a leading construction firm specializing in institutional and commercial projects across the Southeast. Facing challenges with managing vast project data, collaborating efficiently across teams, and ensuring robust security and data governance, CPPI sought a modern solution to replace traditional methods and address data silos.

By leveraging Egnyte as a central content platform integrated with Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC), CPPI successfully automated manual workflows, improved access to critical project data for all stakeholders, including non-project users, and enhanced their overall data management, security, and compliance posture, resulting in significant gains in efficiency and reduced risk across their operations. 

Challenge: Streamlining Data, Enhancing Workflows, and Managing Risk

Like many growing construction firms, CPPI faced significant challenges with traditional on-premises file servers and disconnected systems. Brad Buckles, VP of Technology and Innovation, noted that their initial move to the cloud was driven by the need to address disaster recovery and find better tools for collaboration, particularly with their teams spread across multiple offices and in the field. Managing traditional file servers proved inefficient for their dispersed operations, and a critical need was the ability to securely share data externally.

Compounding these issues were rising concerns around cyber threats, particularly ransomware. Buckles explains, "Every technology leader that I speak to worries about the big ransomware problem. If something like that happens, we need a way to confidently restore our data without downtime and delays."

Beyond security, traditional systems made routine tasks like version control unnecessarily complex and often required IT support, creating bottlenecks that prevented end users from quickly managing document versions themselves.

Furthermore, critical project data was becoming siloed in specialized applications like ACC. While ACC was (and is) vital for project teams, many internal stakeholders needing access to project information primarily use other platforms. Departments like legal, accounting, and pre-construction require easy access to documents like contracts and specifications without navigating a project-centric tool. Manual processes consumed valuable time for project managers, such as generating, saving, emailing, and moving documents between platforms. Buckles describes this administrative burden: "Project managers truly are overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork they have to manage on a day-to-day basis."

This highlighted a clear need to streamline workflows and provide easy, centralized access to data for all who need it, regardless of their primary tool. 

Solution: Unifying Project Data with Egnyte and ACC Connect

The search for a comprehensive solution led CPPI to Egnyte, a partnership that began in 2014. After evaluating different solutions, CPPI selected Egnyte and has been a customer ever since. Moving their data to Egnyte's cloud addressed many of their initial problems.

A key element of CPPI's solution leverages the integration between Egnyte and ACC using ACC Connect—Autodesk’s branded version of Workato, a popular iPaaS platform. This integration directly addresses the data silo challenge. As Buckles explains, "We went into this trying to solve two major problems we see in construction. One was the project manager paperwork burden, and the other was enabling non-ACC users to access data easily.”
 

ACC Connect enables CPPI to create automated workflows or "recipes" based on triggers. Automated workflows now create corresponding folders in Egnyte based on the project structure in ACC and synchronize files between the platforms. This ensures data is neatly organized within their established folder standards, avoiding fragmented storage. Egnyte also provided the necessary tools for managing version control, which is crucial in construction. 
 

Results: Streamlined Operations, Enhanced Security, and Empowered Teams

The integration between Egnyte and ACC has delivered significant results for CPPI, fundamentally changing how they manage and access project data. One major benefit is the reduction of administrative work for project managers. By automating the transfer and organization of documents from ACC to Egnyte, project managers no longer have to manually save, move, or email files. This allows project managers to touch documents such as contracts only once, without subsequent manual saving or sharing steps.

Crucially, the integration breaks down silos and provides easy access to project data for departments outside of the core project team. Buckles highlights this key benefit: "Not every user that needs project data needs to be in ACC. We wanted to have that data readily available in a Windows File Explorer experience that they're accustomed to seeing."

Legal, accounting, pre-construction, and even marketing can now access necessary contracts, specifications, and other documents directly from a familiar folder structure in Egnyte, without needing ACC licenses or training. This significantly improves cross-departmental collaboration and efficiency.

Automated workflows also ensure that contract documents are securely backed up and comply with internal standards and retention policies, mitigating risks associated with manual handling and ensuring data is securely backed up. This automated process leads to high reliability, as well as high adoption rates.

Furthermore, the move to Egnyte significantly enhanced CPPI’s disaster recovery and security posture. The ability to efficiently roll back data provides confidence in recovering from potential incidents like ransomware with minimal disruption. Buckles is confident in their readiness: "We're happy to know if we ever have an attack, we've got the ability to roll back in an efficient and quick way."

For CPPI, the combination of Egnyte's robust content management, its integration with ACC, and the automation enabled by ACC Connect has resulted in streamlined operations, empowered non-project users, enhanced security and compliance, and freed up valuable project team time. This allows CPPI to continue focusing on delivering successful institutional and commercial construction projects across the Southeast.