MullenLowe is a marketing and communications firm with offices around the world, including headquarters in London and Boston. Its creative teams work with some of the biggest brands in retail, life sciences and entertainment. The firm relies on Egnyte to support file sharing across its footprint of small international offices, its 1,200 person Boston HQ, and clients around the world.

Challenge

MullenLowe’s creative teams share, edit and produce large numbers of design files with a range of clients. To protect confidentiality and client IP, those documents must remain in the hands of only those who are authorized to work on them.

In a search for an enterprise-wide file solution, the IT team looked at a wide range of options, including Box and Dropbox. Box and Dropbox were deselected due to the lack of standard data protection and controls offered with those consumer-based solutions. They considered Google Drive, and while its security features were solid, they were too cumbersome for the small team to manage. According to Mark Lewis, Global Infrastructure & Security Director at MullenLowe: "As an IT organisation, we don't have visibility into what's stored on the Google Drives of our users, which makes it difficult to perform data audits. This, along with a lack of granular sharing controls, makes Google the wild west from a security point of view."

SharePoint, meanwhile, was too complex and required a team of .Net developers to manage and maintain. More importantly, it was deemed too easy to share public links to files and folders, which potentially would expose client’s data - a risk not worth taking.

Solution

MulllenLowe selected Egnyte to serve as its single source of content truth for the company’s designers. The rollout started in international offices and quickly spread to its Boston headquarters. In its London headquarters, MullenLowe moved 90 TB of data to Egnyte rather than purchase a new storage area network (SAN). For larger creative work, the firm uses Egnyte’s Smart Cache to overcome potential in-office latency issues.

For the central IT department, Egnyte expands their visibility into file usage with refined auditing on anomalous activity, permissions, and access across sites and users.

Since its rollout across the company, Egnyte has greatly improved the design team’s ability to access and share content, while providing IT with centralized control over external document sharing.

Benefits

Today, Egnyte serves as the single source of truth for most of the company’s users, enabling better auditing, automated reporting, and centralized visibility for IT. Users also leverage the enhanced co-editing features for desktop clients working in Microsoft 365, which helps to further improve team collaboration.

MullenLowe plans to use Egnyte's deep understanding of file usage across teams to further parse and analyze the data for reports on anomalous activity, permissions, and access across sites and users. That data will be used to analyze and understand file relationships, such as how many people in the Boston office have external file shares.

IT conducts biannual reviews of the platform to validate its suitability and security capabilities. They keep coming back to Egnyte because of its centralized control and how it supports auditing. Moreover, it saves his limited staff time and money, especially compared to alternatives that require a team of administrators to manage.

Founded in 1981, Blackmon-Farrell is a commercial electrical contractor based in Rochester, New York. While it handles a range of industrial, municipal, and commercial construction and installation needs throughout New York State, its core business exists in design-build and bid spec projects—90% of which are for state and local government. Its work is highlighted by projects at the Blue Cross Arena, the Monroe County Hall of Justice, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

As a specialty contractor, labor efficiency is Blackmon-Farrell’s biggest concern. Time is of the essence, and productivity gains are often measured in minutes.

“If we lose a day on a project—10 people all standing around—that ends up costing us a lot of money,” said Mike Yatteau, VP of operations for Blackmon-Farrell.

The company continually focuses on employee efficiency as a measurement of success, and it recently tackled a major business hurdle by going digital with Egnyte.

Challenge: Replacing Paper-based Processes

Bidding on public sector contracts involves mountains of paperwork. Everything from wire and conduit to fixtures must be documented, reviewed, and submitted to meet project specifications. Employees also had to spend considerable time on document-intensive processes, such as certified payrolls.

Blackmon-Farrell managed all of this manually, creating workflow challenges and wasted manpower. To close out a project, a purchase order had to be completed and delivered prior to releasing the subcontractors. However, a single project could include over 100 open purchase orders, so someone had to track down the status of each one to confirm they were delivered.

Change orders were another tedious process that directly impacted the schedule. People had to go to the jobsite to get a measurement or comb through different versions of a drawing before they could put together an estimate.

While field teams were armed with mobile devices to access, view, and annotate Bluebeam files in real time, connectivity issues made the process extremely slow. Some teams carried personal hotspots as a fix, but they routinely exceeded their allotted data capacity in a matter of weeks, so their carrier throttled their bandwidth for the rest of the month. The cost was staggering—emailing large PDFs attachments had driven wireless data costs to at least $80 per month per user.

The resulting back and forth between digital and analog compounded the problem. Because of remote access issues, teams had to print four copies of the plan every time a project required a new set, which could cost as much as $2,000, not counting the cost of printers and ink deployed on jobsites. Other times, someone had to manually scan hundreds of sheets of sheets of paper to digitize large drawings. 

Solution: Digitize, Automate, and Manage

Blackmon-Farrell needed a better way. They had to organize project files, make them accessible from remote locations, and reduce costs.

Egnyte’s simple file structure made file management easy. Blackmon-Farrell used standardized project folder templates and assigned a job number to each folder, which made it easy to know what content aligned to which project.

The firm streamlined the change order process by establishing a dedicated “return folder” to collect any costs and supporting documentation from the field. Those orders are now quickly reviewed and approved by the office. And because Egnyte tracks versions and who accessed the document, there aren’t any questions about approval decisions.

As Egnyte is a cloud-based, centralized document solution, everyone can access project files no matter where they are. Supervisors in the field use their mobile devices to go directly to the designated folder in Egnyte rather than searching through old emails or paper files. Teams use links to files and folders instead of attaching large PDFs, so even in low bandwidth locations they can access information quickly for improved communication and collaboration.

The ability to exchange files directly with clients and teams in the field by uploading to dedicated folders reduced the need to print multiple sets of plans and scan hundreds of individual documents.

Benefits: Simplified Workflows and Reduced Costs

Blackmon-Farrell was able to save time and money with the Egnyte platform in several ways:

• Formerly complex workflows are now simplified and accelerated
• Change orders are submitted faster and more accurately
• Digital images and files are easily uploaded and available for approval
• Project closeout is streamlined through tagging, file retention policies, and removing document access for subcontractors who are no longer on the project
• Potential litigation costs are avoided by ensuring contracts and warranties are properly maintained

“In the past, we would have to keep a physical folder for each purchase order for each client. Considering the volume, it wasn’t manageable.” Yatteau said. “With Egnyte, I can keep everything organized and stay on top of what’s been reviewed and approved.”

Teams use Egnyte’s native integration with Bluebeam to view, mark up, and share plans directly from their mobile devices. Because they’re no longer reliant on paper records, the company has significantly reduced printing costs and eliminated the need to drive from jobsite to jobsite to deliver those plans.

And by emailing links to documents instead of attaching large files, Blackmon-Farrell has dramatically reduced its wireless consumption, saving $40 to $50 per user in monthly data bills.

Blackmon-Farrell is realizing the benefits of becoming a digital organization - lower costs, easier access to data, faster processes, and greater productivity – all of which result in an improved bottom line.

 KPS4Parents is a nonprofit child and family advocacy organization focused on the needs of students with disabilities in the early education, K-12, and post-secondary settings. Founded in 2003, the California-based organization helps parents and adult students throughout the United States navigate the highly regulated bureaucracy of public education and publicly funded educational programs. Its goal is to ensure each individual student receives the outcomes promised to them by law and funded by taxpayer dollars.

Challenge: Antiquated Document Management

At the core of special needs education is the Individualized Educational Program (IEP) — a very document intensive process that produces a legally binding controlling document, an IEP, for each special education student. A single case can generate over 1,000 records from 10 different stakeholders including parents, attorneys, educators, expert advisors, school districts, regulatory investigators, administrative hearing offices, and federal courts. “The documents save the day when it comes to IEPs. It’s a black and white, evidence-based journey,” said KPS4Parents CEO Anne Zachry.

Many parents become overwhelmed by the sea of documentation and the multitude of ways those documents are shared. They or their representatives must fax, email in batches over unsecured connections, make hard copies of paper records, mail CDs of audio recordings, and/or deliver evidence binders to hearing officers and investigators in person.

As of late, the administrative hearing offices and courts require digital uploads of evidence instead of paper copies or recordings on portable storage devices. KPS4Parents is better prepared to accommodate digital document sharing than most school districts and law firms, which are still heavily using paper.

Solution: Modernized, Secure File Sharing

KPS4Parents recognized the need for parents, outside experts, attorneys, and advocates to share confidential evidence in a highly secure and user-friendly environment. Egnyte was selected for its security model, scalability, and ease of use for both the sender and the recipient.

Using the platform, the typical case flow follows this pattern:

• New client folder created on Egnyte, with parental access to the child’s folder and sub-folders
• The local school district uploads files to a secure folder, but cannot access the rest of the child’s records
• KPS4Parents reviews the information and creates a report outlining the child’s IEP
• Records are shared as needed with expert assessors, attorneys, state and federal regulators, or other enforcement officials
• Folder and file permissions are easily revoked when users no longer need access to the data

Egnyte keeps important records submission-ready for digital sharing with stakeholders and decision-makers. Because education records are protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and sometimes also the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the security that Egnyte provides to keep records secure is imperative. Everyone involved has peace of mind in knowing they are not risking disclosure of protected information.

Results: Streamlined Processes for Parents and Stakeholders

KPS4Parents has received glowing praise for its processes and use of the Egnyte platform to facilitate secure communication with all stakeholders involved in its cases.

Heather Dora, a licensed educational psychologist who has worked in the public school system and as a private practitioner, attested to the value of Egnyte for school districts. “Its user-friendly nature ultimately benefits the student, reduces litigation brought against the district, and increases efficiency so that psychologists and other professionals can focus on meaningful work.”

An attorney from the U.S. Department of Education has expressed his appreciation for how KPS4Parents uses Egnyte to share evidence in support of regulatory complaints. According to Goriune Dudukgian of the California Justice Project: “Management and sharing of confidential, legally protected documents is essential to our work,” he said. “Egnyte has greatly facilitated our work because it is HIPAA and FERPA compliant, very easy to use, and searchable… allowing us to find the needle in a haystack.”

Parents appreciate the 24/7 access to their children's records and the ability to add new records to their children's files the moment they become available, including uploading photos or PDFs of documents, voice mail messages, audio recordings of meetings, and other important records from their mobile devices with the Egnyte app. They can also retrieve and share records with doctors and specialists on the spot during appointments using the Egnyte app on their devices. The speed of communication and the efficiency with which KPS4Parents' cases can be processed make it possible to overcome the hurdles of complex, publicly funded programs for people with disabilities. “Egnyte has been immensely beneficial with the collaboration among my son’s entire team. Sending and storing files in an organized way while being able to isolate who can see what, is a great benefit,” said one KPS4Parents client.

Many KPS4Parents students and their families stay with the organization for years, from preschool to high school graduation and beyond. All documentation for each student is available to parents throughout their journey. The importance of that data is near and dear to Anne Zachry of KPS4Parents: “I’d go without food before I’d go without Egnyte. It’s the hub; everyone is depending on it.”

Looking ahead, KPS4Parents plans to develop an app for parents to track their children's special education programs. The intent is to help parents better advocate for themselves. Leveraging Egnyte for secure document storage, the app will include guides for regulatory timelines that integrate with calendar apps to help parents keep on top of assessments, IEP meetings, and other regulated procedures. It will also include case management tools to help parents identify the necessary steps to solve specific challenges. Automated workflow processes will build evidence lists and case maps as needed.

KAST Construction is a general contractor based in West Palm Beach, Florida. As an ENR Top 400 ranked contractor, KAST specializes in high-density residential, hospitality, and commercial projects. KAST has 300 employees located in offices and job sites in and around West Palm Beach, Miami, and Tampa, FL.

Challenge: VDC and Project Team Inefficiency

In 2015, KAST Construction management began to expand the company’s use of technology, particularly Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual Design and Construction (VDC). Rob Sloyer was hired on as director of technical services, and his first priority was to implement the new technology effectively.

To do this successfully, Sloyer and his team needed to ensure that project teams could work collectively and securely in new and efficient ways.

“Our job is to manage Procore, our drones, and the VDC program, all of which includes training, policies, and procedures,” said Sloyer, now the VP of innovation and strategic services.

KAST saw VDC as a way to improve how they built. They believed it could positively impact the quality of their projects through better collaboration, lowered costs and enhanced safety. But as they rolled out the initiative, they found a series of data management inefficiencies that hindered any improvements in productivity.

For starters, the VDC team operated almost independently of the projects they supported. The team began every project by asking the project manager a series of questions—addressing the areas that needed to be coordinated, the expected outcome, the budget, and deadlines. Then they would go work amongst themselves to produce the designs.

That approach involved a lot of back and forth with a project manager who was extremely busy with project startup. If the VDC team scheduled time to work on a project but lacked all the necessary information, such as the current budget or schedule, they had to email the project manager to get it answered. Waiting for responses slowed everything down and resulted in the loss of scheduled days.

In addition, teams executing the projects—the ones who needed the designs, schedules, and budgets from the VDC team—couldn’t find the information. “If a project team is looking for model files, and they are hard to find, hard to access, and hard to use, they are just not going to do it,” Sloyer said.

As a result, the VDC team wasn’t providing the full support the project teams required, and the project teams were wasting time and money either searching for designs or building off old plans.

Solution: Standardized, Secure Access for All

Sloyer knew that for the VDC program at KAST to be successful, it required a shift in mindset and a better way to facilitate the exchange of information between the project teams and the VDC team.

Sloyer had always used Egnyte to store project drawings that were hyperlinked back to Bluebeam so he could access files from his desktop, laptop, or mobile device. And he recognized the opportunity to leverage that same use case at a larger scale.

“I realized this was something that could serve everyone, from the project teams to the subcontractors and trade contractors,” Sloyer said. “What if the information was easy to find when people needed it, no matter where or who they were?”

With that realization, Sloyer’s team stood up standardized Egnyte file structures for both Precon and Operations. And now when a project begins, the VDC managers know exactly where to find the information they need without having to ask anyone or wait for an email response. When they have to develop schedules and budgets for the VDC process, they just go to Egnyte, find the information, and start generating plans. And when the plans are ready, they post them back to Egnyte, making them immediately available to the Precon teams.

The same goes for Operations. They have their own project folder but can easily go back to the Precon folder to find the VDC information they need. And while they can’t edit or delete the files (ensuring data integrity), they can download and upload them to the Operations project folders for easy access when needed. Plus, the Precon and Operations folder structures are customized for each group to better address their unique needs.

The standardized folder structure makes it easy to find the right information on any project. As teams transition between projects, they know what information will be in each folder and how to get it, saving countless hours.

Project-based access controls make it even easier to find the right folder through all the noise. “When I go into Egnyte as an Administrator, I can see 300 projects with 800 folders each,” Sloyer said. “That’s a lot. But our project managers only see the projects they are working on. They don’t have to click around to find the right folder, so it’s really simple and saves a bunch of time.”

Egnyte also enables secure file sharing with subcontractors, which is critical because KAST doesn’t do any self-perform work. “With Egnyte, we can share with our subcontractors for the duration of the project and when the project is over, we can revoke their access. We can even lock the file after it has been downloaded. That gives us a lot of control and the confidence to know we can protect our clients’ sensitive information,” said Sloyer. 

Benefits: Building Smarter and Faster

Egnyte allows KAST to facilitate the flow of data to the people who need it, when they need it. When the VDC team has time scheduled to work on a project, there is no more searching for files, no more waiting for email responses, and no more wasting schedule days. And the benefits of Egnyte go beyond the VDC team.

Before, when KAST shared project administrators between job sites, the team needed to wait until the admin was physically on their site to get files or questions answered. Now, with Egnyte’s integration with Procore, the admins can access and share the files teams need no matter where they are.

“How we operated before resulted in a lot of waiting around. Now, the admins can respond to needs from a specific person no matter where they are. That saves time and improves job satisfaction,” said Sloyer.

The recent strengthening of the integration between Procore and Egnyte will make it easier to access the latest Procore files from any device. And the fact that co-editing is now available on any device will improve how they collaborate together.

“Now teams can work from home, from the coffee shop, from their kid’s Little League game,” Sloyer said. “The people, and firms, who can integrate work and life will eat the lunch of those who can’t, and Egnyte gives us that flexibility.”

What started as an individual use case to increase productivity, has now resulted in the entire VDC team providing better service to the organization.

KAST is building smarter and faster with a little help from Egnyte.

Challenges

Sargent is a 350-person-strong, employee-owned infrastructure construction company in Stillwater, Maine. It has projects in seven states, covering everything from wind farms to landfill cells.

When Sargent had a data breach in 2020, they were lucky that their IT service provider, Network Coverage (NetCov), was there to get them back up and running.

The close call forced Sargent to realize that a file management solution that could provide both data access and threat protection, in the office and in the field, would be the way to minimize the risk of future attacks.

However, their office employees were using Dropbox, a notoriously insecure file sharing platform, and were struggling to effectively store and share information. Additionally, field teams couldn’t access the up-to-date information they needed in a timely manner which was slowing projects down.

For example, a project manager in the office would submit paperwork to the owner for review and approval, while also emailing the same paperwork to the supervisor in the field. If the owner came back with a change, the project manager would need to email the supervisor again to let them know of the latest plan. Once the owner approved the final changes the project manager would need to email the supervisor again to let them know of the final decision so they could procure the right material and begin construction.

Not only was the process slow and tedious, but on jobsites with limited connectivity, the supervisor might only be receiving notifications once a day. Meaning they had to spend time searching through all their emails to try to find the latest plans and approvals - that is, if they hadn’t already started construction working off old versions of the plan. The result – project delays and unnecessary expenses due to procuring the wrong part or building off the wrong specs.

To overcome these issues and stay on schedule, many project managers purchased personal hard drives and downloaded files to them for access from anywhere. If those hard drives were lost or damaged, a common occurrence, they would lose data, causing even more rework. In addition, having unprotected, and unknown, hard drives with sensitive company and client data on jobsites posed a significant risk.

It was time for a solution that worked for everyone—employees in the office, teams in the field, and the IT department responsible for keeping all data secure.

Sargent turned to NetCov for a solution that could both improve productivity and protect their data.

“NetCov has always been a lifesaver, and they were there in our time of despair,” said Tasha Gardner, CFO at Sargent. “Through all our years of working together and all their technology recommendations, they have never led us astray. So, it only made sense for us to turn to them for help.”

NetCov recommended Egnyte.

Saving Time and Money With Egnyte

With Egnyte, Sargent’s personnel have secure access to the files they need, when they need them, regardless of whether they’re in the office or on remote jobsites. They can easily share files across internal teams, as well as external vendors, owners, and subcontractors.

Getting a plan approved quickly evolved from a convoluted series of emails to a simple file upload. Now, from a single Egnyte folder, the project manager, the owner, and the supervisor on site all have access to the latest version of the file. This means less time searching through email for files, less rework on projects, and less cost.

Sargent can also send large files more easily to potential subcontractors or vendors. Previously, when bidding on a project, estimators and project manager teams struggled to provide large plan sets to the potential client.

“We have plan copiers and printers that used to run 24 hours a day just for people to give us a price,” said Jason Light, IT manager at Sargent. “Now we just send them PDF files.”

The teams in the field love Egnyte because it means no more VPN, long delays waiting for a wireless connection to get the files they need, or time spent backing up and restoring files.

“We did a cost benefit analysis,” Gardner said. “The time savings resulting from the project management team and the supervisors not having to backup and restore their files...that in itself pays for the cost of Egnyte.”

And Sargent isn’t stopping there.

More Opportunities Ahead

Sargent is looking to expand its use of Egnyte to construction equipment. Today’s machinery is equipped with GPS, computers, and hotspots with internet connectivity. However, field engineers and surveyors manually upload data to each machine.

Currently, surveyors create a file (such as a GIS shapefile), put it on a thumb drive, travel to a site, plug it in, upload the data, then run the file and make sure it is going to work. Then they drive to the next jobsite and do the same thing. This process not only wastes time, but also leads to a high degree of job dissatisfaction.

“It's getting harder to keep good surveyors because they spend a lot of time traveling, going between jobsites and physically carrying files to the machines,” Light said.

“What if we used Egnyte to upload the files automatically to the equipment?” Light said. “The surveyor could stay in the office and just push the files directly to the machines. That is going to save them a bunch of time.”

For Sargent, what started as a project to better protect their data and improve access to files evolved into an initiative to optimize their workflows. With Egnyte, employees in the office and in the field can easily access files and collaborate from anywhere. And IT is confident in the security of project documentation and client data. The result is less risk and greater productivity across the entire organization.

“We now have happier people,” Gardner said. “And happier people are more productive people.”

Challenges

A ransomware attack over the weekend had brought the Engineering, Design, Construction, and Smart Manufacturing firm to a standstill. In order to contain the breach they shut down everything including all on-premises and mobile access to their file server. And without access to their project files they couldn’t access critical information such as updated drawings and change orders; they couldn’t respond to requests; they couldn’t engage with their subcontractors; they had no ability to deliver on their projects.

Solution

Egnyte was deployed across the firm and, with the help of Egnyte's Professional Services Team, 7 TB of clean, ransomware-free project data was cut over to get them up and running. In order to facilitate a smooth transition and better user acceptance, Egnyte employed additional training including additional coffee chats, demos, and extra office hours.

Results

Now, the firm is almost fully deployed with 750 seats and Egnyte covering not just the project files but business files such as HR and Finance. In addition, it is governing and securing their SharePoint instance and file services. Since deploying the platform there have been no additional incidents, and with Egnyte’s data governance solution if they are ever hit by ransomware again the solution will detect it and be able to proactively mitigate any damage.

Challenges

With its client roster growing each year, along with the number of projects the company had in precon or under construction, C.W. Driver Cos. took an organic approach to building its IT infrastructure—adding storage capacity and file-sharing tools as needed. This created three issues: storage, constant need of expensive upgrades, and shadow IT (data silos and backup issues).

Solution

After investigating cloud-based file management solutions, Blaine Crawford, C.W. Driver Cos.' Director of IT, found that Egnyte checked all the key boxes for his company. Egnyte offered a user-friendly interface for file collaboration from any device. It also provided the familiar Windows-mapped-drive format the company’s employees had become comfortable using. And it allowed C.W. Driver Cos. to retire its on-premises data-storage infrastructure and outsource it all to the cloud.

Results

Integrating Egnyte with Autodesk, C.W. Driver Cos. ensures its teams always have the most recent document versions. Because they can access files from mobile devices, superintendents can easily pull up drawings and RFIs in the field. And after replacing on-premises storage with Egnyte’s easy-to-scale cloud solution, the IT team hasn’t had to raise its data storage budget for eight years.

Challenges

Page needed to find a solution to work together more efficiently. With projects that can have an extensive employee team and up to a hundred external consultants located in multiple cities, Page had files spread across various systems and locations, making finding, sharing, and collaborating on files extremely challenging.

Solution

Now, Page’s plan is to take all the content (that is contractually permissible) off their file servers and move it to Egnyte. To date, they have entirely transitioned their Marketing content to the platform and are now focusing on Accounting, Human Resources, and IT. The goal is to get to the point when all new projects begin in Egnyte.

Results

Page was recently awarded a large healthcare project and their use of Egnyte resulted in significant improvements in file sharing, collaboration and data security