Overview

In a competitive real estate development space, Lewis Group needed to maximize the productivity of its teams. Yet its existing file management infrastructure was slowing everyone down: it didn’t offer remote access to the files teams needed and when they were in the office, locating, moving, and syncing files was seriously sluggish.

Everything changed when Egnyte came onboard. With every file now easily accessed from a single platform and secure remote access made simple, productivity skyrocketed, projects accelerated, and direct costs fell by 66%.

Challenges

Lewis Group’s employees needed fast access to critical files, such as architectural plans and project documentation. Unfortunately, their existing file management system provided no remote access, so unless they were in the office, they couldn’t access, share, or collaborate on essential content. Even when they were at their desks, locating files on the network, moving large files around, and syncing were all agonisingly slow.

Solution

With Egnyte onboard, remote and office-based users can easily access and collaborate on files of any size, on any device, even when they’re offline, which improves productivity and relationships with clients and vendors. Egnyte’s central hub of visibility and control also eliminates the frustrations of backend file administration for IT.

Results

Switching to Egnyte has cut Lewis Group’s direct costs by 66%. And with 600 staff saving at least 30 minutes a day with Egnyte, Lewis Group has unlocked an incredible 300hrs of extra capacity across the business daily!

Challenges

As Les Mills expanded into cities in Asia, Europe, North and South America, Mike Mason, Global Infrastructure Tech Lead, found himself regularly traveling the world standing up Exchange servers, file servers, backup and recovery systems, and VPNs to support the collaboration needs of its distributed workforce.

Solution

Mason decided to bring a cloud-first approach to Les Mills and its file services. He rolled out Egnyte globally in 2014, established a single source of truth and consolidated multiple content repositories into a centralized, flexible, and secure cloud environment. In 2020, with team members working from home, Les Mills brought more workout content online and shifted focus to the on-demand side of the business to meet customer needs.

Results

• Les Mills needed to very quickly shift focus, reduce operating costs and focus on the areas of the business that would lessen the impacts of Covid-19.
• Les Mills has about 100TB of data and took quick advantage of Egnyte’s AI-powered lifecycle management capabilities to identify 1.6M duplicate files across their environment.
• To solve this growth in storage, they have created retention, archive, and deletion policies that lowered storage costs and reduced risk exposure.

Robins & Morton is committed to continuous improvement in everything they do.

This philosophy has helped the construction firm founded in 1946 become one of the leading specialist builders of new hospitals and healthcare facilities in the United States today, completing more than 1,700 successful projects across 38 states. These projects have spanned from the Miami Beach Convention Center Alternate Care Facility built during the pandemic, to the Fort Hood Intrepid Spirit Center which serves up to 1,000 service members annually.

Continuous improvement is also one of the guiding principles behind the Building Forward® initiative, an innovative approach within Robins & Morton that empowers project teams to share ideas and process feedback throughout the planning, design, and construction project phases.

As construction projects have become more complicated and complex across more locations, Robins & Morton is improving how its office and field-based project-teams access, share, and collaborate on project files to run smarter, more efficient projects. This was the impetus for integrating its construction project management system, Procore, with Egnyte.

Challenge

Managing 160 projects across 16 states, Director of Corporate and Operational Technology, David Pratt, is always looking to reduce inefficiencies for the architects, sub-contractors, and client representatives working on projects.

Procore is used by project teams to coordinate and track each step of the construction process. In addition to managing real-time scheduling and project tasks, it is used to capture daily progress reports and plan reviews.

All company and project-related documents, from contracts and photos to CAD drawings and large digital AR/VR files are stored within Egnyte’s cloud-based file-sharing platform, making it easy for field-based teams, to securely access and collaborate on files regardless of where they are located, or what device they are using.

With so many active projects, Pratt needed to ensure that both Procore and Egnyte were always aligned and updated for project teams to easily locate files on the Procore Project page, eliminating the need for users to navigate two systems or juggle multiple permissions.

Solution

By using Egnyte’s native platform integration with Procore, project teams now have a single source of content truth, to access, share and collaborate on key project documents, simplifying the experience for users and IT administration alike.

“When a new construction project begins, IT simply creates a new job project in Procore, defines the access rights of all team members – which will include clients and trade partners – and then identify which content in Egnyte we want to securely share with whom,” Pratt said.

A two-way automatic sync between Egnyte and Procore eliminates the need for manual intervention, allowing users to easily upload new project documents to Procore, which are then automatically saved to Egnyte.

“The integration of Egnyte and Procore has been positively received by all. At a stroke it has eliminated the challenges we had in the field with data storage and archiving project documentation,” said Pratt. “Plus, integrating the two environments has boosted our ability to efficiently spin up new projects and interact with partners through planning, design and construction.”

Results

With a seamless integration in place, Robins & Morton has streamlined how it provides all stakeholders access to documentation for the duration of a project, generating significant productivity gains across project sites.

This proved particularly transformational when COVID-19 hit.

“We had to innovate fast to ensure that work on urgent healthcare and emergency Covid-19 facilities could continue,’ said Pratt. ‘That meant finding new ways to document job site progress and share this with partners and clients so we could work together faster. Thanks to the Egnyte and Procore integration, we were able to do this efficiently.”

The integration made it safer and easier for clients to visualize and manage projects, allowing Robins & Morton to unleash truly ground-breaking operational innovations across its project sites. This included the creation of BIM caves where clients could immerse themselves in VR models, gain a 360° perspective of future development and make construction decisions faster.

Project teams securely shared photos with stakeholders to document progress at construction sites, ensuring that approvals and decision-making processes were not impeded by physical access restrictions.

With a culture that embraces continuous improvement and innovative technology partners working together to solve complex construction challenges, Robins & Morton is delivering on its mission to make a lasting impact on the people and companies it partners with.

Solving complex challenges on aggressive timelines is in the DNA of Alberici Corporation, a diversified construction company that works in industrial and commercial markets globally.

When longtime client General Motors Company called on Alberici for an urgent design-build request to transform an 86,000 square-foot warehouse into an emergency ventilator manufacturing facility during the COVID-19 pandemic, they answered the call. Within just two weeks, the transformed facility produced its first ventilator and, within a month, it was making 500 life-saving devices a day.

Drawing on their more than 100-years of experience successfully completing complex projects like the largest hydroelectric plant on the Ohio River, automotive assembly plants for leading car manufacturers, and SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital, Alberici was ready to act fast.

Engineering News-Record recently ranked Alberici as the 31st largest construction company in the United States with annual revenues of $2B. Nearly 80 percent of Alberici’s business is generated by repeat clients, a testament to their service and quality and the foundation for consistent growth.

Ron Borror serves as the Director of Technology Infrastructure for Alberici and has been with the company for 28 years. His team is responsible for all core infrastructure including compute, storage, telephony and user support. According to Borror, the primary goal of his team is to provide the best technology solutions to support project teams in the field and deliver the best construction projects to their clients.