WM Blanchard - Procore and Quickbase Integration for Commitment and Commitment Change Order Approvals

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Overview

WM Blanchard Co., a family-owned construction firm established in 1860 and based in Springfield, New Jersey, has built a solid reputation over six generations for excellence in healthcare construction and project management. Specializing in healthcare facilities, the company has developed long-standing relationships with some of the most prominent medical institutions in New Jersey, including RWJBarnabas Health, Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center, Jersey City Medical Center, Newton Medical Center, Summit Health, Hackensack University Medical Center, Holy Name Medical Center, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and University Medical Center of Princeton. These relationships highlight Wm. Blanchard Co.'s expertise in delivering high-quality, complex construction projects that meet the rigorous standards of the healthcare industry. The company offers a wide range of services, from preconstruction planning and Building Information Modeling (BIM) to general construction and construction management.

Challenge

Blanchard Construction uses Procore's cloud-based construction management platform to manage its construction projects, specifically providing its 
project managers and teams with tools to support project execution and financial management. Procore streamlines project management, improves communication and collaboration across various stakeholders, and enhances efficiency across various aspects of a construction project, from preconstruction to project closeout. However, despite strong usage and adoption by the project teams, the most senior executives responsible for 
approving contracts and contract change orders we're being inundated with requests for approvals and found that using the “out of the box Procore functionality” for approvals to be a challenge and time consuming as they had to log on to Procore and navigate to various different screens to gather and review the information they wanted to see to confirm the approval of new contracts and contract changes orders. 

Our Approach

We leveraged Quickbase along with our Dimension Integration Platform to build this solution. We worked collaboratively with Blanchard from ideation to delivery, with key steps including: scoping, requirement gathering, detailing data extraction from Procore and ingestion into the Quickbase App, reviewing screen designs, configuring e-mail notification templates, end-to-end testing, and deployment. 

Our Solution

The goal of the product development effort was to create a solution that would streamline the process by making it dramatically easier for the senior approvers at Blanchard to find and review the information they needed to confidently approve contracts and change orders in a timely manner.  The end product was a custom mobile app that pulled data from Procore and presented it to the executives in an all-in-one view of the data they needed to approve items and easy to use approve/reject functionality that would automatically update the approval workflow status back in Procore. Calance combined its expertise and experience working with Procore, particularly with the Procore APIs associated with Approval Workflows and Construction Project Financials, with its rapid low-code application development capabilities to quickly build the envisioned mobile app. Quickbase, with its enterprise-grade security, data governance capabilities, and instantly available mobile app features, made it the obvious low-code platform choice 
for this solution.

Results

Streamlining the Approval Process for Senior Executives resulted in a drastic reduction in project delays and approval related bottlenecks. This kept project budgets aligned and on track. Furthermore, consolidating all the concerns that approvers have surrounding Change Orders in one easy to access mobile interface opens the door for more pushback on concerning COs and hence less project risk.