Case Study: Straticon Drives Project Profitability with Full CMiC Suite

Straticon drives project profitability with full CMiC suite, unifying their field operations with their financials & accounting.

Published by CMiC Global

The Challenge

For nearly 30 years, Straticon Construction has been one of the top full-service contractors in the South Florida region. As a family-owned and operated firm, they began as a painting contractor but expanded over the years to include services in general contracting, with a market focus on hospitality, multi-family homes, resorts, country clubs, marinas, as well as commercial and retail construction.

Before CMiC, Straticon managed their entire business using applications in the Microsoft Office Suite for their project management and QuickBooks for their accounting. When looking into the integrity of their data, the Straticon team—not surprisingly—uncovered double entry and data redundancies. What the team did not expect, however, was the detrimental impact these data issues were having on their project profitability. “The field would report numbers significantly higher than what was actually coming in and being closed,” says Chris Hardin, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder at Straticon Construction. “We never knew about the issues or discrepancies in a project unless they were vocalized on a phone call or in an email—and that’s only when an issue was known. Otherwise, we had no way of monitoring what was going on day to day.”

In 2014, Straticon began its search for a solution that would empower its team with the real-time information they needed to gain full visibility and control of their projects. “Our top priority was to take advantage of the accessibility of the Cloud and ensure data could be shared back and forth between our back office and the field,” says Hardin. Ultimately, Straticon realized that they were in desperate need of a single source of truth.

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The Solution

“We are operating now as we always should have been—with the insights coming from the field matching exactly what our costs on a project are.” — Chris Hardin, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder at Straticon Construction

Straticon evaluated Procore for project management and Sage for accounting, but selected CMiC as the only solution purpose-built for the construction industry, with all capabilities—from the back office to the field—on a single database platform. Unlike other software vendors, CMiC delivers an enterprise-level solution that enables every facet of a construction firm’s business—from budgets to drawings, change orders to forecasts, and contracts to revenue. This is accomplished with a suite of applications that sit on one database, ensuring the consistency, accuracy, and timeliness of all financial and operational data.

For their team in the field, Straticon implemented the full suite of CMiC Mobile applications; Collaborate/Project Gateway; and CMiC’s pre-packaged integrations with DocuSign and PlanGrid. “Our goal was to automate as many of the processes we could for our team in the field,” says Hardin. “With CMiC Mobile, our field resources can leverage the smartphones and tablets they already have to track the continuously updated profit margin calculations for each job and to minimize the double entry on each potential change order (PCO) and subcontract by creating them on the job site.”

With the support of CMiC’s Global Services team, Straticon implemented the entire CMiC Suite to unify their field operations with their financials & accounting. “We’ve really benefitted from having the full support of CMiC, with their account management team available for us to contact directly at any time,” says Hardin. “We have our cases solved within a day, unlike the customer support portals of other software vendors, where it can take 2-3 days to even get a response.”

The Result

With CMiC, Straticon no longer questions the financial figures on their forecasts at the end of each month. “Because we now forecast accurately every month, we can directly link those figures to project our WIP gross margin on every project,” says Hardin. “We are operating now as we always should have been—with the insights coming from the field matching exactly what our costs on a project are.” CMiC Contract Forecasting allows users to maximize project profitability by taking a snapshot of incurred costs and commitments at any point in time to predict how those costs will look by the end of the project. Any discrepancies can be detected and triaged before they occur, saving time and money as the project progresses.

Similarly, with CMiC’s Collaborate/Project Gateway tool and the consistency it provides in documentation, Straticon is now equipped to prevent potential liabilities and discrepancies between their project partners. Because their subcontractors have access to CMiC to enter in a request for payment, “it moves the accountability to the subcontractor, eliminating the potential for risk and blame,” says Hardin.

Internally, Straticon benefits from the standardization of its documentation when creating its own subcontracts and change orders. “We no longer have employees sifting through pages of documentation and then creating their own templates in Word,” says Hardin. “Our team can instantly package and print the report they need using the Microsoft Integration Package Templates (MIP).” MIP provides existing contract templates, which are then auto-populated with the appropriate information from data stored in CMiC. By selecting CMiC as the foundation for their single source of truth, Straticon has established consistency across the organization and throughout its operations to manage and monitor every project accurately while ensuring its profitability.