Learn more about our work with Automated Logic here
Transcript
Automated Logic is a subsidiary of Carrier Corporation. We apply building automation and building controls in an intuitive way. Currently, we have about 6,000 open and active projects across our entire organization and that normally amounts to about 25 to 50 projects in a Project Manager’s portfolio. Our projects span mission-critical hospitals, data centers, grade schools, higher-level learning such as colleges. We also do high-end residential, office buildings, baseball stadiums. We were even doing some cruise line ships.
Before Cora, you know our effort was to try to execute our projects in the best way we knew how and that ended up being a bit of a “hodgepodge” of a bunch of different systems. It really was a complex model of multiple different processes, Office suites, local standards throughout the country, and workflow with zero transparency to what our resources were on those particular projects or even our budgets. So while the work was getting done and are we had good customer satisfaction we’d never have the transparency, and fluidity if you will, on how we were executing those projects.
We looked at a variety of portfolio management tools; approximately eight. It was easy to boil it down to Cora due to its out-of-the-box offering and from what we understood at the time, its flexibility and meshing of what our best practices were into the tool, and that’s been proven out. We’ve been very pleased with what we’ve seen.
For me, it’s the ease of looking up any project in the entire North American field operation and being able to quickly ascertain what it looks like; You know its financial health, what the team interaction looks like on the project, risk mitigation, you know documentation that’s all-important. It’s all housed important,
So that’s its benefit for me, as someone who looks across the entire organization, you know. For others, it’s more, you know, micro-centered. They have the ability to forecast their revenue and their budgets in their portfolio. Others enjoy its ability to assign resources and funnel all that information into a mobile app.
Our revenue forecasting previously was done in Excel. You look across the organization, you all of a sudden have 150 spreadsheets and all those need to roll up into one version of the truth. So with the way Cora works, each individual PM has their version of forecasting within Cora, and with a click of a button, we can roll all of that information across the country into one source of forecasting, so it’s an excellent tool and something that’s saved us a ton of time and a ton of errors for our monthly forecasting.
We have quarterly risk mitigation meetings and those typically pertain to our larger project, so you know anything from $1-2 million and above, which there are quite a few of, we take those projects and do a deep dive into what they look like financially, what they looked like execution wise. We’ll take a look at the schedule, make sure that our percent complete matches up with where we expect to be in our cash receivables. All of that we are able to do a simple couple clicks of a mouse and have a report out that summarizes that detail.
For someone at my level to look at, as well as the project managers and the operations managers below me, for them to all to be able to see this in a one-stop-shop is just powerful and we have saved multiple jobs from collapse because of it.
With Cora, when we first implemented it, the expectation early was a 1 to 2% net recovered margin on our projects just from a streamlined efficiency and we’ve seen that we’ve gotten our 1-2% net recovered margin across the business, across our execution platform, so all things are “thumbs up” as far as what I’ve been able to see with the results of using Cora has been.
Our working relationship with Cora has always been creative and it’s been collaborative. I recommend Cora to many different business units within Carrier and Automated Logic. So I find the product compatible and flexible for different businesses and I would have no issues recommending it to any organization.
