Customer Stories
How DAVIS Construction uses Hoylu to enhance scheduling, safety, and collaboration
est. 1966
Rockville, Maryland
The largest general contractor in the Mid-Atlantic US
Hoylu Value
Expedited calculation of key project performance metrics
Improved in-person meeting dynamics
Reduced risk through a new risk lookahead system
Increased interdisciplinary problem-solving
James G. Davis Construction Corporation is the Mid-Atlantic region’s largest general contractor. With offices in Rockville, Maryland and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, DAVIS is known for prioritizing strong community ties and locally informed expertise. Specializing in highly complex projects across 11 market sectors, including education, government, healthcare, and science and technology, DAVIS teams bring experience and insight together to deliver exceptional results.
Introduction
DAVIS is currently underway with an electrical project for a healthcare client which consists of work on an existing addition that houses switch gears and panels for the hospital’s emergency power, which are tied to external generators. The project calls for the construction of a new building that will be attached to the existing structure, and contain a new switch gear for the hospital’s regular power.
When the project is completed, power will be transitioned from the old switch gear to the newly installed one. The project involves duct banks, utility work, structural work, directional boring, concrete masonry units, foundation walls, waterproofing, brick facade, a new roof, and a new interior.
Challenge
While DAVIS had a well-established pull planning process, they didn’t yet have a purpose-built planning software in place.
Having used both analog and digital approaches to Lean construction, Senior Superintendent Shawn Mongold knew he preferred the digital option. “Someone can just come and move those sticky notes anywhere they want, or they fall off, because they’re sticky notes. And then you have no idea where they were unless you took very detailed photos,” explains Mongold. “I desperately want to get away from the sticky notes. It’s not sustainable,” he adds.
Mongold had run several pull planning sessions using Miro, but immediately recognized the difference when introduced to Hoylu. “This is like Miro, but it also has functions specifically for construction scheduling. It just blew my mind,” he says.
Mongold also noticed a reduction in individual team members’ stress levels when using a digital planning tool. “When you’re running those meetings in person, no one wants to stand up and walk to the board and be the first one to write on a sticky note and start putting it on a board in front of 15-20 people,” he explains. “With Hoylu, you get that sense of privacy. It’s not as anxiety driven as standing up in a room full of people and walking over to this giant piece of Corex, taking a sticky note and a marker and then confidently writing down your duration.”
By reducing apprehension by changing the dynamics of the meeting, team members can focus on the details of the project plan and provide better input.
Solution
The team found it relatively easy to transition to Hoylu from Miro. “It was fairly simple, because the logic for Lean construction is already there because we’ve been doing it for a while, and it’s pretty much the same methodology,” says Mongold.
As the team has gotten more familiar with Hoylu, they have steadily added to the range of functionality they use. Typical use starts with uploading a PDF of their P6 schedule. Once they’ve built out their swimlanes, they add floor plans and other supplemental visuals around the plan. Mongold also uses the to-do list, daily huddle tools, and constraint log in his trade partner meetings.
DAVIS has also pioneered some new uses of Hoylu. “We have a project risk lookahead board that we utilize at our company, which tracks any high-hazard activities that are upcoming in the next three, six, and nine weeks. We record who’s responsible for it and then we tie it over to possible coordination meetings, certain safety inspections we may want to do for that week if that activity is happening. After I’m done filling it out, I just print screen it and upload that image into our folder so our safety department can see it,” Mongold explains.
Results
In addition to innovating around their safety protocols, the team derives numerous other benefits from using Hoylu and has seen an overall improvement in schedule management and stakeholder communication.
“We’re always using the lookahead and the weekly work plan reporting function for the lookahead. We always have that PDF in our agenda for our owner’s meetings. My project fully uses this software, and it makes my time management and my project that much better,” says Mongold. “It gets your trade partners talking with each other and prompts us to set up those coordination meetings between those trades outside of a weekly meeting or the pull plan meeting.”
Project performance tracking is another area that Hoylu has streamlined for DAVIS. “Hoylu tracks your percent plan complete (PPC) perfectly, which is a metric that we track. I have a monthly checklist that I send to my executives. They ask for the previous three weeks of PPC. It’s very easy to find, I just scroll in on the week and see what the percentage is. Before, we used to have to count every single activity in the weekly work plans. And then if they didn’t complete one, put an “X” on it. Or if they went long, put an “X” on it. Then we would track all the negatives and calculate all the committed activity days versus the missed days. It was extra work—this saves a lot of time,” Mongold explains.
In addition to overall PPC, the team is also able to use variance data to identify trends. “We used to track safety incidents to see if a company has any prior issues or trends with safety incidents, but we were missing an easy way to report on that data for production incidents. Hoylu provides that metric,” says Mongold.
By analyzing variance reports for each trade contractor, DAVIS can identify tendencies that contribute to delays, such as poor planning or insufficient crew size for committed tasks. Hoylu’s variance data gives the team the data to push back when needed to ensure that their trades have adequate resources for the tasks they’ve committed to. For example, “You told me you’re going to have 10 guys out here, and you have a crew of five. Our durations increased because you had half the crew size,” he explains.
About Hoylu
Our platform offers you and your team the power of unified planning with an intuitive solution that combines feature-rich whiteboarding, planning, and task management. Plan, engage, and visualize your projects with best-in-class usability and integrations. Bring your best ideas together with your best data across disparate teams and solutions for unified, unlimited, unbeatable construction project planning.