Customer Stories
W. M. Jordan Company drives successful corporate Lean practices with Hoylu
Photo Credit: Kyle LaFerriere Photography
est. 1958
Newport News, Virginia
Construction management and real estate development company
Hoylu Value
Optimized materials procurement and storage
Increased buy-in and engagement from trade contractors
Strengthened corporate Lean adoption
Introduction
Founded in 1958, W. M. Jordan Company is a construction management and real estate development company active across six locations in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, and has been an enterprise Hoylu customer for over a year.
Challenge
When W. M. Jordan committed several years ago to adopting Lean construction practices at the corporate level, the company began experimenting with different approaches to implementation. Beginning with traditional, sticky-note-based pull planning on a design-build pilot project, the team soon developed strong competence with Lean methods, but found the administrative burden of transferring their paper-based plans into Excel and maintaining them too laborious.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the team transitioned to Mural for digital Lean planning to safely maintain operations, which helped them acclimate to digital planning tools. After Lauren Simone, director of learning & development and Lean construction, and Rebecca Shields, Lean data analyst, attended the Lean Construction Institute’s annual Congress in 2022, they intensively researched and tested several additional software options, including Hoylu.
Solution
The team quickly determined that Hoylu was the best fit for their business goals and workflow requirements, and use of the platform took off fast. “We did a test project on one, and a couple of months into that project, it was going so well that we went enterprise with Hoylu. That was just over a year ago,” explains Simone.
Since their enterprise adoption of Hoylu, the team has become adept at planning in Hoylu, both in the design and construction phases. “As we’ve transitioned to having in-house corporate Lean support, the last two projects we’ve done now are in construction, and we’ve used Hoylu as our working platform,” says Erik Mills, senior project manager.
The support from Hoylu’s customer success team minimized the team’s learning curve. “One of our favorite things about Hoylu and one of the deciding factors was the customer support. Anytime we had any questions, and still to this day, we can send a text, email, a phone call, and immediately somebody will either hop on the meeting or call us and help us work through whatever the issue may be,” says Josh Nelms, superintendent and Lean coach.
Results: Improved engagement
One of the first benefits the team observed was an increase in engagement. “With the field staff, this seems to really catch on with them a lot better than the old Excel sheet. This enables more thorough planning than Excel, and it seems to have a lot more buy-in than the analog systems that we’d had before,” says Mills.
Feedback from W. M. Jordan’s trade contractors has also been positive. “We heard feedback from trades about their ability to export their work into either Excel or Project for their internal tracking. Two of our trade contractors now use Hoylu exclusively, whereas before they had to create two different versions of their plan, one for our analog Lean system and one for their internal planning. It was never linked together, and now they’re able to link it,” explains Nelms. “For the trade partners, it’s cut their workload immensely by 80 percent because they don’t have to continually input new data each week, they can refine what’s already there. That’s really where the time savings is on the trade end,” adds Mills.
With the greater transparency afforded by working collaboratively out of a centralized, real-time plan, trade contractors have become proactive about resolving planning conflicts. “Now we have the individual trades briefing their tasks in front of the other trades and it holds them accountable to the other trades. They’re deconflicting things amongst themselves during the meetings, as opposed to us driving that,” adds Russ Clark, project manager.
Results: Optimized material procurement
The team has seen additional impact on their material procurement. By having a more accurate plan available sooner, they can order materials earlier and minimize wait time. “A huge time savings is being able to get people on board early and getting stuff approved and getting it ordered because there is serious lead time, especially on such unique projects with special requirements. Now we’re not waiting on material. That’s been a big win for everyone in the field,” says Harry Register, project superintendent.
“The material logistics and dependability of predicting when we’re going to need those materials has improved. We’re not spending money on things like off-site storage, or running a forklift just to take stuff from pile to pile,” Mills adds. “Everything’s more efficient in how we’re staging material and bring other trades in to flow in a sequence.”
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.