Seeking Standouts
We search far and wide for gems to join our team, and we treasure our working relationships. We look for innovative, customer-focused team players who are self-starters and lifelong learners.
Understanding and solving construction project management challenges, and strengthening each customer's work through full-service customization, administration, and support--that’s the value we bring to our customers. Each VPO team member is dedicated to the success of our customers and our colleagues.
“I enjoyed having the opportunity to help streamline the creation of projects for our clients. By utilizing configuration and automation, our Support team is now able to effortlessly create new projects when requested through the Project Center.”
“The VPO team was quick to involve me in existing projects, while also being receptive to new ideas I brought to the table. In my first three months here, I was able to make enhancements to our security posture, which helps protect all of the great work that happens at VPO.”
“We work closely with clients to develop new functionality based on their goals. Working with our clients' teams is always a pleasure because of the critical and creative thinking that we all get to do together to augment and refine and customize VPO for their work.”
“Developing a way to integrate and print photos in Daily Reports was a really rewarding challenge. And finding a willing beta-testing partner in our client was such a bonus! They found real value there and even came up with additional applications for the solution.”
Fostering Flexibility
Realizing the advantages to working remotely, in 2009 the entire VPO team became pioneers in telecommuting. By using Microsoft SharePoint and Teams, and sharing our calendars, we collaborate synchronously and asynchronously—including across time zones.
Seeing one another as both co-workers and fellow human beings, our woman-led team uses innovative thinking to work smarter rather than harder, as discussed in our #workfromhome blog series.
VPO becomes the primary source of truth for all of our consultants. It’s the site of record for any drawing and document, for any project, for real-time reference anywhere, anytime. Everyone was setting up their own project sites in SharePoint. The lack of consistency was a major problem. We didn’t have one central place where we can look at the entire portfolio of projects. It was a much more decentralized delivery process.
Everything is within the realm of implementation with VPO. If I’m out of the office and if somebody wants to know about a bid on a project, that information is available right there on my phone. I’m not going to have to chase down a project manager who may be unavailable. The ability to run what-if reports on how many projects we have bidding next week, for example, really helps. We will then be able to translate that data into a more robust way to tackle workload management.
The VPO platform enables us to work as if we are all in the same room when, in reality, we’re dispersed across the country or overseas, instead of having project communications and interactions become fragmented by relying on email, everyone involved in the project can access the platform to stay on the same page. Working with our customers becomes more of a collaborative, interdependent effort, which ultimately facilitates change management. We are saving time, controlling costs, maximizing resource utilization, increasing throughput, and making fewer mistakes--which were our goals when we implemented the VPO solution.
We are not a construction firm. We are a steel-making company that is growing rapidly with several large construction projects going on at the same time. Previously, each division had its own approach to managing its construction projects, and the construction group was searching to find common practices to track ongoing projects. . .We realized we needed a single, cloud-based platform with heightened security protocols to bring consistency, standardization, repeatability, and greater efficiency to the way that we manage our internal construction projects.
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Because many of our clients are public entities such as schools and authorities, their projects carry more stringent documentation management and records archiving requirements to maintain transparency into a project’s execution. Many people don’t realize just how much paper and documentation are involved with public construction projects, and streamlining the flow of documents and automating, managing, and archiving communications are an important part of the services that we provide.
Our clients hire us to keep projects on schedule and under budget without sacrificing quality or cutting corners. VPO is a great tool for helping us consistently achieve those goals while maximizing resource utilization. Documents are located and questions are answered a lot faster, and the system saves us a ton of time, and money because there’s no extraneous effort to locate information or documentation. Everything is so easy to access or update, and everything is tracked. There’s no need to do things by hand or make manual updates.
As our construction management business continued to grow—and we had more projects to manage concurrently—we began looking for a better, more organized, single-platform solution. While all of the vendors could handle the basics of processing submittals and change orders, we wanted a solution that was more customizable. With VPO, we’ve streamlined our workflows, improved communications with clients and contractors, and have realized an effective quality control function in the process.
With VPO, SIMPLUS [since acquired by Anser Advisory] is more productive. We do more with less people, take on more work, and make more money. It’s also been a tool that our clients have embraced, making them more productive. VPO is so easy to use and implement that we’ve found that we don’t need to add additional staff on larger projects. VPO helps reduce that need, adds value, and makes us more competitive. We’re doing much more with less people, resulting in higher revenue.
VPO is compartmentalized very well and provides the access control tools that we need to automate information flows as well as workflows. By managing user access and tying that access into workflows, we are realizing additional efficiencies as well as the heightened transparency required of a governmental entity. And, at the end of the project, everything is archived, preserving a public record on every project.
