Item: Procore
Rating: 7
Author: Tim Corbett

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At Infinite Energy Construction, we use Procore across all of our offices throughout our organization. This consists of not only our home office but 6 satellite offices as well. It allows ALL of our people to work from the same, common framework. We effortlessly share documents and data. It is absolutely vital to how we function.

Pros and Cons

Document control is very good. It has allowed us to set up our file structures to be exactly the same for every user, every project, no matter if they are working on a one-off project in some far-flung location, working at one of our established program-level field offices, or working in the home office. The user experience is the same across the board.
Standardizing business forms across all units is a nice side-benefit, too. It is not uncommon for field offices to have unique ways of doing things, sometimes for no better reason than "that is just how it has always been done here in _______!" Being able to have an organized, standardized template that pushes out to all "forces" all users to be consistent. This allows management to review documents much easier, as there aren't subtle differences to be sorted.
While document handling is, in general, very good, it is the Drawings tools (and the related Punchlist and Inspections tools) that really shine. Those, along with photos (which can be easily linked/embedded in drawings) are game changers. The field always has the latest drawings, submittals, RFI's, ASI's, etc. at hand.

ProCore has been very good at rolling out updates. That being said, the Financial reporting still has room for improvement. While it is not full-blown accounting, it has the potential to replace such at the Project Management-level. They have made improvements and will continue to improve, I believe, to make the financial tools better.
Success has its downsides, and one potential weak point is that, as more and more users adopt Procore, it can be a challenge for the servers to keep up. It is not uncommon to get Loss of Service messages at peak times (end of the month, end of the year, etc). The outages haven't lasted for extended periods of time (usually an hour or less), but it IS a leap of faith to have Procore and the "cloud" your sole avenue for reaching your critical data.
It would be nice to be able to easily modify certain forms. For example, we are a Federal contractor and must use very rigid government forms for simple things like submittals and daily reports. A greater degree of flexibility to modify the output of these forms/reports to meet our specific needs would be great. We have tried to utilize the "custom report/form service" that they offer, but have had mixed results. What we really want is the ability to modify the output how we need it.

Alternatives Considered

PlanGrid

To be honest, PlanGrid was far superior as a Drawing / Punchlist tool back when it came out. Procore did a major revision on their Tools in the last year or two, and now Procore is an excellent tool.

Collaboration Benefits

As stated earlier, the ability to access all data from anywhere, with the same user experience, has been a true game changer. I can honestly say our company could not have sustained the growth we have experienced in the past 3 years without Procore and the integrated cloud-based nature of the tool.

Return on Investment

We have transitioned away from printing documents, by and large. Instead of outfitting offices with large printers, we put small, cheap scanners on every desk. This encourages folks to digitize any "legacy" documents that cross their desk, and get it up in Documents on Procore.
We save a substantial amount of time daily.
There isn't any downside, but I will admit that getting ALL parties up to speed to use the tools isn't always easy. Folks get set in their ways, and you have to stay on them to show them the benefits.

Goals with Procore

Gain visibility into projects
Ensure information is accessible and up to date
Document job site conditions
Report on incidents and inspections
Identify job site risks
Track cost impacts from the field
Streamline financial reporting
Improve forecast accuracy
Simplify employee time tracking

Obviously the cloud based aspect helps everyone be on the same page. Pushing safety information out via Procore, as well as site photo's back, helps our corporate safety group keeps tabs on all sites. Financial tracking at the project management level is effective. The time card feature works pretty seamlessly and allows us to accurately cost time the right location.

Ease of Integration

The online tools are great for learning. The tutorials are easy to follow. We did roll it out in stages, using one group as a test subject to work out the bugs prior to pushing it out to all others.

Likelihood to Recommend

ProCore works great for our General Construction side of our business. As a GC, it functions well. We also are a self-performing electrical contractor, however, and find it has short-comings in that arena, particularly in the slightly unwieldy way that Invoices are handled. As a GC you might receive 20 to 40 invoices (pay applications) on a given job each month. As a self-performing contractor, we can have hundreds and hundreds of "tickets" or invoices to enter each month. Materials are purchased, many times, in small quantities from multiple vendors. The process to enter and track an invoice is the same whether it is for $1 or $1M.

Procore is a key tool in our tool kit, and one we wouldn't want to do without

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Procore