The project’s three buildings are the administration/student activities building to house administration programs, student activity programs, food services and a bookstore; the Fireside Community Building, which provides flexible meeting space for campus groups; and a three-level classroom building, including instruction rooms, faculty offices and a lecture facility. To manage the project’s wide-ranging program scope, the college district chose Bentley’s ProjectWise EADOC construction management system, as recommended by the construction manager, Critical Solutions Inc.

“EADOC is saving lots of time with the moving of information back and forth to the various entities involved with the project,” explains Alex Gourtzelis, senior construction manager for Critical Solutions. “You can actually spend that time dealing with other issues on the project, as opposed to paperwork.”

A Centralized Database

The Contra Costa project team is using EADOC to centralize project information for all team participants and save valuable time that used to be spent processing, tracking and accessing project information.

“EADOC benefits us by making it easier to collaborate with all the parties involved with our project,” notes Shalilah Bess, assistant construction manager for Critical Solutions. “We’re using it as our centralized database for RFIs, submittals, inspection reports, requests, daily logs, memos and meeting minutes, as well as PCOs. The IOR uses it for their inspections, and the contractor uses it for their inspection requests, RFIs and PCOs. We run reports from it daily and weekly, and we’re able to export from EADOC to Excel.”

Accountability and Transparency

EADOC records all actions performed on each document with a time/date stamp and user details, so the status and history of all documents is always available to project managers. The system can identify any outstanding documents—and who has them—to help keep all team members on track.

“We can check and see if somebody has opened a document that was sent to them,” adds Gourtzelis. “If you don’t have any record of when things were sent or opened, people will claim, ‘Hey, I never got this information.’ But EADOC keeps track of that to the second. Also, there are notifications, so people immediately know there is something in the system addressed to them. So they can quickly go to it.”

Rich Data Links

EADOC helps Critical Solutions save time through the ability to link documents (e.g., RFIs, submittals and change orders) to other items such as drawings, locations and project assets. This creates a web of rich data relationships that make it easier to find relevant information quickly.

A screen capture shows EADOC’s submittal module with an open risk item.

“Having the ability to link multiple documents together is great,” explains Bess. “If a user wants to go in to see the history on a PCO or a change order, we can link the RFI that initiated it, we can link the PCO that tracks the cost that’s associated with that change, and we can also link any ASIs or any supplemental drawings or instructions that were linked to it. So you can keep everything all together, and someone can open up any one of those items and see everything else that is associated with it.”

A Digital Project Archive

When the project is complete, EADOC maintains all the linked relationships between the project’s documents, communications and costs, leaving a rich, electronic archive that can be used in future operations and maintenance.

Via the capital project management system, users can easily attach a photo to an RFI.

“At the end of the project, you get a flash drive of all the documents related to the project, and you’re able to just turn that over to the client,” explains Ron Johnson, president of Critical Solutions. “When this project finishes, we’ll be able to turn over the flash drive to the client and say, ‘Here’s everything from start to finish of construction.’ So you don’t have to make a lot of hard copies, which saves a lot of time and money.”

Using ProjectWise EADOC, Contra Costa College was able to centralize the project data and communications from the construction of its new college center to increase team collaboration and accountability, and minimize the time and expense of manually handling and tracking physical documents. At completion, the Contra Costa Community College District will receive a complete digital archive of the project, which will be useful throughout the entire lifecycle of the new facilities.

“Having a Web-based system allows us to interface with project managers, construction managers, architects, the client and the contractor—and we find that to be a significant advantage,” concludes Johnson.