Tegan Gahan

Written by Tegan Gahan, STOBG Emerging Technology Manager

As builders, one of our core markets is corporate interiors, which adds up to over 2,500 small projects every year. These “day two” projects, as they’re often called, can range in size from $10,000 to $5M and, from a schedule perspective, anywhere from just a few days to several months. 

Managing these fast paced projects with multiple stakeholders and many moving parts is one of the industry’s toughest challenges. While our project teams are well versed in the nature of these fast-track projects, we know they can be challenging for our subcontractors and partners to keep up with, let alone our clients and project stakeholders.

So, we set out to help solve those challenges through our client-focused, sophisticated and comprehensive approach to ongoing facility care. This approach includes exploring software programs and other tools that can help all project partners have transparent, efficient, and easy access to project information and updates.

During the past year, STOBG has been partnering with a software developer called Day 2+ to create a tool that could more easily manage the facets of projects like adds, moves, and changes—everything from finding the right resources for the work to managing out-of-scope tasks in a tight schedule. By tracking these bits and pieces all in one place, we’re able to keep all stakeholders, from the owner to the subcontractor’s foreman, informed and engaged in all phases of these microprojects.

Through the culmination of technology expertise, industry experience, diligent developers, and a vision to eliminate fragmented and siloed processes, we expect the addition of a tool like this to be the key to unlocking the market of continuous service for STOBG.

Our teams have been piloting this new tool on projects, absorbing feedback from each member of the growing pilot team and transforming the finest pain points into refined processes along the service pipeline. So far, it’s really proving to be a game-changer. And it all comes back to partnership. By pairing the expertise of our construction professionals with the development know-how of friends in the tech space, we have leveraged each other’s strengths to solve challenges. That’s what innovation is all about.

HERE’S WHAT THE PLATFORM WILL PROVIDE:

  • A simple interface for our clients to create service requests so that our teams can track progress and serve as our client’s liaison in every stage of the construction lifecycle. 
  • A method for our subcontractors to bid the open work in a matter of clicks, receive submittal approvals, allocate resources and materials, and even receive payment.
  • A single product created to benefit both our providers and our clients, allowing us to maintain a single source of truth for performance management, communications, pricing, submittals, drawings, and schedules.

“It’s not just big jobs at STO Building Group. We’re interested in the medium-sized jobs, repeat smaller work, the on-call maintenance. When we finish a headquarters, we don’t want to leave. We want to stay there for life. The continuity of that relationship is important to us.”—Jim Donaghy, STO Building Group Executive Chairman