Improved Infrastructure Service Capacity with OneOffice

St. Paul, MN

Population: 303,820

Product: OneOffice for Construction Project Management

Depts: Public Works

Customer Since: 2021

St. Paul’s Public Works Department was responsible for the maintenance of much of the city’s infrastructure and struggled to effectively manage projects with existing processes. By shifting all records and documentation to OneOffice, the city was able to better track project progress.

CHALLENGE

The City of St. Paul’s Public Works Department is responsible for maintaining the city’s ~750 miles of roads but the systems used to keep work on schedule and on budget were not ideal. Important project details were documented by construction inspectors in bound journals and later transcribed into spreadsheets. However, the spreadsheets were inaccessible to inspectors in the field, and the usefulness of bound journal notes was limited by the lack of a standardized format. Making monthly payments to contractors took a lead technician a whole day to gather all the necessary details from emails, spreadsheets, and journal entries, before calculating the payment. Short-staffed and facing increased work volume, the department knew its existing processes were unsustainable and were in dire need of standardization.

SOLUTION

The department enabled better management and tracking of its projects by adopting a comprehensive construction management platform. Staff no longer have to manually transfer data from journals to spreadsheets, and instead use iPads to enter information directly into OneOffice. Alternatively, photos of daily journal notes can be uploaded to the platform and tagged to projects or events. Staff can also access project information from the field, and easily share all records and documentation with stakeholders. With these improvements, supervisors and managers save time previously spent deciphering journal notes.
The uniform notes structure in OneOffice shrunk the monthly payment process for contractors from an all-day task to something that takes staff 15 or 30 minutes before they get back to performing their essential work.