Working with Shawmut Design and Construction
In May of 2015 Shawmut Design and Construction began using Touchplan on their construction of Brown University’s New School of Engineering in Providence, RI. As part of our customer support, we periodically stop by jobsites and check in to see how things are going. I sat down with Perry Ashenfelter, the Project Manager to talk […]
In May of 2015 Shawmut Design and Construction began using Touchplan on their construction of Brown University’s New School of Engineering in Providence, RI.
As part of our customer support, we periodically stop by jobsites and check in to see how things are going. I sat down with Perry Ashenfelter, the Project Manager to talk about Touchplan and the project.
The New School of Engineering is an example of an Integrated Project Delivery System. As many of you know, IPD is a contractual method that starts at the outset of the project to get designers, architects, and construction companies in the room together from the design beginning. With this many teams in the room it is important to keep communication clear and open. As Perry said, “for our planning meetings not all of the engineers and architects can attend. Touchplan allows for them to rotate attendance but still keep up to speed on what planning occurred when they are not there.” Touchplan tracks real time changes during planning sessions so anyone can follow it live from anywhere.
“Touchplan is a great tool to get people to understand the timeline and what they are constrained by.”
To keep all of these moving pieces straight, Perry relies on Touchplan to keep everyone in tune with the timeline and constraints. “One of the great things about Touchplan is that it provides a visual of the timeline and autopopulates dates. Having that visual of real dates eliminates error and allows for double checking.”
In this particular project they have done an individual pull plan for each of the following groups: structural, facade, building system, clean room, and interiors. Touchplan allows for this separation, but also enables the project leads to pull reports from the five pull plans simultaneously. The reporting tools in Touchplan are another feature of the software that is keeping Shawmut on top of the game. “Touchplan gives us incredibly powerful reporting tools that are valuable with our MEP group to track commitments between the design team and the trade partners.”
On a project of this size a flexible and functional construction application is important. Touchplan does this for Shawmut and Touchplan can do it for you too.
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