DesCor Builders is a licensed general contractor based in Sacramento, CA that provides full service preconstruction, general contracting, and construction management services. They have been widely recognized as the best construction value in the Northern California area by providing the most sophisticated construction services at an economical price. Their exceptional people and practices make sure their clients’ projects are intelligently managed and accurately planned for timely delivery with no surprises.

DesCor started nearly 60 years ago with the purpose of building a lasting legacy of great buildings and even greater relationships with both their clients and their team. They’ve since grown the company to operate in 15 different market sectors at any given time to the tune of roughly $250 million a year, to which they credit their core values of passion, accountability, commitment, and excellence.

THE CHALLENGE

As DesCor grew their company from $8 million to $250 million in a short period of time, they realized that to maintain their upward trajectory they would need to stay ahead of the curve by identifying and eliminating inefficient processes. One of the processes that DesCor identified was their resource loading. 

Tyler Ganyo, a Partner and Preconstruction Provider at DesCor, described the resource planning process before Bridgit Bench. “We were inefficient with how we were doing our workforce and resource loading,” said Ganyo. “I was on four different spreadsheets, while also trying to track the project itself. We just realized how inefficient we were being. Our time is so important these days.”

While operating in so many different sectors has helped DesCor become the company they are today, it also made workforce planning in spreadsheets increasingly difficult. “When you’re in a lot of market sectors,” explained Ganyo, “you really need the ability to be nimble with your staffing. We’ve got certain guys that can do certain roles and needing to know what that looks like, coming out, is basically why we started using Bridgit Bench.”

THE SOLUTION

As their projects continued to get bigger and more complicated, DesCor began creating different types of innovation teams internally that included everyone from superintendents and engineers to project executives and members of their leadership team. These innovation teams focused on identifying problems and inefficient processes at DesCor and then committing to find the best solutions that could address those problems.

“Innovation is really just a new way of doing things,” Ganyo explained. “But when you’re looking at the new ways, you want to be more efficient and more effective. At DesCor, we call this ‘process improvement’. When we’re using a new technology, we want to turn it into a process improvement. The goal isn’t just to solve a problem, we want to make ourselves better.”

Before Bridgit Bench, Ganyo was dedicating countless hours every week managing and maintaining a series of spreadsheets. Time that Ganyo is thankful to have back now. “It saves me about 70% of my time,” he told us. “I had so many different spreadsheets to tie our supers, managers, and engineers together. Add to that being active in so many market sectors. We really needed a cleaner path to accomplish that. So Bridgit Bench has saved an incredible amount of my time. It’s been huge for us.”

Bridgit Bench has also helped the team at DesCor create a centralized, single place where they can come to understand their staffing needs. Having this visibility of their workforce has helped Ganyo be more agile with his team and workforce strategy. “We might be doing a $100,000 GI or a $90 million multifamily job,” explained Ganyo. “Our jobs are constantly changing. New ones are coming in and a job might go away for some reason. I keep Bridgit Bench open every day because I click one thing and everything updates in real-time. I’m in it quite a bit.”

“We want to be on the forefront of innovation at DesCor. Who knows what the next 10 years will bring? The last 10 years have been crazy. The technology is just going to keep going in that direction. So our team really puts a focus on looking at what’s ahead to see what’s out there.”“I had so many different spreadsheets to tie our supers, managers, and engineers together. Add to that being active in so many market sectors. We really needed a cleaner path to accomplish that. So Bridgit Bench has saved an incredible amount of my time. It’s been huge for us.“

— Tyler Ganyo, Partner & Preconstruction Provider at Descor Builders

WHAT’S NEXT FOR DESCOR?

Working to eliminate inefficiencies and make incremental process improvements has led DesCor to adopting 7 new technologies in the last 5 years, being careful not to overwhelm the team with new technologies. Successful tech adoption takes time, buy-in, and constant evaluation.

While their innovation team will always be looking for new ways to make process improvements, the team at DesCor is working to integrate their existing tech stack (including Bridgit Bench with Procore), to ensure their data remains consistent across every tool. “We have a power group that works with Procore on a lot of integrations right now,” said Ganyo. “They are working with our team to see how everything can be integrated because we don’t want a ton of tools that work independently of one another. That gets a little overwhelming.”

We look forward to seeing how Bridgit Bench evolves as a core piece of DesCor’s technology stack. Read more about all of our popular integration offerings.

Article By: Bridgit Bench

Link to article: https://gobridgit.com/case-studies/how-descor-builders-has-cut-time-spent-on-workforce-planning-by-70/