CMiC Chasse Building Team replaces legacy systems to boost efficiency and support explosive growth.
The Challenge
Chasse Building Team is an Arizona-based and community-focused commercial building general contractor specializing in the education, multi-family and commercial building sectors. Since their founding just eleven years ago, Chasse has grown significantly, from $22 million in 2008 to $278 million in 2018.
Like most small construction businesses, Chasse began with QuickBooks and then transitioned to Sage 300. As the firm continued to grow over the next several years, they realized that they had accumulated a bundle of software packages to supplement Sage 300 that didn’t effectively interface with each other and that were impeding effective company-wide communication and collaboration. Over time, Chasse users devised multiple workarounds. While reevaluating its processes, Chasse realized the same data was being input over and over again on spreadsheets, which further demonstrated the inadequacy of its existing solutions. Furthermore, its project teams could not consistently access Sage 300 from remote jobsite locations. The firm made the determination that it would consider alternative solutions before investing in any additional modules or 3rd party software.
While attending the CFMA National Conferences in both 2015 and 2016, Jason Switz, CFO at Chasse, dedicated time to evaluate various software vendors in attendance: COINS, Viewpoint, Trimble, Procore and CMiC. After careful deliberation, the Chasse team determined that they would begin the process of identifying and selecting a fully-integrated cloud-based solution.
Learn why Chasse Building Team chose CMiC to boost their efficiency and support growth.Download this Case StudyThe Solution
“When one of our project coordinators issued her first subcontract, she assumed that she missed a few steps or made a mistake because it only took her a few minutes to produce the entire subcontract package. Generating a complete subcontract with CMiC is a huge time saver and is allowing us to redefine other processes and give our project coordinators more responsibility.” — Jason Switz, Chief Financial Officer at CHASSE Building Team.
Chasse established a software evaluation committee and quickly narrowed the potential software providers down to two finalists: Viewpoint and CMiC. After participating in both vendor presentations, Chasse was impressed by the CMiC multi-tenant cloud offering and the committee unanimously determined that CMiC was the best option for now and for the future.
“We chose the CMiC multi-tenant cloud solution because it fundamentally met all of our needs,” says Switz. “With CMiC, we could expect to significantly expand remote access for all of our teammates through the cloud, eliminate the numerous redundancies and double entry, and provide cutting-edge technology our current and future teammates expect to effectively perform their jobs and best serve our clients.”
Unlike other software vendors that require fixed infrastructure or have limited cloud service offerings, CMiC can be deployed as an on-premise platform, as Platform-as-a-Service (or PaaS), or as part of a multi-tenant cloud environment.
Chasse worked diligently with its CMiC Services team to prioritize the implementation of the basic modules—GL, A/R, A/P, Job Costing and Job Billing—to successfully go-live with the CMiC multi-tenant cloud solution in an aggressive timeline of four months.
The Result
Today, the entire Chasse team enjoys secure access to their full suite of CMiC enterprise software, at any time and from any location—from the jobsite to people’s homes.
More importantly, implementing CMiC was an opportunity for Chasse to reevaluate and overhaul any redundant internal processes. With CMiC, the firm has significantly simplified its process of opportunity management and project setup. In addition, it has given its project managers much more powerful tools to effectively coordinate the 200+ projects the company manages each year.
Similarly, since deploying CMiC, its project coordinators have reduced the number of steps involved in issuing their subcontracts. With Sage 300, the creation of the subcontract document was only the beginning. It also involved creating 10-15 separate ‘exhibits’ in Excel or Word—saving them as PDFs—and combining all documents within a PDF editor before distributing the complete package to a subcontractor. Today, the Chasse IT Manager creates a subcontract document—utilizing the Microsoft Integration Package functionality built into CMiC—that automatically pulls the relevant fields from CMiC to generate the complete subcontract package. This enhancement has fully automated a process that previously took 20-30 minutes for each subcontract.
“When one of our project coordinators issued her first subcontract, she assumed that she missed a few steps or made a mistake because it only took her a few minutes to produce the entire subcontract package,” remarked Switz. “Generating a complete subcontract with CMiC is a huge time saver and is allowing us to redefine other processes and give our project coordinators more responsibility.”
Reflecting on their decision to go with CMiC, Chasse is convinced that it absolutely made the right choice. “The CMiC multi-tenant cloud is the fully integrated solution we were looking for,” added Switz. “Now that we’ve worked through our first-year of post-implementation, we’re excited about further evaluating how CMiC can positively impact our business, with CMiC Mobile Field, Business Intelligence Tools, and Resource Planning modules. Although we have not yet fully deployed all available functionality, we have a vision, and we know with certainty that by selecting CMiC, we have the right tools now to achieve the outcomes that we seek now and into the future,” concluded Switz.
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