After setting up PLOT for their project, the benefits were quickly realized with the team saving up to seven (7) hours per week on coordination and communication efforts around deliveries.
As one of the largest and most established builders in North America, with more than 8,000 skilled tradespeople and professional staff, The Walsh Group is at the forefront of leading construction operations in the industry. Operating out of 20 offices in the U.S., they offer a diverse range of services for a variety of construction sectors. The team working alongside Project Manager Elliot Wilm, an 8-year Project Manager with Walsh and Assistant Project Manager Tony Proskovec were tasked with managing construction operations on a complex multi-story warehouse project located in Chicago.
The specific logistics of the jobsite added additional challenges to the project execution, by having 5 delivery gates, a high volume of deliveries each day, pedestrian and cyclist paths to work around, and occasional road closures. Anticipating these challenges, Elliot and Tony were in search of a solution that would streamline site logistics and delivery communication and be extremely simple for the team to use. They first heard about PLOT from another team member at Walsh and decided to check it out. After an evaluation, it was apparent that PLOT would directly solve the hurdles they were faced with for site coordination.
It was going to be a nightmare to try and coordinate all of it… PLOT turned out to be exactly what we were looking for.
After setting up PLOT for their project, the benefits were quickly realized with the team saving up to seven (7) hours per week on coordination and communication efforts around deliveries. Tony notes the improved ability to plan for flaggers in the appropriate locations, and Elliot highlighted an instance of effectively planning precast deliveries around road closures, all with easy access to the information through the PLOT app. In addition to these measurable results, there was an added bonus to implementing PLOT: elevated safety culture and communication on the jobsite.
PLOT’s safety notifications and mass group text messaging feature turned out to be a natural enhancement to Walsh’s already strong safety processes on the site. With the ability to include hundreds of workers in a central group chat, safety notifications and overall communication became more immediate, accessible, and transparent. Due to ongoing heat waves, the team is strategically using the mass safety notification capabilities to notify workers about break times and other weather-related risks, and are glad to have an effective tool to communicate about safety standdowns if necessary. Additionally, Walsh hosts a safety lunch every other month or so, for the approximately 400-person project team. The lunch provides the crews with food, talks about safety, and is a way to appreciate everyone’s efforts for being safe on the site. PLOT’s safety notification feature is a natural part of making this event happen and helps to effectively communicate and organize the 400-person team for safety lunches.
There’s no other effective way I’ve seen to be able to do mass site notifications.
Being able to communicate in this capacity and have a bridge with everyone on the site instantaneously when needed is a clear game changer for a safer, efficient and effective operations on the jobsite. The teams summarizes this by noting significant reduction in the “telephone game”, mass confusion, and misinformation that happens without a solution like PLOT in hand.
