Burns & McDonnell is a full-service engineering, architecture, construction, environmental and consulting solutions firm based in Kansas City, Missouri. Its 7,600 employees plan, design, permit, construct and manage facilities all over the world.
Since day one, the firm’s mission has been clear and consistent — to make its clients successful. The Strategic Initiatives team contributes to that mission by implementing processes and technology throughout the company that help project teams streamline project execution. The vision of this team is to help deliver a fully integrated project lifecycle, where data is created once, and as a project progresses, it automatically flows to users when they need it. To carry out that vision, the Strategic Initiatives team began implementing technology pillars to reduce the number of software systems supported and used by the workforce.
To be a technology pillar at Burns & McDonnell, a software needs to have the flexibility and usability to work across the entire enterprise. It also needs to be scalable so the system can grow as business needs evolve. Burns & McDonnell views technology pillars as long-term investments, allowing them to leverage integration, eliminate siloed tools and avoid the pain of replacing software systems every few years.
Prior to implementing a pillar technology for project controls, Burns & McDonnell had an existing project controls system that was failing due to lack of functionality, inability to scale and difficulty of use. After pushback from end users, the Strategic Initiatives team began to search for a replacement solution.
Burns & McDonnell decided to partner with Octave to make Sequence Enterprise the pillar technology for enterprise project controls because of its configurability, flexibility and ease of use. Today, all project teams use Sequence Enterprise as the front end to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to take advantage of its more familiar and functional user interface.
Burns & McDonnell leverages the bi-directional integration capabilities of Sequence Enterprise to share data with other pillar systems in real time. Sequence Enterprise sends project data to the ERP system so finance can validate and make sure it meets business requirements. The data from the ERP then updates the project status in Sequence Enterprise, which also is integrated with the customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Once projects that are in pursuit are won, they can easily be created and started within Sequence Enterprise.
Multiple times, Burns & McDonnell has been able to use this technology’s built-in configurability to tailor the system to meet the needs of users.
For example, when onboarding a newly acquired company with different work processes, the company quickly created role-based screens and menus specific to new users without disrupting current users. After the success of Sequence Enterprise for project controls, its use has been expanded to include professional services estimating. Burns & McDonnell now considers Sequence Enterprise be part of its critical infrastructure.
Next steps
Burns & McDonnell plans to expand the scope of Sequence Enterprise to include resource management and will continue to leverage it as a pillar technology, connecting it with other tools and completing the vision of a fully integrated project lifecycle.
