By Ed Avis
Editor’s Note: Digital services will be one of the topics discussed during the educational sessions at the ERA/IRgA Convention in Atlanta next month (and it will surely be among the informal discussions, too). This article provides a taste of that topic, and one of the people interviewed in this article, Elmer Rhodes, will be a panelist on the topic at the convention.
When the housing market collapsed in 2008, the management of Drexel Technologies realized they had to change how their customers thought of them. Drexel, a reprographics firm with offices in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Lenexa, Kansas, no longer wanted to be thought of as just a print and equipment supplier.
“When the market downturn occurred, we started looking at how our customers think of us and what we could change,” says Troy Illum, Drexel’s vice president. “At the time our sales were focused on the bid phase of projects. But that’s only a couple of weeks, so we started looking at other phases, and decided we needed to get more digitally involved with the projects.”
That decision led Drexel to take several steps that have given them a “seat at the table” among other leaders of building projects. Drexel is one of many reprographics firms seeking to advance from print supplier to high-level document management partner.
Education First
One of the first things Drexel did was work to have three staff members earn Construction Documents Technology (CDT) certification from the Construction Specifications Institute. Through a program offered by the Reprographic Services Association, the three Drexel employees studied the basics of construction documents – including the types, organization, and interpretation of construction documents – and took the certification exam.
“If you’re going to get involved in managing construction documents, you need to educate yourself on what these people do on a daily basis,” Illum explains.
Software
Another essential element of Drexel’s advancement was incorporating document management software into their processes. The firm has been on the development committee for OpCenter (previously called PLP), and uses OpCenter Share and OpCenter Build to manage client documents.
These OpCenter tools are designed to improve collaboration among design and construction team members, manage the flow of documents – including change orders, submittals, etc. – and log and archive everything.
Perhaps most important from the reprographers’ perspective is that the system makes the reprographer part of the team, not just a supplier off to the side. Each time OpCenter Build is deployed, a CDT-certified reprographer acts as the project’s construction information manager.
Seat at the Table
In addition to keeping the system running smoothly, Illum explains that Drexel personnel train the design and construction team members on the document management process.
“There’s definitely a lot of training that takes place,” he says. “A lot of times the players are not necessarily close – they can be hours or states away. So sometimes we do web meetings, but the best case scenarios are when we can sit down in a pre-construction meeting and talk through how they do document submittals, RFIs, etc.”
Illum says education extends to owners, who need to be persuaded to incorporate the system. Sometimes he gets the system built into the specifications – “General contractor will pick up the tab for OpCenter Build” – and other times he includes the software in bids.
Every time Drexel succeeds in getting that coveted seat at the table, the firm sheds some of its former image as merely a print or equipment supplier.
Way Beyond Print
Another reprographics firm that has advanced to document management – and beyond – is Cross Rhodes Reprographics, which has locations in Illinois, Missouri, and Louisiana. Elmer Rhodes, the company’s owner, says that printing plays a smaller and smaller role in his business.
“We took PlanWell Collaborate and wrapped our company around it and said we are a document management company, period,” Rhodes says.
Cross Rhodes’ journey to becoming a document management company began when Rhodes trained the staffs of two construction companies how to manage documents and subsequently learned how much those companies were being paid to manage the project’s documents.
“I said ‘No more!’ As a reprographer we have everything needed to offer full-blown document management services,” he says. “We have the equipment, the technology, and the people who know how to handle drawings and specifications and RFIs and addendums. Now we need to learn how to bring that all together.”
Rhodes explains that document management often is a line item on bid requests, and frequently professional services firms, small contractors, or divisions of large contractors bid on that line item. When he bids on such work, he demonstrates how PlanWell Collaborate – a program that manages construction documents in a secure online environment – can a make a project run more smoothly.
“It’s the management of the documents that will speed up the process of the project,” he says. “You can show them that this might knock three months off an 18-month project.”
When Cross Rhodes is awarded a project, payment for the document management comes in monthly regardless of the number of prints. “I could care less if I print,” Rhodes says. “I get a check each month.”
In fact, his firm is now working on a hotel project in Chicago that aims to be completely paperless. The project is using Bluebeam Revu software to facilitate the use of PDFs as working construction documents.
Next Step: More Than Documents
Now Rhodes is leveraging his relationships with developers and contractors to move his business beyond documents altogether. He talks with people in the field to learn what problems exist and then figures out how Cross Rhodes can help.
One of these conversations led to his latest endeavor: RFID tracking of employees on job sites. Rhodes learned that supervisors take time each day to walk around job sites and make sure everyone who is supposed to be there is actually there. This is important for various reasons, including employee time management, subcontractor management, and diversity tracking.
Rhodes searched for a solution and settled on RFID tracking. He found a RFID supplier who liked the idea so much that he’s partnering with him on the project. They provide the contractor with an RFID tracking unit for each jobsite entrance, and lanyards containing personalized RFID tags for each employee. When an employee shows up, the tracking unit notes the time, his name, and other identifying factors, thus completely eliminating the need for a supervisor to hike around the job site each morning.
Cross Rhodes charges a monthly fee for each tracking unit, which comes with 250 lanyards. The firm just landed its first major client for the service, and now Rhodes is looking for other reprographics firms that would like to become resellers. (Contact Rhodes at ERhodes@x-rhodes.com for details, or come to his presentation at the ERA/IRgA Convention in Atlanta.)
Digital Helps Print, Too
Naturally, most reprographics firms are not ready to bail on print altogether. Digital tools can help manage the print business, too.
For example, accurately tracking clicks on FM installations traditionally involves frequent site visits or reliance on the client to provide the numbers. That’s a hassle, especially when the client is a small subcontractor who doesn’t have staff available to read the meter and is out on jobs all day long.
“There are like 2.2 million subcontractors in U.S., but 1.8 million have 10 employees or less,” says Mark Langdon, president of Eastern Engineering Supply, which has three locations in Indiana. “So you have Johnny’s Drywall Company and it’s a 5-man operation, and Johnny is installing drywall, and they don’t have a secretary at the office, and they might even lock the door when they are all at the jobsite. So trying to get data from them can be very hard.”
To solve that problem, Eastern has installed PrinterPoint on its clients’ printers to automatically provide click information, supplies usage, and other details. PrinterPoint is a web application installed on the clients’ computers that automatically tracks and transmits print information.
Eastern has been using PrinterPoint since October, and has over 100 installations, Langdon says.
The Next Level
The three digital tools mentioned in this article are just that – tools. What’s more important is the attitude behind the tools, an attitude that the future of reprographics is more than print.
But with a century of printing behind the industry, convincing clients that reprographics firms can be full document management partners is not easy.
“I would love to think everyone thinks of us that way, but it’s an ongoing process,” Illum says. “We’ve been so equipment-dominated and FM-dominated that that’s still the first thing people think of. But I think a lot of owners who didn’t know us that way think of us as document management people. It’s harder to change first impressions than create new ones. We have to work on it every day.”