McMillan Pazdan Smith Reduces Time-to-Completion on Major Reports

Scope of Work

McMillan Pazdan Smith is an elite and innovative architecture and interior design firm with particular expertise in public K-12 school, higher education, and healthcare campuses. Physical improvements to these properties require a lengthy planning process. Because tax dollars fund these projects, it’s important to ensure that every project component is thoroughly documented so money is never mismanaged. When MPS comes to a public school to evaluate the property for needed repairs and improvements, they have to be extremely detailed and specific in their report in order to request government funding for the project.

Reports of this kind are (almost overwhelmingly) long and require photographs to describe the needs of the campus. MPS was using an off-the-shelf software product from BlueBeam, which provides a blueprint of a building (say that five times fast…). The current solution was an amalgamation of BlueBeam files, notes, photographs, and Excel spreadsheets which all had to be painstakingly arranged and organized manually in order to finish a 40+ page report to secure government funding.

MPS’s ultimate problem wasn’t BlueBeam, but the fact that once the “blueprint and picture part” was over the entire remainder of the report had to be done by hand and involve multiple individual contributors. Accounting for the schedules and user errors of several different people every time a report was being made was, in a word, tedious. In another word, it was inefficient.

Final Results

Since Worthwhile has taken on this project, the average time to compile a report has gone from a manual effort over many days to a programmatic automated solution resulting in a report being generated on demand. Overall, their work has been cut down to a fraction of what it used to take to send a request for project funding to the government. The value to the MPS team that has been regained by these improvements allows them to redistribute their workforce into other critical areas of the business and take on more clients than ever before. Now the reports are much easier to create, and the document itself is significantly more polished and structured. It’s important that taxpayer money develops things that are nice to look at, too.

About the Process

MPS wanted to find a solution to their problem and turned to Worthwhile to develop the answer. We identified an opportunity to build a cloud-based platform that would seamlessly integrate with BlueBeam and collect the information (including pictures) that was housed there while also giving individual contributors a place to add their own notes to the discussion. With a final button click, an MPS teammate could easily compile the ultimate report, rather than having to grind it out manually.