RHSI Blog
Barbara Tavares and RHSI – Highlighted in Case Study for Raken Daily Reporting App
RHSI is pleased to announce Barbara Tavares, our Senior Construction Manager, is highlighted in a case study by RAKEN – a daily reporting app for construction.RHSI is utilizing the software to enhance our inspection services for the City of San Antonio Pavement Preservation Program. Read the full case study here.
Excerpts from the study include: Tavares was given a task that would make any construction manager nervous….(her) challenge wasn’t to manage one enormous project. Instead, she was faced with managing lots of small projects, each with their own potential pitfalls. “In a capital improvement program with hundreds of streets slated for repairs, we were contracted to provide inspection services for about 50 of them across the City,” Tavares says, “these individual asphalt renovation projects that involved repairing potholes and sealing streets to prevent further degradation are typically under $100K each. But there were a ton of them that added up to a multi-million dollar program.”
But Tavares didn’t just buy the first pretty app that came along and hoped for the best. Her years of experience in the industry gave her a specific list of features that she knew the software needed to have in order to get the job done right. “I was searching for how to manage multiple projects,” Tavares says, “so I needed a daily that was easily reproduced, that my inspector could do in the field, and was easy enough to allow him to go to 3 different projects and do 3 different reports on the same day without taking all his time. It also needed to be stored because at the end of the month we use the backup to show the City what the contractors had done and approve pay applications.”
Raken seemed like it had every feature on her list: the ability to handle multiple projects, fast workflow, easy photo management, and a professional daily report that could be easily accessed for the City to see what was being done. It seemed like a match made in heaven, but there were still some reservations. The biggest of which was simply this: will my inspectors in the field actually want to use it?
“The first person to use it was Wayne, in his late 60s,” Tavares relates, “He was a little nervous to use an app and an iPad. but he quickly got the hang of it, and he loves it. Now, with some of our new inspectors, it takes them 5 whole minutes to get it.”
“We are saving time and money at the end of the day with Raken,” Tavares says, and then explains where she sees the improvements. “It saves the inspector 1-2 hours a day. They don’t have to come back to the office, download the pictures, rename them, and put them in the right file and that saves us about $150 a day. This also gives them more time on actual income producing activities.”
“Fast forward to now and in 2019 the City’s maintenance program includes about 250 streets, and my firm was chosen to lead the inspection efforts and track costs,” Tavares says, explaining, “I’m the depository for all the data. So, I organized a Lunch & Learn at my office, showed 2 other inspection firms how we are saving time and money using Raken (while I fed them) and now they have also elected to use Raken, too. The City was getting 3 different dailies from 3 different companies, so I’m streamlining it.” If Tavares was saving her firm $150 a day, imagine the money she’s saving all those other firms and the City of San Antonio itself.
We couldn’t be more proud to be a part of the amazing work that Barbara Tavares is doing with RHSI, and we can’t wait to see what she’ll do in the future.
Posted by on 19th March, 2019 | Comments | Trackbacks | Permalink
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