Briq announces acquisition of Swipez, bringing automation to billing and accounts receivable
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O’Shea Builders is a leading commercial construction services provider based in Illinois. Founded in 1900, they are one of the oldest construction companies in the United States and provide general contracting, civil, and commercial services.
“We were spending too much time hunting, gathering, and collating information.”
Harry Schmidt
For O’Shea Builders, getting job cost information from estimating to the field in a timely fashion was a workflow that consumed considerable administrative time. Field teams were working on average 20 days without budgets, and it took the estimating team on average nearly 40 days to get the detail-level estimates into the field. Some projects even exceeded 60 days of work in the field without budgets. In the worst cases, some jobs were completed even before the job costs rolled in.
There was improvement to be made in this process, but they didn’t want to add more headcount and overhead to solve for it. Instead, they needed tools and technology that would allow them to manage their business more efficiently. These tools are needed to support strategic business goals and help benchmark financial and operational KPIs while keeping costs stabilized.
“You can never eliminate risk, but you can mitigate it. From a productivity standpoint, Briq gives us real-time meaningful feedback that’s going to propel us forward in the industry.”
Harry Schmidt
Briq helped the O’Shea team improve their Estimate to Budget workflow by atomizing the process and automating parts of it. The Briq team was able to build a workflow that took the estimate from a .csv file, broke it down by detail, and automatically populated that information into the project management and accounting application for the project managers. Most importantly, Briq was able to help them do it fast. In four months, Briq’s automation technology improved the roll-in process from 40 days on average to 9 days, a 61 percent improvement. This meant that project teams in the field, on average, went from waiting 20 days for data to waiting 0.3 days. It also meant that the estimator was no longer spending 20 percent of his valuable time managing this process.
This automation allowed O’Shea to significantly derisk their projects. From a risk factor, the project teams were working on a job for nearly a month without any financial data. Once any data hits operations, the number of people affected increases drastically. It costs a lot less to change anything at the beginning of a construction job as opposed to in the middle of a job.
“The great thing about Briq is we didn’t have to change how we input information at all, but now, our project managers and accountants have direct access to everything in Briq.”
Harry Schmidt
Overall, Briq has created flow through O’Shea Builders’ organization, setting them up for success. Critical data like job budgets are now delivered to the right team in real-time and more visible throughout the organization. Briq has also sped up O’Shea Builders’ debrief process, allowing them to quickly learn from their jobs and work on continuous improvement.
By making a critical investment in Briq, O’Shea Builders scaled up and beyond the level they set out to achieve. They were able to rely on technology and not more people to solve their problems. Briq built a better way for O’Shea Builders to work and get more value from their resources.
“The estimator enjoys his Fridays a lot more these days.”
Nate Rohr, Data Analyst
