Alberici improves financial reporting with Procore Services team
The Challenge
Alberici had separate project management and ERP systems that required manually keying or uploading budget figures and cost codes separately to every project.
The Solution
Alberici partnered with Procore Professional and Technical Services to integrate its ERP with the Procore platform. Procore Professional and Technical Services not only planned the implementation but worked alongside Alberici to ensure the rollout was successful.
The Results
“The Procore Professional Services team was really excellent at defining the process, figuring out the details, helping us through the implementation – and then really working with us to identify little problems and fix them. Procore Services have been incredibly responsive and are a really great partner.”
Brooks Williams
Director of Construction Technology
Tools to Manage a Complex Portfolio
Alberici is a leading North American construction company serving the civil, energy, institutional, commercial, heavy industrial, manufacturing, water/wastewater and automotive industries.
Alberici has more than 3,500 salaried and craft professionals, as well as robust self-perform capabilities. Alberici's portfolio includes Hillsdale Fabricators, a facility that provides complex steel fabrication and erection services, a heavy equipment fleet, masonry division and port facilities on the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Alberici is ranked the 30th largest domestic builder (Engineering News-Record, May 2021) with annual revenues exceeding $2.6 billion.
In order to more efficiently manage a portfolio of this size and complexity, Alberici needed a powerful construction management software tool set, which they got from Procore. Once their project management platform was in place, the next step was to integrate their financial management system.
'Those needs go back to one of the reasons that we chose Procore initially. We have long wanted to connect our project management platform with our ERP so that we could eliminate duplicate entry, cut down on errors and inconsistencies between these two critical systems. Once we had Procore mostly up and running throughout the company, the next thing we turned to was integrating those systems together.'
Technical Expertise to Effectively Integrate Project and Financial Systems
Alberici has a robust in-house IT department. However, when the time came to connect their project management and ERP systems, they called on Procore Professional Services to see that integration through. While they considered other vendors, they valued Procore's deep technological expertise and sense of partnership, ultimately choosing to work with Procore on the integration.
'The Procore Professional Services team has been a great partner to us,' says Brooks Williams, Director of Construction Technology at Alberici. 'We're usually accustomed to deeply managing a project like this. We felt like Procore really stepped up and took it off our hands.'
Alberici had earlier made Procore its company-wide platform of choice. Now, it was time to begin the long-anticipated integration with their ERP – starting with two key elements.
'The core of that integration was cost codes and budgets. The cost codes have to match between the systems. Before, we would have the budget on a spreadsheet, and then that would get keyed into eCMS. Keeping the two systems in sync was sometimes a little difficult,' Brooks says.
Accelerated IT Project Benefits
Working with Procore Technical Services was an exercise in trust to the benefit of both partnership and the integration.
'We really came to trust the Procore Technical Services team. If there was an issue, we relied on them to help us identify the exact records that were causing problems. They were just a great partner, very attentive, and they were watching our systems closely.'
Once the integration was complete, the benefits were immediate.
'It just runs now, and we don't have to spend as much time monitoring it,' Brooks says, 'so time-to-value was pretty quick. We're not double-keying stuff into two different systems anymore. That's a huge time savings.'
Over a century into their saga, Alberici has hit full stride – the company's broad experience and decades of construction wisdom leading them to the right tools and the right partners.
'From the very beginning, we've felt a close partnership with Procore at all levels, from the sales process to implementation, to our day-to-day running of the system. The ability to talk to the developer teams as they're working on new products or changes to existing tools has been incredible.'