Case Study: CMBA

Background

CMBA Architects is an “upward-thinking” architecture and design firm focused primarily on healthcare and education builds in Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Everyone on the 57-person team is “trained to think up to the next level of innovation and creativity throughout every phase of the design process.” This produces excellent results for their clients.

Ken Lutz currently serves as CMBA’s CFO, principal architect, and office manager of the Des Moines location.

The Challenge

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CMBA offices operated somewhat independently. However, with everyone working remotely in 2020, the teams began to collaborate more across offices. According to Lutz, the pandemic “leveled the playing field’ in that they were now able to utilize resources across all departments, regardless of location. But they didn’t have a good way to manage everyone. They tried to use their ERP’s project management tool—but, according to Lutz, the user interface wasn't visual and the process was very manual. Then, the shared spreadsheet the team exported broke enough times that eventually everyone just stopped using it.

Ultimately, no one knew if the right people were working on the right projects—and, as a result, the team was struggling to meet project deadlines. According to Lutz, people were getting spread too thin and principals were more or less wrestling over staff. “It got to be confrontational,” he said.

After their ERP was acquired by another company, Lutz considered using the parent company’s tool, but he didn’t want to run into the same poor usability issues they had already experienced. Plus, “they’re not friendly to work with,” he said. “So I’m not interested in throwing money their way.” They also talked about hiring someone to build them a custom spreadsheet—but that would have still kept them using a spreadsheet and everyone has varying Excel skills, which would’ve made maintaining the sheet challenging.

The Solution

Fortunately, after a year of discussing potential solutions, someone from ��«ӰҵAPP serendipitously reached out with an offer to demo the product—and the team at CMBA liked what they saw. According to Lutz, the ��«ӰҵAPP team “was very open and honest about the product.” After all, it was still in development at the time, which Lutz was perfectly fine with. In addition to its excellent customer service, ��«ӰҵAPP’s biggest selling point for CMBA—the thing that most got Lutz’s attention—was its integration with its ERP. With that connection, the team no longer needed to recreate the information housed in that system, which was “manual and very annoying.” Instead, when they export important project phases into ��«ӰҵAPP, it reproduces them automatically.

Plus, because of ��«ӰҵAPP’s intuitive and easy-to-use interface, training for the CMBA team was a breeze, which, Lutz said, would not have been the case had the team gone with their ERP’s planning tool.

“��«ӰҵAPP is a good fit because it’s so easy for everyone to use.”

The Results

At the moment, CMBA is only using ��«ӰҵAPP for scheduling. “We’re using it in baby steps,” Lutz said. “Then we’ll work on timesheets and management of fees.” Eventually, Lutz plans to use ��«ӰҵAPP for all aspects of project and resource planning. He’s been especially pleased with the constant rate of innovation he’s seen since they adopted ��«ӰҵAPP. “New things are happening all the time,” he said. “I’m always looking to see what ��«ӰҵAPP has innovated to make things more streamlined.”

While it's too soon to quantify the impact of adopting ��«ӰҵAPP, Lutz believes they’re certainly “going to be more efficient.” But more important than even that, without ��«ӰҵAPP, Lutz said, the team at CMBA would still be fighting—and burning out. “Having people not work 100 hours a week is good,” he said. “Both for morale and for meeting deadlines.” Plus, ��«ӰҵAPP has helped CMBA function more as one coherent team, as opposed to individuals spread across disparate offices. Ultimately, that helps to ensure that everyone—across the entire company—is well utilized, something that had never happened before ��«ӰҵAPP. According to Lutz, when people are under utilized, they begin to worry about the company’s future—and the security of their jobs.

Finally, Lutz plans to use ��«ӰҵAPP to improve conversations with potential clients and, thus, garner more business. After all, he can now show them exactly where their project fits into CMBA’s current schedule and how they plan to meet their deadlines. “We would always say the project fit,” Lutz said. “But I think it means more to prove it.”

Lutz joked that he was hesitant to recommend ��«ӰҵAPP to other firms because he wants to retain his competitive advantage—after all, he believes the investment in ��«ӰҵAPP was worthwhile. But ultimately, he said, do it: “We’re architects, we’re not data analysts. If an architect can use the software, anyone can. It’s a great planning tool—very graphical.”

Industries

��«ӰҵAPP

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CMBA

Background

The Challenge

The Solution

The Results