Looking out for ... the Owner
The CIPO Team keeps rolling out new and impressive ideas for ways to make our Capital Management software the best in the business. This month, we’ve continued to meet with our Owners, some of the biggest Agencies in Southern California, to see what else we can do to make their lives much more straightforward.
While our DevOps team works on adding new functionality (to be announced next month!), the rest of us spent considerable time lately on project-level lessons learned. How could we make it so that each project doesn’t have to be recreated each time an Owner wants to start a new project? We have some Owners who bid a project a week; thus, implementing these projects in CIPO needs to be quick. And hours of staff use to create projects is not efficient or time well spent on an Agency. While some other software platforms require new projects to be built from the ground up, each time, this is not the case with CIPO. We allow projects to be duplicated. Why recreate the wheel? Duplicate a project that you know you’ve spent considerable time putting together. Change only the names of the players, but each time a process, procedure, or methodology is outdated or needs to be improved, make the change. Thus, each project that is used from duplication is a lessons-learned approach. Each project is a BETTER version of the last project. The Owner receives only the best or latest version of their hard work, and they know that they won’t be forgetting any steps as the project is created. Additionally, a new project can be created in minutes, not hours.
Further advancement of the CIPO Cloud has been with progress payment requests. We’ve seen over the years how many Owners and Contractors fight over values on the payment request. We’ve also seen the project team spend far too much time having to meet in the field with paperwork, try to negotiate work area entitlement, etc. It all takes far too much time. Additionally, an Owner may feel that the Contractor is front-loading a project or attempting to charge for materials not yet delivered to the site. With CIPO, we looked at these issues from not only efficiency but a legal perspective. Meaning, not only are processing and overall communications of progress payments completely digital and far less time consuming, we allow the Owner or Agency to make changes to the final payment request and forward the final document to the Contractor for authorization. Should the Contractor disagree and not want to sign the pay request, the action remains in possession of the Contractor and NOT the Agency until resolved. From a legal perspective, it never looks as though the Agency is holding money from the Contractor. Should a project go to claims due to a payment request being withheld, CIPO looked at who best to protect. Since the Owner has initiated and made attempts to pay, the courts look at this favorably time after time.
As you can see, each process we build into CIPO has the Owner’s best interests. These are just a few ideas that make CIPO Cloud the perfect fit for your Agency. We not only look at how to expedite your workflow, but we look at each process from a legal standpoint (risk assessment/risk management). And because of our long tenure in the construction management field, you know that we are out to protect your team with each decision we made in creating the best capital improvement platform on the market.