The City of Dallas goes Digital Verifying Quantities Completed on Public Works Contracts
The public works department at the city of Dallas implemented a digital quantity verification system, called Power QV starting with a 3-year road maintenance contract in December 2019, and by the first quarter of 2020 the project had more than paid for itself. Since then, the public works department has migrated the rest of their bond and continuing services contracts to the digital platform at a significant savings to both the city and the contractors involved.
As Christopher Lutz, Senior Program Manager at the City of Dallas Public Works, explains:
“Originally, we were simply looking for an easy way to capture photos of work performed in the field. We replaced our paper-based quantity tracking system with an all-digital solution that captures GPS and time-stamped photos at the same time as the quantities completed, and the results have been outstanding.”
“Giving the foreman and the inspectors in the field real-time access to the data they need through their tablets has made their jobs significantly easier because they are no longer waiting on papers and faxes. However, the benefits of going digital have reached across my entire department:
Billing is now a 1-click export of pre-approved quantities replacing a process that used to take up to a week with late nights that involved horse-trading with contractors,
City council members now get near-instantaneous responses to records requests because the data is transparent and available in real-time,
My staff are making more informed decisions in the field that improve the services we deliver.
We would have covered the cost of the system just with the photo records of what was happening in the field. However, we recovered the total cost of the system in a few months with the decisions we made avoiding problems on a few projects, the resources (including cubicle space) we were able to give back to the city that we no longer needed because my team is working more effectively in the field, and the simplification of the billing process because we have virtually eliminated monthly disputes with our contractors. I’ve been a part of a lot of system implementations, but this has been by far the easiest deployment in my career that has had the most upside.
Kerry Augustine, one of the founding members of QV Solutions, had this to say about the QV Solutions technology,
“Our team has done a lot of work in the construction industry, and what we have seen is that many other software packages available are either built on older technology lacking simplicity of use, are exceedingly expensive with complicated functions that average organizations won’t use, or lack real-time decision-making capability. We built QV sheets to serve a specific purpose and deliver a measurable benefit so that municipalities and their contractors could be more effective. It is easy to deploy, quick to train anyone for use, and incredibly easy to work with.”
Because the software is licensed in a way that makes it easy to involve everyone directly in the system, many benefits are available to the contractor as well as the municipality. Justin Mitchell, Assistant Project Manager at Southland Holdings, spoke to us about the values it has for his company:
“When we first started using QV Sheets on our Dallas project, we trained our managers and about five of our crew-leads and our sub-contracted crew leads in a 30-minute session. The software was so easy to use and is so user friendly; that we were able to quickly deploy it to our 30 other crew-leads by word of mouth. More importantly, because the system is so simple, we actually have access to reports from the field on a timely basis. We can see what has been approved by the city and when they approved it. With this level of visibility, I can forecast our monthly billings throughout the month. We are also getting paid faster because our submittals are delivered to the city much quicker, and I no longer have to reconcile my records with theirs at the end of each month. I’ll be recommending QV Sheets to the next cities we bid on.”