Case Studies

Burns & McDonnell Uses EcoSys to Keep Projects Running Smoothly Throughout Coronavirus Pandemic As COVID-19 began to affect the project world, organizations in the engineering and construction industries had to quickly adapt to the ever-changing challenges brought on by the pandemic. For many companies, including Burns & McDonnell, this meant bracing for an economic slowdown implementing a business continuity plan and adapting current project protocols and schedules. As a leading full-service design and construction firm operating in many different industries, Burns & McDonnell swiftly mobilized their employee-owners to support the systems and critical infrastructure projects needed to keep the U.S. moving forward. Throughout the pandemic, the firm has supported nearly 10,000 projects that touch 16 critical infrastructure categories defined by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. To manage projects effectively, the leadership team at Burns & McDonnell needed to find a way to easily identify, prioritize and report on projects related to COVID-19. Additionally, they needed to implement a work-from-home strategy enabling their employee-owners to execute projects remotely, at the same standard of excellence their clients have come to expect. After exploring a few alternatives, EcoSys™ Enterprise Project Performance software was selected as the source of identifying, prioritizing, managing, tracking and reporting on COVID-19 related projects. EcoSys is already a technology pillar at Burns & McDonnell and one of the top enterprise applications its operations depend on. The flexibility and configurability of EcoSys allowed Burns & McDonnell to quickly make changes to the system. They created a process that allows them to flag both new and inflight projects related to the COVID-19 response. Then, they were able to integrate the data from EcoSys into their ERP system. This allowed them to then build a data model around this attribute for reporting. All of this was designed, configured and pushed to their production environments within four hours, meaning Burns & McDonnell was able to adapt to a changing business need with very little effort and with no disruption of operations. Key Facts Company: Burns & McDonnell Company Profile • A global leader in design and construction • 7,600 employees • Headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, USA • More than 55 offices worldwide Key Benefits • Acting with agility to support critical infrastructure projects • Quickly identifying and reporting on priority projects for better decision-making • Ability to shift to a remote workforce without disruptions to project management and project controls functions If we had not shifted from our old system to EcoSys, we would not be able to manage our project financials today." Patty Sullivan, Strategic Initiatives, Project Manager Case Study Burns & McDonnell

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