How Choate Construction Improved Financial Data Accessibility with Kroo
Background
Choate Construction is a large commercial general contractor founded in 1989. Choate operates 6 division offices throughout the Southeast United States with 500+ employees. Choate does more than $1 billion in construction volume each year and is an ENR Top 100 contractor.
Choate has around 150 project team members who are tasked with updating monthly project financial reports pulling data from Procore and Viewpoint Vista. These financial reports provide key information on project budgets, change orders, outstanding billables, schedule milestones, and project-specific commentary. These reports are distributed throughout the company to key stakeholders to make data-driven decisions.
Before Kroo entered the picture, Choate’s monthly financial reporting process faced a few challenges:
- Frustrating user experience: Project team members would spend several minutes updating and waiting for data to load financial reports for each of their projects.
- Limited accessibility: Many project financial reports were only accessible from the company’s Citrix environment due to database connection limitations. Choate had not yet developed a secure and portable method to access all data outside of that environment.
- Difficulty of real-time reporting: Given the above challenges, completing real-time financial reporting was tedious. The team sought out a solution to implement data recalls outside of their Citrix environment.
After Kroo
Choate leveraged Kroo’s platform to streamline their financial reporting process for project teams. The Kroo platform offered an automated data pipeline for Viewpoint Vista (with other financial data syncing from Procore to Viewpoint Vista). Choate benefited from Kroo’s white-glove approach to customizing certain features to improve their financial reporting process.
Below are the benefits that Choate realizes from using Kroo:
- Improved user experience: Instead of spending minutes to manually refresh financial reports, project teams only need seconds to refresh their data for the latest information coming from Viewpoint Vista.
- Expanded accessibility: Kroo’s platform allows Choate users to securely access financial reporting outside of their Citrix environment.
- Real-time reporting capabilities: With Kroo’s platform powering Choate’s financial reporting, project teams can quickly refresh their data at any time for ad-hoc project financial reviews.
ROI for Choate
The new financial reporting process saves Choate countless hours of time-intensive updates.
- Kroo successfully reduced the refresh time by 3x.
- Kroo successfully reduced the time to complete financial reports by 7x.
- Kroo provides a streamlined process which automates the data pipeline from Viewpoint Vista. This improves the user experience for Choate’s project teams.
- Kroo provided the flexibility and customization often needed when working between multiple financials systems.
Potential cost savings of thousands of dollars.
- Choate strategically chose to partner with Kroo, optimizing cost-efficiency compared to the higher expenses associated with external consulting or development resources.
- Removing the data access barrier will allow reduction in the IT infrastructure required to support legacy access methods.
- This can cost more than six figures for a one-time implementation with no ongoing support.
- See Kroo’s calculator for the estimated cost to develop in-house: https://calculator.getkroo.com/
Flexibility in reporting other types of construction data.
- By adopting Kroo’s platform, Choate can access all connectors within the Kroo catalog.
- Choate can leverage Kroo to implement key features such as a managed data warehouse to expand their data capabilities. This is only possible because Kroo provides a unique, white-glove approach for teams without a full data team.
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