How Clayco is Using Clearstory to Eliminate Change Order Risk from its Business

According to Clayco executive vice president Mike Pierle, poor change management is the number one financial risk facing commercial construction projects today.

“Keeping change from jeopardizing a project seems to be what this business is all about anymore,” says the 35-year industry veteran who oversees Clayco operations nationally. “Outside of safety and product quality, it’s the biggest threat to our success.”

Sixteen years ago, Clayco had two dozen project directors, project managers, and project engineers. By 2024, the General Contractor is hiring 10 to 20 project engineers and project managers per month.

With growth has come a need for process improvement and standardization enabling Clayco to effectively scale, and addressing change management was a top priority.

“The Change Order process to that point was manual, time-consuming, and error prone,” explains Clayco senior director of cost management Ryan Carson. “We wanted visibility and open communication with our trade partners, and we wanted one depository for CORs where all stakeholders could collaborate on eliminating risk.”

Decreased Days Aging, Accelerated Approvals

Gained Complete Visibility Into Risk Exposure

Prevented Fee Erosion From Surprise Costs

Clayco found its answer in Clearstory, the industry’s only shared, cloud-based Change Order Communication Tool purpose-built to align stakeholders on risk in real time. With a mobile app for capturing field-directed work and powerful tools for conducting pricing exercises and speeding COR review and approvals, Clayco was able to eliminate paper T&M Tickets, reduce days aging, and gain instant visibility into Change Order risk on projects.

“The risk to the organization at any time is direct, particularly when Change Orders begin to manage a project rather than the project team managing change,” says Pierle. “When it comes to financial risk, it always comes down to our ability to effectively manage change in a timely manner.”

Indeed, a lack of timeliness was a key factor contributing to Change Order risk on Clayco projects prior to adopting Clearstory. Paper T&M Tickets, in particular, were prone to getting lost, parked on the wrong person’s desk, or otherwise stalled in trade partner processes, only to show up at the end of the job as a last-minute stack of surprise costs.

“With Clearstory, we get early awareness for PMs, superintendents, and subcontractors that a change is being tracked on a Time & Material basis,” Pierle says.

“Since deploying Clearstory, we have seen a substantial reduction of the overall potential change management risk to the organization.”

Mike Pierle

Executive Vice President, Clayco

“Getting that awareness in the moment eliminates the surprises one month, two months, twelve months down the road that are hard to get in front of and resolve.”

Real-time stakeholder collaboration in Clearstory is likewise speeding alignment on Specialty Contractor Change Order Requests, providing the organization, visibility, and automated workflows to reduce days aging and streamline the COR process on Clayco projects.

“It’s time-consuming to reach out to individual contractors and ask for weekly Change Order Requests and a monthly updated Change Order Request Log,” Carson says. “One of the immediate benefits from Clearstory was key visibility into what CORs we had received that had not yet been approved or processed.”

Visibility into that Change Order exposure at the project level, along with Clearstory’s ease of use and intuitive tools to review, respond, and resolve CORs quickly, has Clayco teams eliminating chunks of change management risk that posed an ever-present threat to project profitability.

“In any given month, we could range from $50 to $70 million in commitments made in order to engage with change,” Pierle says. “Since deploying Clearstory as part of our process improvement, we have seen a substantial reduction of that overall potential risk to the organization.”

Carson points to Clearstory’s Change Notification feature as an example of the intuitive, automated workflows that alleviate the headaches of miscommunication between project stakeholders, supercharging user adoption and energizing teams.

“We can easily use the communication tools within Clearstory to conduct pricing exercises, ask for revisions, and capture cost impacts,” he says. “We’re constantly communicating and collaborating in a way that enables us to agree upon Change Orders more quickly.”

With improved stakeholder alignment and communication, Clayco jobs are closing out faster and avoiding the last minute CORs that stressed out teams, strained relationships, and jeopardized project margins.

“We’re deliberately using the Clearstory COR Log at close out to make sure there’s nothing out there that hasn’t been dealt with yet,” Carson says. “It eliminates the surprises and volatility of manual processes that potentially fade our profit toward the end of a project.”

And beyond the numbers, Pierle sees an additional return on investment from the comfort Specialty Contractors get from fast approvals and the dialed-in decision-making project teams are able to make with real-time change management data at their fingertips.

“Having a consistent process for all of our project teams that provides visibility and reduces turnaround time is a great indicator of ROI,” he says. “With Clearstory, we can finally look at all of the facts related to change management on a project and make the pivots and adjustments necessary to support our teams and deliver results.”