How WEST Builders Used Clearstory to Solve Change Order Disconnect With Trade Partners and Project Owners

For WEST Builders, implementing Clearstory to streamline how the General Contractor aligns with trade partners and clients on out-of-contract work couldn’t have come at a better time. 

“We were transitioning to a more uniform, transparent model where project managers would control more of the cost management for our projects,” says WEST Senior Project Engineer Derik DeLonzor. “So we wanted to give the PMs tools to contain risk and communicate the financial health of our projects with subcontractors and owners, and Clearstory really helped us accomplish that.”

Purpose-built by former General Contractors who saw their projects suffering from manual Change Order workarounds and paper-driven processes, Clearstory’s core product is a shareable, cloud-based Change Order Log that creates instant transparency between stakeholders and features simple but powerful workstreams to capture field-directed extra work, conduct pricing exercises, and streamline Change Order review. 

“From a project manager standpoint, having a platform where everything is in one place for Change Orders helps my own mental sanity,” DeLonzor says. “It saves time, and there’s a tangible financial gain when we can make better decisions by having all Change Orders accounted for.”

“Having a platform where everything is in one place for Change Orders helps my own mental sanity. It saves time, and there’s a tangible financial gain when we can make better decisions by having all Change Orders accounted for.”

Derik DeLonzor

Senior Project Engineer, WEST Builders

Greater Efficiency &  Dynamic Decision-Making

At WEST, Clearstory has solved the disconnect that project teams faced trying to align with subcontractors on Change Orders and work tracked on a T&M basis by providing a shared, real-time Change Order Log to replace downloading and exchanging different logs back and forth. While the manual processes seemed to be common in construction, DeLonzor witnessed first-hand how they could burden teams from both a time and transparency standpoint. 

 “You know, we had our methods of tracking change orders, subcontractors had their methods of tracking change orders, and there could be a disconnect between what was happening in the field and what offices were communicating to each other,” he says. “And it’s essentially impossible to track everything when you don’t have that communication.”

By providing streamlined, real-time communication between WEST project teams and their trade partners, Clearstory has replaced the need to track down emails or locate paper documentation on someone’s desk in order to align on costs. It’s an efficiency boost to eliminate the time-suck of manual workflows, but the transparency and real-time visibility into risk also provides WEST with the confidence for dynamic decision-making, too. 

“It’s 100% more efficient to eliminate the madness associated with paper shuffling, but being able to make decisions on a jobsite based on better forecasts provides a financial gain, too.” DeLonzor says. “Being able to quantify where I might have dollars available to adjust or accelerate a schedule here or there makes a real impact on a job, and gives our upper management the confidence that we're tracking things on site effectively.”

Easy Trade Adoption, More Successful Projects

With a commercial builder background and offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, WEST has been following developers deeper into robust multifamily, mixed-use, and student housing markets, and is relying on project transparency and the complementary features of Procore and Clearstory as a critical asset in helping to communicate costs in real-time with clients.

“It’s helped unleash our detail-oriented and design-based mentality to help bring those projects to life and align on the best approach to get a project completed,” DeLonzor says.

Specialty Contractor adoption of Clearstory has also been brisk and painless, an achievement that DeLonzor credits to an incredibly easy user interface and the practical solutions Clearstory provides to all stakeholders.    

“One of the great things about Clearstory is its simplicity,” he says. “Our subcontractors really appreciate that the goal of Clearstory is to create transparency and improve the financial health of all stakeholders on our projects. At the end of the day, that Change Order transparency between us just helps everybody out.”

So much so that WEST is now using Clearstory on all of its projects as its standard Change Order Communication Tool for aligning with Specialty Contractors and clients on costs, risks, and opportunities to make projects more successful for all stakeholders. It’s been a transition that ran in tandem with DeLonzor’s career advancement at WEST, and one that he feels has been vital to the success and empowerment of project management teams at the company. 

“I was actually on our first project that used Clearstory from start to finish,” he says. “And now we employ it on every single one of our jobs. We don't have a job that does not use Clearstory.”

About West Builders

With offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, WEST Builders is a client-driven firm with broad experience in ground-up construction of commercial and multifamily projects including studio campuses, mixed-use properties, and student housing. WEST’s success is fueled by a core dedication to perform well beyond customer expectations through effort, engineering expertise, and intelligence.