Lewandowski would like to see government officials use technology the way he does to keep on top of deadlines. He thinks that if he can help to provide the government with the tools to make its job easier, such as a way to access MDP's database through the Internet, he can build customer loyalty in the process. As it stands, he says, he often has a better idea of his projects' progress than the government does anyway. "They have to call us to see what's going on," he says. "We're at a point where we can't get more efficient without doing the government's work for them." There's a major stumbling block, however. As high-tech as the military's defense systems may be, its bureaucracy hasn't kept pace. The Air Force Academy only recently supplemented its Wang mainframe computer system with a system of PC-based LANs. "And the Academy is more sophisticated than Peterson Field or Fort Carson," Lewandowski adds.
How to bridge this technological gap? Lewandowski is banking on cyberspace. He's developing a company Web site, which he hopes will be up and running by the end of 1997. Current plans call for storing key MDP project information with an Internet service provider, with all files formatted to run on the Microsoft Office 97 application suite. "We're planning within the next quarter to have a preliminary system in place," says Tom Swaim, the project manager overseeing MDP's Web site development. "We're doing this to improve internal communication but also to improve the process of exchanging information with the government. We want the Web page to facilitate posting shared information: general correspondence, serial letters, submittal registers. Everyone would have access to that data so that they can immediately see the status of a particular submittal."
At present, supervisors in the field can access this data from their laptops with 28.8 Kb modems, but according to Swaim, the flow of information will be much faster once the Web site is fully operational. "We'll have to provide a pathway to the service provider from our file server, which will be the central repository of information. Eventually, we'll probably install some sort of modem pool off the server, and that will greatly increase the speed of response. Immediate access to information will help us make decisions even faster."
Although it remains to be seen just how long it will take the military brass to become truly Web-friendly, Lewandowski says he has already realized significant savings from automating his operations. "For the kind of construction that we do," he says, "we'd normally need maybe eight people in our office just to take care of all the correspondence. We have four." The same is true outside the office. A typical construction company the size of MDP, he says, will have supervisors running each job site, with a project manager overseeing three to five jobs, doing all the scheduling, modifications, billing, and negotiations. With SureTrak, it's possible for MDP's managers to oversee a greater number of projects than they could if the scheduling were done by hand.
Lewandowski's supervisors also save him time and money by using SureTrak to monitor their schedules effectively. "We have definitely achieved labor savings," he says. "I'm aware of at least 30 situations where we demonstrated delays caused by the government, worth about $150,000 in revenue. By tracking their own budgets, the supervisors can manage the project dollars better and make more effective economic decisions."
Lewandowski won't claim that automation is a panacea, and he admits that he has at times hit some bumps along the high-tech road. MDP's supervisors were all former painters and carpenters and were, by and large, not a computer-literate lot. For some, it was a rocky transition. Certain employees couldn't get the hang of updating SureTrak when tasks were finished or revised, which naturally caused havoc because the time lines bore little or no resemblance to the job at hand. Most of his supervisors adjusted eventually, however. "But they had to take the initiative and spend a lot of their own time learning the process," says Lewandowski.
To help ease his staff into working with computers, he gave the supervisors four IBM-compatible 386 desktop PCs for home use. He also provided them with game programs and wrote spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3 to help them manage their personal finances. "And I spent a lot of time on the phone coaching them," he says.
Among his efforts to systematize every last detail of his business, Lewandowski has tried a few things that just didn't work. With the multitude of subcontractors he needed to pay every month, he thought he could devise a system that would eliminate time cards. So he set up a worksheet in WordPerfect on the supervisors' laptops and instructed them to submit their workers' hours by modem. But the accounting pay codes made this process more trouble than it was worth, and Lewandowski decided that it made more sense to do the job by hand.
All in all, though, Lewandowski has been pleased with his automation efforts. In fact, he plans to start a consulting business to help other construction companies do what he's done. Although computers aren't exactly unheard of in the construction industry, even in small operations, Lewandowski claims that a surprising number of companies still track everything on paper. "We already have two potential clients," he says.
The final irony: The government's inefficiency has not only made Lewandowski's current business more competitive, it has also given rise to a new business opportunity.
Christopher Caggiano is a staff writer for Inc. magazine.
