Overview
Northeastern University is a global university system with 48,000 students and over 200 buildings across 14 campuses. Their Planning, Real Estate, and Facilities (PREF) team has a nine figure capital budget and manages over 300 projects each year, most of which are funded by individual colleges within the university system.
Northeastern uses Gryps to provide detailed project and financial dashboards for each of these colleges, allowing stakeholders to access real-time information without having to build manual reports or wait for the next update meeting.
The Challenge
The PREF team manages capital projects for 10 internal “clients”—colleges within the university system who are the primary funding source for their own projects—at any given time. In addition to managing the construction itself, they’re also responsible for tracking budgets and keeping the colleges updated. Each college has its own finance team that needs detailed information about project budgets and potential overages, as well as space management teams that depend on accurate project timelines for their own scheduling.
Before Gryps, the PREF team was putting together manual reports for each college every month. This was a time-intensive process, and because the reports were static the information would sometimes be outdated by the time it was delivered. They considered giving internal stakeholders access to e-Builder so they could access project information directly, but worried that A) the complex data and workflows would be difficult for these users to navigate and B) the information would be misinterpreted if the user lacked proper context.
The Solution
Gryps connected to several systems used by the PREF team—including Trimble Unity Construct (e-Builder), Procore, and Boston’s city permitting system—and organized the data into a single knowledge graph. Using this knowledge graph as the underlying data set, we built a dashboard for each college with all the information they need about their active projects.
These dashboards include:
- Their entire portfolio of projects in assessment, design, or construction
- Project status and estimated completion timeline
- Financial information including amounts funded, committed, and spent
- The project manager and key properties associated with each project
- More detailed budget information depending on role and permissions.
The results
After years of fielding requests for more direct access to project data, the PREF team is able to provide the colleges exactly what they need via comprehensive, user-friendly dashboards. Using Gryps allows them to provide relevant information in real time, without having to expand direct access to Unity Construct.
In addition to the time saved by eliminating manual reporting, the PREF team has also seen an improvement in their own data hygiene. Making the information in Unity Construct visible via Gryps dashboards has created more accountability for project managers to be aware of what’s going into the system, leading to better data quality across the organization.
