East Bay Municipal
Utility District's
The East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) operates an
extensive waterworks system that supplies water to approximately
1.3 million residents of Northern California's Alameda and Contra
Costa Counties. With pipelines, filter plants, pumping stations,
and reservoirs spread across a 325-square-mile area, EBMUD faces
the daily challenge of staying on top of the construction and
maintenance responsibilities associated with keeping water flowing
to its customers.
To bring better management to the numerous construction projects
going on within EBMUD at any given time, the district's Construction
Division chose to integrate PARAGON Program Management System
into its construction management process in 1995. Kevin Canada,
supervising administrative engineer for EBMUD's Construction
Division, explains that, at that time, the division was in need
of a software solution that could integrate all facets of construction
management into a unified system that provided reporting and
document control capabilities along with immediate access to
cost and schedule information. PARAGON proved to be that solution.
"We needed to streamline our contract administration duties
so our staff could more effectively manage the myriad of construction
projects under our jurisdiction," Canada said. "Using
PARAGON has been very helpful in terms of improving the way
we do business within our section; it's helped us to standardize
our reporting procedures and to become more efficient and better
organized.
For example,
PARAGON has reduced the time and expense needed to prepare
payment invoices to a fraction of what it was before. "We
are currently working on a project that contains a couple
of hundred pay activities. So we simply feed the raw data
into PARAGON and it automatically computes how much is due
each contractor and generates the necessary report documentation
each month," Canada said. "It used to take about
a week each month to complete the computations and paperwork
needed to support the progress payment invoices with documents
passing between five people", he said. "Now, two
or three people are able to complete this task in a couple
of hours using PARAGON."
|
