O’Brien & Company recently received the Most Outstanding Project award at the 2022 Trimble Viewpoint Construction Awards for updating and expanding the Nestucca Valley K-8 School in Cloverdale, Oregon. Trimble’s annual awards honor the technological achievements of North American contractors as exhibited through the growth and improvements of their projects, people, and processes.

Along with the Most Outstanding Project award, other categories included Most Impressive Human Resource Achievement and Best Use of Trimble Construction One Technology. The Trimble Viewpoint Construction Awards were evaluated by a panel of judges including select Trimble Construction executives and Manohar Damle of Basic Resources, Inc., who won last year in the Best Use of Technology category.

“While project demand has been high, inflation, supply chain volatility, and high material prices have forced many contractors to become more innovative and creative in order for their projects to be completed on time and on budget,” said Lawrence Smith, Vice President and General Manager of Trimble Construction Management Solutions. “For our construction award winners, technology proved to be the best way to gain the agility and flexibility needed to respond to today’s ever-changing business conditions. As a result, they didn’t just improve on processes momentarily but developed new workflows and efficiencies that will help them scale and grow for many years to come.”

With the added challenge of being renovated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nestucca Valley K-8 School was also in need of additional space due to higher student enrollment, an emergency location for natural disasters, and an update to its aging water system. O’Brien & Company, a design-build contractor throughout the state of Oregon, updated and expanded the school so that it included classrooms, administrative offices, commons, a gymnasium, a kitchen, career and technical education labs, music space, a secure front entry on the south side, and a brand-new playground.

“We were able to complete the project three months early and $3 million under budget due to early and total buy-in from subcontractors, the design team, our management team, and especially the client being super flexible,” said Derek Salo, Project Manager at O’Brien & Company. “With COVID and everything, it really could have turned into a disaster. … But just seeing everything come together at the end is something that I'll never forget.”

The adoption of Trimble technology also played a part in the success of the project, with O’Brien & Company utilizing Viewpoint HR Management and Viewpoint Team.

Viewpoint HR Management improves productivity by reducing manual data entry and speeding up onboarding and employee-related workflows. During construction, O’Brien & Company used Viewpoint HR Management for onboarding, timesheets, and for posting the company’s COVID bulletins for remote employees.

“[With] COVID, we had to re-gear our thinking,” Salo said. “Us as a management team went pretty much fully remote. That's not easy when you've got 100-plus construction workers on site with students every day.”

Viewpoint Team is a cloud-based solution that enhances construction collaboration. During the project, Viewpoint Team provided teams with a collaboration hub to communicate RFIs, submittals, drawings, change orders, and daily logs to monitor jobsite issues, which included COVID-related health forms.

“Viewpoint Team was super instrumental on this project,” Salo said. “The thing I love about it is that it not only keeps the design team accountable and the client accountable, but also keeps our own team accountable. It reduces the amount of things that slip through the cracks.”