PROJECT SPOTLIGHT ON RESORTS WORLD LAS VEGAS & GLOBAL BUILDING TECHNOLOGIES
See how Global Building Technologies has used FinishLine to manage Architectural, FF&E and Owner sign-off inspections
About Resorts World Las Vegas & Global Building Technologies
Global Building Technologies (GBT) is an industry leader for understanding the Hospitality and Development business needs and providing innovative services to increase efficiencies, reduce costs, and mitigate risks and liabilities. The GBT team has used FinishLine Software for one year to manage the inspection process on the Resorts World Las Vegas (RWLV) project.
This property is being developed by Genting Berhad and Resorts World has affiliated integrated resorts in the Americas, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the Bahamas. W.A. Richardson Builders as the General Contractor. We spoke the owner of GBT, Robert Bess and several of the GTB team members to learn about their experience using FinishLine on the GBT project.
Constructing RWLV is one of the largest hotel construction sites currently in the U.S., is steadily moving forward with approximately 1,500 construction workers on-site each day at the 88-acre parcel of land. The destination will combine traditional and modern architecture, weaving a new luxury hotel experience into the fabric of Las Vegas with Asian-inspired touches, progressive technology and world-class guest service.
The GBT team has been entrusted to perform Architectural, FF&E and Owner sign-off inspections of the two towers containing more than 3500 standard rooms, suites and villas under 6 different international brands. We spoke with Robert Bess, the Owner of GBT who is providing the inspection resources along with Finishline Software.
RWLV cares about the quality of their product and wanted a team who could provide quick turn-around inspection services for 3,500 rooms. Since GBT uses FinishLine Software exclusively, they have efficiently managed all of the inspections. Due to the large project scale, GBT needed to use an inspection tool that they could quickly implement and train their 12 team members who preform inspections.
FinishLine Software is intuitive, which made training a straightforward process so GBT could get to work ASAP.
GBT chose to use FinishLine based on the cost, in addition to recommendations from other employees who had used FinishLine on other projects in the past. Due to FinishLine’s ease of use and powerful reporting features, GBT saw a ROI within 12 months of using FinishLine. Had GBT used other punch list systems for the inspections, it would have slowed their overall process.
“FinishLine has dramatically changed my daily workload. It has made it super easy to complete reports, create a whole punch list in a matter of minutes vs putting together data from different people.”
The GBT teams currently using FinishLine to manage Architectural punches, FF&E, and Owner Sign-Off. Using the Procore integration allows them to publish weekly reports direct to the Procore Platform for the project which has improved efficiency. Some of the most valuable features or capabilities in FinishLine are the Graphical Navigation, Advanced Reporting, Sub-Contractor Assignment, Checklists, Customized inspection types, tasks and descriptions. Using FinishLine enables the GBT team to inspect dozens of rooms while distributing reports to many different Sub-Contractors. GBT uses several devices to implement FinishLine including the iPad, iPhone, Microsoft Surface Pro, along with Android tablets and smartphones.
RWLV & FinishLine by the numbers
- Total number of sheets: 6271
- Total number of punch items: 136,000
- New punch items per week: 7,500
- Total number of pictures: 166,000
- New pictures per week: 9,500
- Total utilized picture storage: 45GB
Using FinishLine on the RWLV project has enabled near real-time creation and dissemination of the punch items to the Sub-Contractor Teams. Extreme coordination and ball-in-court responsibilities, increased efficiencies by ALL parties on the platform, reduced Risk and Liability, and using a Single Source of the Truth has been a gamechanger. FinishLine is easy to use, as Maureen of GBT said: “FinishLine has been a great tool for creating punch items for my current project, it’s easy to learn, easy to navigate, and easy to understand. Due to the user-friendly interface, I am able to quickly add punch list items with no issues.”
See FinishLine in action
The timesaving is incalculable but significant. FinishLine is at least twice as fast as Procore Punchlist on item input, but there is an incalculable time savings on assignment and completion. A minimum of 10,000 plus manhours just on the dissemination and coordination of assigning open items, incalculable on the completion of the items as it impacted all Contracted parties and increased efficiencies. Using a robust inspection system has saved Property management thousands of hours of work organizing and managing the punch and the completed, owner approved rooms.
“FinishLine compared to other products is second to none. I have used Procore in the past and the difference between FinishLine and Procore is being able to sign off individual items rather than the whole space. Also, the ability to be able to put items down geographically vs as a PDF makes a huge difference. I believe FinishLine is superior as a punch list tool, as well as a reporting tool as compared to almost every other program that I have used in the past.”
Only a few years ago a project of this size would have been inspected or punched with yellow legal pads and a digital camera. After a long day's work, all that information then would have been translated into a spreadsheet and the pictures married up with the punch item and then categorized by Sub-Contractor or by floor or GC depending on the project. On a project of this size and scope you are literally saving tens of thousands of high dollar manpower to inspect, assign, organize, report and close these items.
Currently there are other software systems deployed on this site such as Procore which has the punch list built in. However, the punch list in Procore is list based only and requires an inordinate amount of set-up to be functional from a reduction of resources perspective.
In addition, PlanGrid was also available but infrequently used due to many factors not the least of which was the pricing to bring all parties on-board in a near real-time collaborative environment. In addition, the navigation was not as robust or easy to use as the hotspot/link navigation of FinishLine Software.
When asked what this process would be like without FinishLine, Robert Bess said, “One word – CHAOS! Even without the manual methods of the past, other platforms just aren’t as well suited for this size and scope of work with the ease of management of the volume of items.” Felix, a GBT team member added that FinishLine really improved all of their processes saying that, "FinishLine really streamlined this whole project, there is no going back to the office spending hours putting your items together, making sure that the photo matches up with the item number, putting that into Excel and getting that into a bulky report. Everything is digital with FinishLine and the GC can download the files or look at the app on their own devices which helps coordinate things a lot better and helps to get your project done quicker."
“Compared to other punch software that I have used, FinishLine is very simple to use. I’ve used FinishLine to punch items and have also received the punch list report. It’s very informative and straight to the point.”
Robert also said, “I believe that the Team of Inspectors with global Building Technology combine with the Software features and capabilities not only allowed the owner to decrease their spending on this monumentally important task, but I feel strongly that the Owner received a Better Product than they would have in any other methodology.”
Since inspection items and all other deficiencies tracked on this project will live on in the FinishLine Software into Operations and Maintenance, preventative Maintenance, Warranty tracking, commissioning and other aspects of the building giving them almost x-ray vision of their property issues for the life of the building.
When asked about improving FinishLine for the future Robert said, “Give me a Blue dot and geo referencing so items are actually in a true world location and navigation is done the same way.” He also suggested to tout the Asset Management module of FinishLine Software for owner/operators to have not only Fixed Asset inventories but also a ticketing system for trouble or problem resolution around these same items.
Learn how GBT has been using FinishLine Software to manage the impressive RWLV project