Founded in 2002 and based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, La Macchia Group is a design-build construction firm that focuses exclusively on financial institutions.
La Macchia Group, which is a sales-oriented organization, doesn’t bid jobs but instead goes out and finds clients. Their mantra is, ‘If you’re not growing, you’re dying.’
And the company is most definitely growing! Over the last few years, La Macchia Group has grown at a pace of 20 plus percent while the headcount has gone from 30 to nearly 100 in three years.
The company goals include continued growth.
THE CHALLENGE
La Macchia Group’s explosive growth has led to challenges related to managing its institutional knowledge and databases. As they work to make sure their business can handle the change, La Macchia Group looks to technology which has played a big role for them for some time.
“My role is crafting the systems that we had in place as a small business to evolve into systems that work functionally for larger groups of employees and people within the company,” says Mike Cherubini, Director of Operations for La Macchia Group.
In the past, La Macchia Group had been using Microsoft Excel across multiple departments for construction resource management. However, they “were never married up and they didn’t talk to each other.”
“The mental gymnastics of matching up the name, the percentage that was allocated for that name, the projects, and their position across the project spectrum within our company was quite the challenge,” says Cherubini.
After setting aside a couple of days to look into resource platforms, La Macchia Group narrowed their search to a few solutions including 10,000ft. La Macchia Group had done an extensive trial run of 10,000ft, but found that they needed something that was more robust, user-friendly, and built for construction.
THE SOLUTION
A colleague attended Procore’s Groundbreak conference where he was introduced to Bridgit Bench. Later, Cherubini and some colleagues got a demonstration of Bridgit Bench.
And then COVID-19 hit.
“It quickly became apparent that there were more robust offerings within Bridgit Bench to slice and dice and to view our information.”
Mike Cherubini, Director of Operations at La Macchia Group
“It caused us to bring in more contracts and more resources to address those contracts, which has caused an even greater need for my role in organizing these systems,” says Cherubini.
La Macchia Group has appreciated how helpful Bridgit Bench could be with remote construction resource planning. “We need multiple users to talk to the same set of data at multiple times since we’re not together, and we need stakeholders tied into the resource planning process to view this data,” says Cherubini.
“It’s about being able to assign the right person at the right time.”
Mike Cherubini, Director of Operations at La Macchia Group
In just a few months, La Macchia Group has become one of Bridgit Bench’s top users. One reason why Bridgit Bench has become such a useful resource for La Macchia Group is the ability to customize fields. The company has customized 30 fields to get the information they need to properly assign resources to a project.
“Team members need to make decisions every day on a project,” says Cherubini. Having everything, “in one place on one screen, so they can view and walk through our process with Bridgit Bench and those data points are invaluable to them.”
La Macchia Group uses Bridgit Bench as the middle ground for its tech stack.
“Bridgit Bench is our communication and viewing tool and we push and pull data from multiple systems to Bridgit Bench.”
Mike Cherubini, Director of Operations at La Macchia Group
Despite the many ways that La Macchia Group is using Bridgit Bench, the tool is easy to use. “The simplicity of the interface is what makes it so powerful,” says Cherubini. It’s also user friendly. Cherubini notes he can train employees how to use the software in an hour.
This stems from Bridgit’s knowledge of the industry.
“Bridgit is very aware of the market and probably knows our needs before we do.”
Mike Cherubini, Director of Operations at La Macchia Group
He adds about the company, “The way that your system grows and the input that you take from us and the input that you give us is invaluable,” says Cherubini.
With all the data aggregated in one place, La Macchia Group no longer needs to piece resource management information together. This is a time saver and allows the company to do workforce planning more smoothly despite the challenging times and the many layers, phases, and considerations they go through.
As La Macchia Group strives to continue growing, Bridgit Bench helps them forecast and model scenarios. The company can be clearer about its resource needs and resource management can take into account multiple pieces of relevant information.
