How Mortenson Construction Reduced Change Order Risk on the GEODIS Park Stadium Project

James Armour is a Senior Project Manager with Mortenson Construction’s Sports + Entertainment Group, and was the Project Manager over the enclosure and interior scopes for the $330 million GEODIS Park Major League Soccer Stadium in Nashville, TN. Completed in May 2022 as a joint venture between Mortenson and Messer Construction, the 532,000 square-foot stadium features a 360-degree canopy, 65-foot wide concourse, and at 30,500 seats, is the largest MLS venue in North America.

But midway through construction, Armour was uncertain how the project would successfully navigate an array of T&M Tickets piling up to account for trade damage to drywall. “I could tell paper tickets weren’t going to work over the course of the project, because just sorting through the tickets and matching them to emails and doing it all with hardly any backup documentation was already a mess,” Armour says. “We needed a way out of the antiquated paper ticket process to bring us into the digital age.”

A Dynamic Change Order Solution for Dynamic Projects

Armour’s lead executive Tom Clark had been introduced to Clearstory from colleagues he had worked with during construction of the $1.4 billion Chase Center in San Francisco, and after some initial research, Armour decided to implement the solution at GEODIS Park. “I didn’t have any trepidation about launching Clearstory in the middle of the project, because we knew anything would be better than what we had,” Armour says. “We did not have anything resembling a good process for T&M Tickets. We had nothing. Just paper tickets and email.”

Created by former General Contractors to modernize how the industry communicates and resolves out-of-contract work, Clearstory is the only Change Order Communication Tool purpose-built to reduce risk for all stakeholders. Clearstory’s 100% digital T&M Tags and real-time, Universal COR Log provide automated workflows to eliminate carbon copy T&M Tickets and static COR logs, helping project teams stay on the same page, avoid risk, and understand cost impacts.

When Clearstory was quickly adopted by the drywall Specialty Contractor on the GEODIS project, Armour rolled it out to his remaining trades, too. “Our Subcontractors love that the turnaround time is faster, processing documentation is easier, and everything is so much simpler than using paper tickets,” Armour says. “Trades with any level of sophistication recognize the benefits quickly, and after using Clearstory just once and seeing how easy it is, they’ve completely bought in. It’s turned out to support all of our needs from a ticketing standpoint.”

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“Trades with any level of sophistication recognize the benefits quickly, and after using Clearstory just once and seeing how easy it is, they've completely bought in. It's turned out to support all of our needs from a ticketing standpoint.”

James Armour

Senior Project Manager, Mortenson Construction

Streamlined Processing for Expedited Close-Outs

Clearstory also provided transparency on cost and risk exposure between Mortenson and its Trade Partners, streamlining communication and helping to boost productivity as the GEODIS build-out raced toward early completion. After finishing seven weeks ahead of schedule, Armour and his team used Clearstory to expedite close-out, and by the original project end-date seven weeks later, had financially closed out with all trade partners.

In total, Mortenson was able to process $1.5 million in change costs using Clearstory on the GEODIS stadium project. From that, Armour and his Trade Partners were able to quickly identify hundreds of thousands of dollars in either viable scope or trade backcharges that could be funneled away from the project contingency bucket, eliminating that money from project risk.

That success has the Mortenson Sports group implementing Clearstory on all projects moving forward, including the company’s $1 billion Gaylord Convention Center joint venture with McCarthy Building Companies. “From what we have seen there is nothing else on the market like Clearstory that integrates into Procore, talks with our systems seamlessly, and has the features we need to process out of contract work quickly and drastically reduce our cost exposure,” Armour says.

The Mortenson Sports Group is also evangelizing Clearstory as a plug-and-play solution for other company divisions and construction projects, big and small. “We like to push innovation in the Sports Group. It’s something we preach a lot,” Armour says. “We see the value in Clearstory and think it is here to stay. There’s never going to be a better time than the present to try it out.”

About the Project

The Mortenson Sports Group is a premiere builder of both professional and collegiate sports stadiums and arenas, including Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, and the Chase Center in San Francisco. The GEODIS Park MLS Arena project was a joint venture with Messer Construction and was completed in May 2022.