When it comes to tracking field-directed extra work on carbon copy T&M Tickets, and then working through email and spreadsheets to align with General Contractors on corresponding Change Order Requests, Clint Badger thinks commercial painting contractors are basically over it. 

Badger, the Phoenix regional president for Dallas, TX-based Cherry Coatings, sees a growing reluctance among project teams industry-wide to even bother tracking extra work if it means slogging through the usual inefficient, paper-driven processes and workarounds. 

“And one of the big reasons why is because teams don’t want the hassle of filling out a paper ticket, finding someone on site to get it signed, getting that paper back to the office, then scanning it in and sending a COR off to the GC,” Badger says. “It's just too long of a process.”

At the same time, painters are one of the most change-heavy Specialty Contractors in construction, regularly accounting for trade damage, touch-ups, and punch lists in addition to normal project design changes.

“So out of all of those extras, you typically collect on 50 to 60 percent of them,” Badger explains. “Some of that is just lost paperwork, but some of it is field guys not wanting to do tickets, and it can add up in a worst-case scenario to 10% of project revenue.”

Using Clearstory to Eliminate Costly, Time-Consuming Change Order Workflows

After unsuccessfully trying T&M utilities within their payroll software and other systems, Cherry Coatings adopted Clearstory for its singular focus on aligning project teams on Change Order risk and for its field-friendly simplicity in capturing and communicating out-of-contract work between stakeholders.

Even better, Clearstory seamlessly integrated with Cherry’s CMiC construction management and project accounting software where teams tracked their internal costs and budgets, allowing project stakeholders to quickly align on out-of-contract work while eliminating data entry when creating Potential Change Items (PCIs) in CMiC.

“Previously, there was quite a bit of data entry required to get all of our PCIs into CMiC,” Badger says, “Now we use Clearstory for all of our Change Order Logs and T&M Tickets. When they’re approved you just click a button and push the PCI to CMiC, so we know everything is up-to-date and accurate for our experts in accounting and we can eliminate the hours that were devoted to all of the error-prone typing and data entry from paper tickets and logs.”

Field Tested and GC Approved as a Practical, Powerful Change Order Communication Tool

Beyond the back office, Clearstory has emerged as a successful front line Change Order Communication Tool for Cherry Coatings teams to surface, track, and resolve out of contract work costs with General Contractors. Most critically, it’s provided field personnel with an easy-to-use, real-time, drag and drop interface to simplify T&M Ticket and Change Order workflows. 

“Field teams are all used to technology by now, but their biggest harp is when they’re presented with something that’s difficult to navigate,” Badger says. “When we walk them through Clearstory, the response to the software is that it’s awesome. So now they’re more apt to fill out the extras so the office can determine if it’s really something that we’ll need to charge for or not.” 

Communicating and tracking those costs upstream with GCs has been just as streamlined. Using Clearstory’s shared, cloud-based Change Order Log, Cherry project teams simply provide a link to the real-time log, eliminating the paper ticket shuffle and error-prone, time-consuming exchange of PDFs back and forth through email.

Software Solutions That Are Built to Scale

By using Clearstory alongside CMiC, Cherry Coatings has finally found a way to modernize T&M Tag and Change Order workflows that were holding teams back from the transparency needed to achieve efficient, productive processes.

“With Clearstory’s live link, you can always go in there where everything is organized, tracked, and up to date,” Badger says. “Our GCs see that and they’re wowed. They love the live link and it feels like the whole Change Order process is finally catching up with the times.” 

Badger says the simplicity of using Clearstory alongside CMiC to eliminate data entry and simplify workflows will also benefit Cherry Coatings as it expands into new markets and looks to establish standardized, efficient processes for tracking extra work. 

“Clearstory has definitely provided a more systematic approach to our change order process and work ticket process,” Badger says.”It’s a system that we can take into all of our markets as we expand and say here's how we use Clearstory at Cherry and how it’s gonna help you out. It’s great software. We love it.”

About Cherry Coatings

Founded in 1968, Cherry Coatings is a premiere commercial painting contractor for new construction painting, industrial flooring, and maintenance coatings services. With offices across Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and Tennessee, the company is recognized as the third-largest painting contractor in the US by Engineering News-Record.