Voyage Control’s Journey with Suffolk:

Our work started out in an organic manner, beginning with Suffolk field teams in Boston at the end of 2015. By 2019 Voyage Control was adopted as an enterprise solution, championed by the Construction Solutions Team at Suffolk HQ and established as a best practice for sites across the US.

Voyage Control has been deployed on a variety of projects in the Suffolk portfolio; commercial high rises, hospital projects, education facilities, a casino, and even at a ski resort.

One exemplary project that has adopted Voyage Control in a particularly tight and challenging job is the world renowned hospital for children located in Boston. In the first year of using the platform, the site managed close to 2,000 deliveries to the constantly changing site, sitting within the confines of an active hospital. The platform has seen strong success because end users find it easy to use, provides real-time visibility into site activities, drives accountability for the parties involved, and automates reporting of the day’s activities. 

Growing Together

What factors have contributed to Voyage Control being successfully adopted on so many Suffolk sites?

EASE OF IMPLEMENTATION

Ease of implementation of the Voyage Control platform allows the benefits to end users to become clear quickly. The platform is customized for each site’s setup so that training is straightforward for the Suffolk team and trade partners. 

VISIBILITY

Visibility into real-time data is critical for the site team so that they don’t need to go to a physical whiteboard on the job site to check and see what the schedule is. Schedule changes made in Voyage Control are updated instantly, and the appropriate parties are notified and can access the data from anywhere across devices. To facilitate visibility, Suffolk has also started to put TV screens on their job sites at loading docks and in the field offices to show the daily schedule. 

ACCOUNTABILITY 

Accountability is established for trade partners entering deliveries because Suffolk is able to ensure the timely use of the loading gates and unloading resources, such as tower cranes and hoists. If trade partners are consistently late or don’t show up, Suffolk can provide a record of the planned delivery schedule and discuss it with them to reset expectations and improve future performance. 

REPORTING

Reporting on actionable data is important for Suffolk HQ’s Construction Solutions Team to understand what is going on across sites nationwide. Automating this data flow for each site by enacting a direct integration into Procore’s Daily Log and Submittals is valuable to Suffolk, who require the Daily Log be filled out on all projects. Removing the need for duplicative data entry through this integration is important because it ensures that data is entered accurately and in a timely manner that can be audited later if needed. The Procore integration contributes to Suffolk’s strategy of joining siloed data and provides a direct cost savings to them through time savings and risk mitigation through thorough data capture.