Contra Costa Transportation Authority: Using e-Builder to Eliminate Data Silos and Increase Efficiency

The Contra Costa Transportation Authority manages about $2.7 billion in transportation projects and programs in the east Bay Area near San Francisco. The CCTA’s team of 20 works on a range of projects, from bike sharing programs to paratransit services to a suite of capital improvement projects involving highway construction and infrastructure improvements. In addition, the CCTA manages a 5,000-acre autonomous vehicle test bed and operated the first two shared autonomous vehicles on public roads in California.

“We started looking at how to make our systems more connected—and more effective.”

- Tim Haile, Deputy Executive Director of Projects for the CCTA

From a project management perspective, the CCTA has prioritized a paperless approach to documents for several years. “We started a document control system to scan everything and store it in the cloud,” explains Tim Haile, deputy executive director of projects for the CCTA. “We had a lot of great systems in place, but I started to realize they were not integrated with each other.” Haile says he’d have to run multiple reports from different systems to determine the remaining budget on a particular project. “We started looking at how to make our systems more connected—and more effective.”

The CCTA discovered e-Builder and decided to adopt it as their centralized solution for capital project management. Haile prioritized communicating with the team as part of the transition. “I met with everyone one-on-one and asked about the issues they were having with current systems, and where they would like to see improvement,” he says. “Then, I showed them examples of how e-Builder works and how it could help them make their process more effective and efficient. With this approach, we were able to really gain buy-in to move forward with purchasing and implementation.”

The implementation process began with a close look at the organization’s current business practices and evaluating how well they were working and where e-Builder might help. “People are seeing the value in e-Builder...we’re using it for programming, funding, contracts, invoicing, and document management,” says Haile. “Those were all areas where we previously had data silos, and now we’ve integrated all of them in a central place where someone can go and run a report, and we can also keep track of each process to find out how much time it’s taking.” With all that information in one place, the CCTA has gained greater visibility into their return on investment—and how e-Builder is helping them become more efficient and more effective.

“People are seeing the value in e-Builder...we’re using it for programming, funding, contracts, invoicing, and document management. Those were all areas where we previously had data silos, and now we’ve integrated all of them in a central place where someone can go and run a report, and we can also keep track of each process to find out how much time it’s taking.”

- Tim Haile, Deputy Executive Director of Projects for the CCTA

Haile’s advice to other public organizations looking to implement a construction management solution such as e-Builder is to make sure everyone on the team understands the vision. “As a leader, you might have that vision in your head, but it’s really important that everyone else—board members and staff—shares it and buys into it as well,” he says. “And as you move forward with the implementation, make sure people feel like they maintain ownership of their part in the vision and understand how what they’re doing affects the whole.”