At Granite Construction, we call ourselves "America's Infrastructure Company."
An industry leader in the transportation, water resources and mineral exploration markets throughout the United States, we provide communities and companies across the U.S. infrastructure solutions for construction, program management and alternative procurement.
As such, our work falls into the "essential" work category, meaning business had to continue despite the outbreak of COVID-19. With crews still out in the field, back-office departments like mine had to transition to working from home without missing a step.
Five years ago, this would have presented serious challenges. Our subcontract administrators spend much of their time managing contracts. Contracts have traditionally been stored in in-boxes, local hard-drives or, going back just a little further, in filing cabinets. Getting reviews and approvals was a matter of physically walking them down the hall. For obvious reasons, these methods would have created many challenges in a work-from-home situation.
Thankfully, Granite manages its contracts on the cloud-based Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform. Since our contracts and contracting processes are cloud-based, there has been little-to-no change for our business.
We chose to deploy ICM because we wanted better visibility into our contracts. We wanted to know that all the contracts were we sending out had the proper clauses, and we wanted fast access to active contracts in case questions arose. Having this functionality in place has proven invaluable.
Contracting has always been important in our business, but now it's more critical than ever. We know our risk indemnities and force majeure clauses are already in our templates and our contracts for any situation, including the COVID crisis. We didn't have to think about it.
I credit this to the fact that we'd already been in ICM for a long time. The great habits we developed with Icertis pre-COVID are now coming into play, to our benefit. When we transitioned to working from home, we remained connected through ICM. And, in fact, working from home has gotten more people to use the system!
ICM has been a key tool as we continue providing essential services to communities across America in this difficult time.
And because we're not scrambling to figure out how to maintain business continuity, we plan to use some of this time to review our existing templates and strategically update them to make sure we're in an even stronger position coming out of this.
Lynne Levassar is Procurement Systems Analyst at Granite Construction.
You can find more information on how customers are leveraging Icertis to respond to the COVID-19 crisis on our COVID-19 resources page.