Success Story
Barton Malow has deployed Autodesk Forma across the enterprise to streamline and standardize project management. With thousands of projects in the system and approximately 27,000 users, day-to-day administrative tasks in Forma were often time-consuming for Senior Technology Implementation Manager Elizabeth Fox and her two person team.
Project engineers and project managers at Barton Malow routinely join and leave projects. This means that project work must be reassigned regularly. In addition, team members may need access to large numbers of projects. For example, the Legal Department recently needed to review every project in Forma.
As Elizabeth explained, “We have anywhere from 1,300 to 1,500 active projects in our Forma Hub at any time. To give Legal access, we had to go into every project and add them one at a time. We thought ‘there had to be a better way’.”
Security and organizational risk were also concerns. It was difficult for Barton Malow to ensure that Forma users had the right permissions on each project.
“The biggest security permissioning issue we have is project admin—if a user has project admin access, they are required to take the proper training. We don’t allow external users to have project admin access. Unfortunately, within Autodesk Forma there isn’t a great way to check this,” stated Elizabeth.
For years, Barton Malow has purchased Autodesk solutions and support from IMAGINiT. Every other week, Elizabeth meets with her IMAGINiT sales rep to discuss software licensing and Barton Malow’s needs.
After hearing about Barton Malow’s desire for bulk updates in Forma administration, the IMAGINiT rep recommended IMAGINiT Accelerate. This cloud-native Autodesk Forma administrative platform simplifies user and project management, batch user onboarding, security audits, and role updates.
According to Elizabeth, “When we heard about Accelerate, it seemed like a no-brainer for Barton Malow.” The implementation went smoothly, thanks to IMAGINiT’s commitment to customer success and clear communication. When the team encountered some processing issues during implementation, the IMAGINiT lead reconfigured the system.
“Typically, if we run into issues with software, we have to go through a ticketing system and wait for help. IMAGINiT got to work right away and the solution was delivered incredibly quickly. We were up and running with Accelerate super-fast and we’ve had zero issues with it since,” Elizabeth said
IMAGINiT Accelerate is saving Barton Malow significant amounts of time and money. Handling project access with Accelerate has been particularly impactful. When the Vice President of Innovation in the K12 Education division needed access to hundreds of projects, she asked Elizabeth if it would be too much work.
Elizabeth told her, “I can do that in five minutes.” She continued, “and it literally took me five minutes thanks to Accelerate. Previously, that would have taken my team days to complete.”
The security audit functionality in Accelerate has also increased transparency and reduced organizational risk for Barton Malow. The team can quickly generate a spreadsheet and then use Power BI or AI to identify which users have incorrect project permissions.
“Right now, 16% of people in the system with project admin access have taken the proper training. My team’s goal is to increase that to 80% and we’re well on our way. Accelerate has given us a way to check permission, ensure that everyone is properly trained and that no external users have project admin access,” Elizabeth said.
An unexpected benefit from Accelerate relates to team members who have changed their names or have a new email address. It’s common at Barton Malow for two to three people a week to submit these types of changes.
Historically, when team members had name changes, Elizabeth’s team had to manually modify their names in all their Forma projects. This meant creating a whole new account for them. For email changes, Barton Malow had to submit tickets to Autodesk. Team Members often lost days of work, waiting for updates on the backend of the system.
“Accelerate has been great for this. We weren’t self-sufficient before, and now we can be. And it’s a use case that we never considered for the product. It came up one day and we said, ‘Wait, we can fix that now,’” Elizabeth said.
As Barton Malow leverages technology to deliver construction excellence, it has appreciated the partnership with IMAGINiT.
“I know that IMAGINiT has our best interests in mind when it comes to the Autodesk world. Their tools, like Accelerate, bridge gaps in the Autodesk platform and free up time for us. With Accelerate, we can now handle monotonous administrative tasks quickly and get back to our regular day jobs,” Elizabeth said.
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