Oracle CIC Analytics helps put Honolulu rail project on a fast track

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) is responsible for building the nation’s first driverless commuter rail system, spacing 19-stations across 18.75-miles of track to serve the city and county of Honolulu, Hawaii.

The state-of-the-art, $10 billion, 20-year project’s planning, design, and construction falls under HART, which is a semi-autonomous public transit authority. HART’s management, organization, and capability to plan, construct, and deliver a safe, reliable, and functional rail transit system to the city are of paramount importance.

Dan Jameson, deputy quality management representative for HART, understands the importance of quality analytics to help modernize many of the processes for such a crucial, massive public sector project. The elevated railway will provide rapid, reliable service to alleviate congested streets. The route also serves limited mobility and low-income communities and will aid the nonprofit Keiki to Kupuna Foundation’s delivery of meals to Oahu’s senior population.

As the authority’s business systems manager, Dan oversees all Oracle cloud applications, which includes Construction Intelligence Cloud (CIC) Analytics. CIC Analytics enables organizations to analyze comprehensive project data and blended datasets from Oracle Smart Construction Platform applications, including core KPIs for schedule, cost, risk, and other key project areas.

Making the shift from previous systems

HART implemented CIC Analytics in the fall of 2022 after using applications that were “a bit difficult to stand up.” They faced challenges with building efficiencies and productivity in Oracle Primavera Unifier, which is HART’s project management system. Dan thought CIC Analytics would provide them with insightful feedback while encouraging more consistent performance behaviors. Their legacy solutions and processes were creating unnecessary inefficiencies that needed to be remedied.

Timely approval of contractor payment requests and invoices were among the first things HART tackled with CIC Analytics. Just a year ago, everything was done manually. Much like any organization transitioning from paper to a digital routing of invoices, it was necessary to critique and streamline the signature collection process. Using Unifier’s custom workflow capability, an emphasis was placed on identifying which signatures were required and capturing approvals electronically. “This allowed us to eliminate tracking of paper invoices and the gathering of redundant signatures,” Dan recalls.

CIC Analytics dashboards create transparency

With CIC Analytics, they could measure how long it took to get each invoice paid. The dashboard and analytics provided visibility into where delays occurred.

“Sometimes it took substantially longer to route an invoice for payment than it should have, and then we’d hand it over to the city department to issue a check for the contractor,” Dan says. “By building a dashboard in CIC Analytics to bring visibility to our payment request process, most of our invoices are now signed off within 30 days. When we released this in a dashboard, it became a communication tool to encourage behaviors, holding people accountable to do what we need them to do to operate more effectively.”

Transactions typically occurred through email, creating risk by not having system-logged approvals for documents and drawings in the system of record. “I wanted to make sure our RFIs had a 10-day response on them instead of, in some cases, a few weeks,” Dan says. “These are things that dashboards in CIC Analytics have helped us address.”

An important solution to manage behaviors

Dan terms their current use of CIC Analytics as “very broad.” Their initial focus is creating analytical dashboards to show where contracts, payments, and approved change orders sit in the approval process to quickly address and close out certain aspects of a project.

Several project consultants are required to sign invoices, and they might stack up with one person, who’d sign them all at once before passing them to the next consultant. The new level of visibility on the CIC Analytics dashboard shows how long a person holds a specific invoice, which prompts action and manages behaviors.

“Being able to see it visually is much easier for people to recognize the problem than just seeing line items for these values,” he says. “We're just now reaching the point where we can see roll-ups of data and compare that data visually across different contracts in a mostly real-time system. We've moved away from spreadsheets now that we have stood up CIC Analytics.”

Constant support throughout the implementation

As someone who wears many hats in the organization, he and his team deliver business processes and automate procedures to the organization. This requires expansive knowledge of how each team operates so they can deliver solutions targeted to their needs and train users how to adopt the solutions. Dan has relied on Oracle Consulting Services to help his small team stand up CIC Analytics and improve processes in Primavera Unifier. As the first customer of CIC Analytics, HART received all the necessary support from the entire Oracle team (Product, Development, Support, OCS, Sales, Customer Success) throughout the short implementation.

“Working with the Oracle team, we get a lot of attention to answer our questions,” Dan says. “If you are using Oracle Primavera P6 or Primavera Unifier as your system, implementing CIC Analytics is a no-brainer. If you need a simple analytical solution to visualize your data, CIC Analytics is a must-have.”

With HART making a deeper investment in technology it’s important that solutions are easy to use. Given that Dan has so many responsibilities and a small team, staff training time can be minimal. As Dan onboards new staff, he is finding that they adapt quickly to CIC Analytics.

One new hire started in early January and in just six weeks quickly built most of the dashboards needed. Dan vibrantly explains how someone who is from outside the organization with no exposure at all to CIC Analytics and no understanding of the data sources could complete such a tall task in such a short time.

“The fact that she can stand up a dashboard—literally an entire dashboard—with multiple canvases and portlets on each canvas and do it in a couple of hours. It’s incredible. It really is,” Dan says. “CIC Analytics is incredibly user-friendly.”

‘The future is finally here’

When Dan joined HART in 2018, he saw the challenges facing the organization. No one was thinking about dashboards at that time. But with a background in data analytics, Dan knew the transformative power that analytics would bring to the organization. By playing the long game, HART is reaping the fruits of their patience.
“Here we are 3 ½ years into this, just now standing up these solutions, and it’s already making a difference,” Dan says. “The future is finally here.”

The Oracle Smart Construction Platform combines our industry-trusted applications with a common data environment and an ecosystem of partners to help owners and delivery teams work together and continuously improve performance. The platform connects teams and data, synchronizes work, and empowers individuals to make informed, proactive decisions. Power performance with proven Oracle Construction and Engineering solutions for scheduling, portfolio management, construction project management, project controls, construction payment management, and more.

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