DPR's commitment to customers for 2018 and beyond

DPR was created as a customer-focused organization. We have always known that to build great things we need to focus on customers and their ultimate business goals—"them, not us."

Throughout 2017, we spent our energies on understanding not only what our customers want, but what they need. We took what our customers had to say about us to heart and put plans in action. After all, we are only successful when our customers are successful—their goals are intrinsically our own.

As we approach 2018 and beyond, DPR looks to make even greater strides to take care of our customers and their businesses with greater predictability and efficiency as a result of our technical expertise and commitment to safety.

PREDICTABLE RESULTS

Our customers need predictability from reliable cost estimates and schedules.

Shortly after its founding, DPR laid out Critical Success Factors—baseline metrics of project health—to measure project success. Monitoring these and pushing for improvements has been our tried-and-true methodology for consistency in construction for the last 27 years. DPR has spent 2017 gathering historical cost data from past DPR projects. Data, combined with the power of the industry’s top cost analytics tools, will enable estimators to share cost insights based on data for similar projects. To bring similar predictability to scheduling, our planning, scheduling and productivity management teams are analyzing similar scheduling data to determine the most efficient time frames and most likely scenarios considering time-risk-related factors.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE

Our customers need us to bring know-how.

We are a technical builder. We have carved out a niche for ourselves in building some of the world’s most complex projects—pharmaceutical manufacturing, data centers, hospitals. Our investment in the best mechanical, electrical and plumbing talent and knowledgeable core market experts is all in service to our customers. We take responsibility for understanding our customers’ businesses and the specific systems and project configurations they require so we can provide experience- driven recommendations.

Our growth over the past five years has added challenges to spreading knowledge from our top experts. We are working on strategies to better share information, knowledge and lessons learned project to project as well as making specialized training more accessible. With more than 100 internal operations-focused training modules and an 80-hour per year training goal for employees, DPR prides itself on being a learning organization. Optimizing sharing of lessons learned to build and develop the next generation of technical experts is critical to our success going forward.

INNOVATION

Our customers need us to innovate in ways that benefit them.

More than shiny tech tools, innovation at DPR is about how we disrupt industry practices to offer greater efficiency and better outcomes for our customers. Laser scanning has been used in construction for years, but by seeking out new ways to use the technology we can offer more predictability (see full story on P9).

We continue to find ways to reduce manpower density on the jobsite by using offsite pre-fabrication where safety conditions are more reliable. Prefabrication is nothing new to the industry, but by using Digital Building Components, computer models can be transformed into precise-to-spec building assemblies. Breaking the cookie cutter that is traditional prefab, DPR can help customers realize savings in cost and schedule as well as improved quality without the limitations of traditional prefabrication.

In these busy times, we know that focus and discipline are imperative to strong operations and happy customers. 2018 will be a year of "raising the bar" on what customers want (and need) us to be.

Ever Forward.