Listening to Our Clients – Clark Construction and Fairfax County Public Schools

I had the great pleasure of visiting with several of Kahua’s clients and partners last month to learn more about each company’s mission and the challenges they face accomplishing that mission.

Clark Construction continues to innovate and push themselves and their partners to excel at delivering for their customers. Clark made Kahua its go-to PMIS many years ago and has helped us develop tools on the Kahua platform to meet some of their very specific needs. Clark operates units across the country that use various technologies, always experimenting and looking for process improvements. And they perform projects across the globe.

These photos show a simple job that tells their neighbors at the corporate headquarters in Bethesda, Md., that it is in their corporate DNA to keep up to date. Relative to the massive jobs they perform, it’s a simple refresh of the cladding on their building, but it is indicative of their commitment to quality. 

I also visited with the design and construction staff with Fairfax County Public Schools in Fairfax, Va. FCPS is a new client, just getting ready to roll out Kahua across its entire project portfolio. The school system will use Kahua for all renovation, expansion and new construction projects in its current $1.2 billion capital improvement program. 

In speaking with some of the staff there, I sensed the excitement about rolling out Kahua for all projects going forward and the lost time project members will recover by eliminating redundant tasks and inefficiencies. Like so many K-12 or K-14 districts, Fairfax will be able to consolidate several point solutions into a single source for all project information.  

In many cases, Fairfax has used different business processes for different project types. In the past, this has meant using or creating different systems for each of those different projects, thus creating more silos of data, not to mention the inefficiency that comes with recreating the wheel.  

Our team has been hard at work preparing FCPS, and now the district is up and running on the Kahua platform. 

“FCPS needed an easy-to-use interface because it will have multiple teams with various levels of experience collaborating on projects,” said Heather Diez, Assistant Director of Design and Construction. “We appreciate that Kahua focuses on training and offers a system with intuitive user experience.” 

These previous challenges are not unique to FCPS. Most school districts with healthy capital improvement programs face many of the same challenges. I’m sure this is why Kahua for K-12 has quickly become the go-to solution for schools searching for ways to better manage this very critical work. 

If you are interested in more news about Kahua for K-12, check out Kahua Case Study with America’s Largest K-12 and Santa Clara Unified School District.