The Ideal Software for IPD Projects

The Integrated Product Delivery (IPD) model is fast becoming a popular and powerful agreement for contracts that involve multiple organizations responsible for the successful delivery of major projects. The goal of IPD is to remove much of the friction and adversarial nature of joint ventures and P3 style agreements by aligning the financial goals of all parties involved. Commonly, major projects are jointly managed and delivered by a combination of the owner plus a general contractor, architect, engineering company and other contractors.

While a healthy bit of competition can result in positively motivating entities to work more productively, traditional agreements can foster a caustic, ineffective environment where organizations that should be working together, end up working against each other, competing for the same resources and, inadvertently, sabotaging the health of the project. IPD encourages a more collaborative approach, bringing down barriers and silos to achieve a more beneficial result. The intent is to tie individual success to project success, thereby achieving a more holistic approach from each entity, rather than a segregated approach. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) defines IPD as “a project delivery approach that integrates people, systems, business structures and practices into a process that collaboratively harnesses the talents and insights of all participants to optimize project results, increase value to the owner, reduce waste, and maximize efficiency through all phases of design, fabrication, and construction.” I’ve provided more resources on IPD at the bottom of this article for your reference.

The Perfect Software for IPD Projects

Even though some or all the contractors involved in the IPD will have one or more internal software solutions they use for project management, cost tracking and accounting; finding an independent software platform they can all use collaboratively on the IPD project has historically been tricky to find.

What 4castplus brings to the table in this scenario, is that it is a standalone project cost management solution that delivers a suite of integrated powerful tools for managing the complexities of major projects. The fact that it works standalone – meaning that it does not require the support of any accounting system or other enterprise systems – is unique at this tier of construction project management platforms. The additional advantage that it offers is that it has very powerful and flexible integration tools (both manual and automated) for importing and exporting data to and from each partner’s ERP.

What this means is that 4castplus can be deployed as an independent system that acts as a secure and collaborative platform for all members of the IPD to utilize. Figure 1 below shows a mock-up of how separate JV partners could all work together on the same project management platform to deliver the IPD project. 4castplus can be configured to have each partner’s personnel login securely and access only their own area, or optionally shared areas with other partners. Users can leverage the project management features around project planning, budgeting, forecasting, change orders, coding, etc., along with the rich and powerful reporting that can be sliced and pivoted in a multitude of ways. They can use the built-in jobsite cost tracking so that they can get project costs in real-time – then export all the labor hours uniquely to the payroll systems of each IPD partner.

The 4castplus integration platform enables direct integrations and/or data exports to multiple accounting systems including SAP, MS365, Sage, Netsuite, Oracle, Viewpoint, Jonas and many more.

More resources on IPD:

The Ideal Software for IPD Projects

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