Michuda Construction provides general contracting and construction management services to clients throughout the Midwest.

This family-owned business from Chicago has almost 100 years of pre-construction and construction experience serving healthcare, educational, and commercial facilities, with a focus on occupied space – that is, a building that remains open during construction.

Challenge

In 2014, Michuda Contruction incurred three safety violations in two days. This led to a loss of a major client – and a big hit in revenue.

The company could not afford another violation. When a construction company is working in an occupied space like a hospital, everyone can be affected by the work being done – doctors, nurses, patients, visitors. Safety is a top priority for the company. An estimated 75,000 people in the U.S. die annually due to hospital-acquired infections (HAI). 10% of these cases are attributed to construction or other facility maintenance work. That is 7,500 lives.

The team needed a way to communicate and report incidents on the job site, and a tool that gives a snapshot of what’s going on in real-time and can improve the construction process for both Michuda employees and Michuda clients.

The Michuda leadership team challenged themselves to come up with an innovative new process to minimize risk with the following question: Think of someone you love. How would you conduct yourself, doing construction, if you knew that person was being taken care of in the same facility? Would you do something differently? With an emotional connection to the need, this conversation led to some of the company’s best ideas to address safety.

Solution

Michuda Mobile was built on the altruistic value of saving lives (even from the start, when the leadership team met). MM mitigates adverse patient outcomes. With the system, the team ensures that all employees have proper training and vaccinations and are in their designated areas. By reducing the number of safety violations, MM offers a response to the client questions, “Can I count on the quality of your work? Will you be safe? Will you keep my patients and visitors safe?” MM offers real-time data for all job sites, showing Michuda clients how important safety is for the company.

Michuda Mobile is the first application in its industry to be a one-stop application for job site safety and compliance. Michuda Mobile (MM) is a cloud-based web application that provides 24/7 management and monitoring of the safety and integrity of all Michuda job sites. Michuda Construction did its own research to find an existing employee tracking application that emphasized safety and integrated into its 24/7 safety monitoring tool but could not find anything in the market. This is when the business owners decided to form a strategic partnership with alligatortek and develop its own system.

Michuda Mobile is changing the culture of safety on Michuda job sites. The superintendents can run high-capacity jobs while maintaining gold-level safety compliance.Superintendents can pull available jobs and assign tasks to workers based on real-time jobs, increasing productivity.

The company wanted to go green and eliminate the existing paper-based employee check-in and time-tracking system. MM improved the firm’s morning huddle processes by providing a way for workers to check in using their mobile devices – even when it is not connected to the internet.

Employees can check in digitally with their phones, instead of waiting in line at a sign-up sheet. The check-in feature helps identify and keep track of workers on a regular basis and is particularly beneficial to look up information on employees during an incident.

Employees can stay connected with specialized group alerts on their device. Managers can submit daily reports in a central location. The system allows Michuda to efficiently manage necessary job information about its employees. As a result, employees spend less time getting organized for its morning meeting.

The employee payroll process has also gone digital. A paperbased system faced issues like delays in employee payroll processing, increased margin for error and lost timesheets, and additional resource time for data entry. Now, there are no more issues of lost timesheets.

The application continues to grow with increasing functionalities as the industry changes. There have been 29 additional improvements over the last three years – a mark of continued partnership between Michuda Construction and alligatortek.