Tutor Perini Saves Thousands

“We’re eliminating some of our distributed computing services. That’s going to make our IT operations even more efficient and cost effective in the future.”

Jim Puerner

CIO • Tutor Perini

A legacy of excellence

Since 1894, Tutor Perini Corporation has executed large, complex projects both on time and on budget, while adhering to strict quality control measures. Today, the $5 billion, NYSE-traded, Los Angeles-based company has offices in the U.S., Canada, Guam and the Philippines, offering diversified general contracting and design-build services to private clients and public agencies.

Construction firms generate enormous amounts of data and Tutor Perini is no exception. On-site project teams rely heavily on networked file shares for documents such as meeting minutes, daily inspections, change order requests, requests-for-information, AutoCAD files and large PDFs. In addition to file storage, the project teams and office staff collaborate and share internally among teams and externally with third parties such as contractors, architects and engineers.

Looking for the right fit

The reliance on what Puerner calls “document management by email” led Tutor Perini on a search for a solution that would give the company custodianship of their files, the ability to share files in the cloud and ensure that a single source of truth was replicated back to network file shares.

“With the emergence of cloud technologies, we had employees using what were unauthorized services to meet their business needs. We didn’t have a viable enterprise solution to offer, so we consciously didn’t enforce our policy and block the use of these sites. There were many inherent problems with these services, most notably that they didn’t replicate to our network, therefore we didn’t have custodianship of our data. Additionally, the overall cost to the company for what were more than 400 one-off accounts had grown to unreasonable levels.”

“Now that I’m having people using Egnyte I’m receiving more requests from people saying ‘please set me up for the Egnyte app, I don’t need a local file server’—we’re eliminating some of our distributed computing services. That’s going to make our IT operations even more efficient and cost effective in the future.”

Jim Puerner

CIO

The Solution

Puerner was diligent in selecting the right technology partner. He evaluated eight different solutions, including the most well known file sharing solutions. He says the choice to select Egnyte was all about the combined power of the Egnyte Connect Hybrid deployment (Storage Sync) and the ability for users at Tutor Perini headquarters, job sites and mobile workers to collaborate in a secure and efficient way.

“Egnyte was unique compared to the competition. In particular, we liked that we didn’t have to buy a third party product to do the synchronization. Once we saw Egnyte and the synchronization tools it provided we were really excited as that’s a huge differentiator. Also the integration with active directory was a big win for us.”

With the Egnyte Hybrid deployment (Egnyte Storage Sync), job site employees are now able to work on mission-critical documents in real-time and replicate changes back to the cloud without worrying about potential bandwidth restrictions associated with moving large files.

Content is downloaded onto a local instance of Egnyte Storage Sync running at the job site. The software handles the process of downloading and uploading changes to content to the local site and then back to the cloud – creating a seamless, secure, fast and reliable connection for everyone involved with a project.

Egnyte also helped solve several other issues for Tutor Perini including:

Latency issues

AEC firms are faced with the dual-issue of working with large files such as blueprints and dealing with bandwidth constraints. Egnyte Storage Sync helped synchronize data and ensure that mission critical files were available instantly to remote users.

Mobile access and sharing

With users across the globe, the ability for Tutor Perini users to access data is vital. With Egnyte Storage Sync, Tutor Perini now has 24/7 connectivity to business data regardless of project size or location. “Egnyte has become a staple in our job site operations now, from three guys working over mobile broadband, to over 200 people working on a multi-billion dollar project like Hudson Yards in New York.”

Centralized permission control

Along with collaboration by email and sharing via an obsolete FTP server, Tutor Perini had a number of users sharing and storing with unauthorized external sharing accounts. Egnyte storage sync has enabled Folder and sub-folder access and permissions to be precisely enforced across cloud and local storage systems. Puerner says reigning in the unauthorized accounts through Egnyte “saved one business unit alone more than $6,000 a month.”

The Rewards

Deployed in every business unit, from the civil building groups to the specialty contractors group, Egnyte has become the standard for Tutor Perini.

The project teams and operations groups can now access a file sharing and collaboration platform from anywhere, and the IT administrators are now able to monitor and secure sensitive information. In less than a year, Tutor Perini is already managing over 11 TB of data on Egnyte—and that number is growing.

Puerner estimates more than $250,000 per year in savings to the enterprise from the cloud sharing/storage platform alone. Additionally, Egnyte Storage Sync allowed Tutor Perini to avoid the costs of farming data from end user devices for legal discovery. “In the past, if we received a legal hold order, we would have to collect PC’s, hard-drives and look for any other unique data that existed on a device or in an unauthorized cloud service. We don’t have to worry about that manual process anymore. It’s amounted to tens of thousands of dollars saved in legal discovery costs.”