Torcon Accelerates Field Team Access to Large Project Files with Egnyte

“We work three to five times faster in Egnyte than our previous file sharing system. It’s also the most efficient solution for organizing and accessing project files for construction management companies like ours.”

Shawn Winters

Director of Information Technology • Torcon

A typical construction project involves myriad stakeholders sharing and modifying large volumes of documents and files. That’s why Torcon, a construction management services company with offices in New Jersey and Philadelphia, places a premium on tools that facilitate reliable and secure digital collaboration.

“Document control is the foundation of any construction project,” says Lisa Brennan, Document Control Coordinator at Torcon. “Because of the large number of collaborative documents we work with, we needed to optimize our time.”

Challenge: Citrix ShareFile Keeps a Time-Sensitive Team Waiting

Torcon’s incumbent solution, Citrix ShareFile, was initially implemented to manage internal project documentation. However, it didn’t take long for the team to realize that ShareFile wasn’t well-equipped to handle the sheer volume of files and exponential growth in collaboration with project team members outside Torcon. “We have lots and lots of project files, many of which exceed 20 MB in size,” commented Shawn Winters, Torcon’s Director of Information Technology. “When we tried to manage the high volumes of large files with the old system, it was slow and clunky. It was also unreliable, with a lot of unnecessary complexity and downtime.”

These issues led to significant delays in file access. “It often took an hour just to upload a single document to the system,” says Lindsay Martorana, Document Control Manager at Torcon. “That was a huge issue.”

“Sometimes we could sit overnight before our documents finally finished uploading,” Brennan adds. “And even then, a few would be missing, forcing us to start all over again.”

Often, when file uploads were finally complete, the team encountered even more issues. Martorana says: “When I would try to move a large volume of files from one folder to another, the system would tell me it had completed the transfer. But when I checked to confirm, I found as many as a quarter of the files didn’t go through.” In these all-too-often instances, Martorana’s team was forced to go back and transfer the missing files manually – a tedious and highly time-consuming process.

Solution: Reliable Document Management with Egnyte

Torcon set out to find a new file sharing technology partner, assembling a well-rounded vendor selection team consisting of document control personnel, engineering groups, and team members in the field. “All had input into the trial process and the requirements,” says Winters.

The team evaluated Egnyte and several other cloud file-sharing solutions, including Box, Dropbox, and SharePoint. To ensure their findings were precise and reliable, they assessed each vendor in a virtually identical environment, using the same hardware and network.

The advantages of Egnyte were immediately apparent. “Egnyte was easily the best-equipped to meet our specific needs,” says Winters. “We could work three to five times faster than the other solutions. It was also the most conducive to common construction management workflows, like sharing different file types and sizes with distributed teams in the field, so I knew the change would be easy for our employees.”

After making the decision to move to Egnyte, the team found the implementation process quick and painless. Leveraging Egnyte’s professional services team and their simple to use migration tool, they began transferring files from ShareFile into the new system. “It was one of the easiest migrations I’ve ever done in my IT career,” says Winters.

Benefits: Flexibility, Reliability, and Major Time Savings

Since implementing Egnyte, Torcon has greatly improved their ability to manage large volumes of documents with unprecedented efficiency. “We’ve been able to save five to ten hours per employee every month,” says Winters.

Time savings came from multiple sources. For one, their project teams are no longer left hanging while a missing file is found, or a system outage is resolved. Uploading and migrating documents was significantly faster in Egnyte compared to Citrix ShareFile. There’s also virtually no time spent waiting on uploads or document migration tasks.

The team was also impressed with Egnyte’s integration capabilities. So far, they have integrated Egnyte with Microsoft Office 365 and Autodesk BIM 360, with plans to implement more industry-specific integrations in the future.

Egnyte also provides a level of control over project documents never seen before at Torcon. Managing several million files and thousands of sharing permissions used to take a toll on project teams. Now, the system alerts project teams to anomalies, such as a file placed in the wrong folder location, empowering team members to quickly fix issues before they cause downstream complexities and delays. “If an employee says their document is missing, we can use Egnyte’s reporting feature to retrace the employee’s steps and find the document quickly,” says Martorana.

For Torcon, flexibility is critical. “We’ve had a lot of hybrid and remote teams since the pandemic,” says Winters. “As a construction company, most of our staff work from project sites, often in temporary trailers. Fortunately, Egnyte allows for secure file access away from the office and offers the flexibility to work on desktop or mobile devices. These combined capabilities make collaboration and document co-editing faster and easier for the teams.” As Winters says, “Teams don’t generally like change, but in this case, our team embraced it.”