In this video interview, Suffolk Senior Project Manager Chris Force shares how Trunk Tools simplifies document control and decision-making. From submittals and RFIs to scope development and SOP access, teams get clarity and speed to keep projects moving.
Interview transcript
What daily pain points do you and your team face?
At the end of the day, we’re the guys in the middle between the trade actually doing the work and submitting it to us. We vet it out, we give it to the owner architect for approval. They do their thing, we get it back, we turn around, and we go back to the sub for resubmission. We’re kind of just in the middle, going both ways with documents, hoping that they’re gonna land eventually at an approval, and we can just build and take as much away from the architect and design team as possible. Submittals — every job has thousands of submittals. Depending on your design team, that workflow could be efficient or less efficient. RFIs, same thing. You know, you ask an architect for a color. They might not want to pick the color. The owner has to pick the color. The owner might not want to pick the color — they want the interior designer to pick the color. And it’s project by project. That can get messy depending on how well structured a design team is or an ownership group is. But that’s probably hands down the most chaotic element of that workflow — information in, information back, adjustments, resubmissions, things like that.
What jobsite task used to take way longer than it should?
We would get drawings. I would spend two days scanning drawings to make PDFs, to make my own little folder for the drawings. Bulletins would come out, I would have to manually go through and slip-sheet the new drawings in. Now on Procore, you upload it, it scans it through, you do your little QAQC check on it, and that process goes from days of work to just a couple of hours.
What used to frustrate you the most with all the forms, compliance and daily tasks?
I would say just overall document control — drawing management, getting the first set of drawings, indexing them. My first company, I used to have to scan drawings page by page individually. It was horrible. It would take days to just receive a set of drawings, to then be able to turn around and get them out to the contractors. Right now, we have the tools with Procore — we can just upload drawings in, it does the OCR scan of the title block and drawing number, and you can get a revision uploaded in like an hour or two.
What is a recent example of Trunk Tools having a great impact on your work?
What I like to do is develop that initial scope of work, and then I vet each line that might be specific to a project that doesn’t apply, and basically just shoot the prompt to Trunk Tools. You know, if there’s something in there for traffic coating at all, back-of-house areas — a general line for the waterproofing scope of work — I can ask, “Is there traffic coating on the project?” It says no, there’s sealed concrete, so I know I can delete that out. Now I have a better scope of work. And it’s not just for reduction in scope — you can use it to get more detail and clarity on the scope. If we know that there’s traffic coating but the way the scope of work reads is just “traffic coating in all areas,” I can make that better by prompting Trunk: “Hey, what’s the preferred product for the traffic coating? Is it a three-part or a five-part? Is there an aggregate for texture to be included? Is there a color for it?” I can get all that information, put that in the scope of work, and now the scope of work is bulletproof.
In what ways has Trunk Tools streamlined tasks or cut down time?
It’s the collection of all those small tidbits of time that you get. So, on a normal work week, you have two hours of looking at submittals. That two-hour chunk of your time for the week might be reduced to 30 minutes because you’re utilizing Trunk Tools to kick back submittals that are garbage and allow you to pass through the good ones. You add that on top of getting an RFI from a sub — just before you submit the RFI to the engineer, to make sure we don’t look bad — ask that RFI to Trunk Tools. If it answers, then that’s not even an RFI; you just answer it back to the sub and put it away. So it’s the collection of those small time savings that, extrapolated over a three year project, probably saves days or weeks when you add it all up — and that’s just one person. Apply that to the rest of your team — if you have a 20-person team, you’re saving man-months of time. And that’s time now you’re spending in the field dealing with real problems that aren’t in the digital space — they’re more about built conditions. It’s the collection of everything.
What impact has real-time SOP access had on safety and decisions in the field?
Being able to utilize Trunk to reference the Suffolk SOPs is huge, and I think more for the younger generation — the guys just starting their careers. The ability to have someone that might not know entirely the body or scope that they’re working on, or the procedures generally as a company — the ability to use Trunk to reference those documents that are pretty heavy, like there’s a lot of them and nobody knows all of them — that’s huge. Rather than just pull down the SOP, control-F it, and scroll through to find a word you’re looking for as a reference, the ability to have effectively infinite access to those SOPs relatively seamlessly is huge.
What’s no longer a pain point for you on site?
A superintendent being on site might see something that doesn’t look right. Rather than taking their notepad out or iPad and jotting it down — “When I get back to my desk, I’m gonna look into this, this, and this” — they can take their phone out, TrunkText column B5, and ask, “What’s the out-to-out size of column B5? Is it 24 by 48, or 24 by 36?” You’re looking right at it — you don’t have to write it down. You can verify it immediately, look at it, get a tape out. Okay, that’s good. That’s no longer a homework assignment to take back to the trailer.
How would your team react if Trunk Tools disappeared tomorrow?
Not having that access — knowing that it’s out there and not utilizing it — would be like going back to paper plans, knowing that Procore exists to look at plans online. It would just be a gut punch.