Business Of The Year Kansas Women-Owned Businesses 2017
Rule Breaker Award New York Rule Breakers 2015
25 Outstanding Businesses Under 25 Employees Twenty Five – 25 2012
CEO of the Year City Union Mission 2009
Women Who Mean Business Biz Journal 2009
Vision of Excellence National Association of Women in Construction – 2009
About MySmartPlans
Shelley Armato and Dominick Armato
Shelley is the Founder and CEO of MySmartPlans. Her husband Dominick is Co-founder and President. They suffered firsthand the effects of chaos in the industry. Dominick, a 45-year contractor, was wildly successful and one project with insufficient data caused them to shut the doors on that company. But they rose again and reinvented the construction industry by streamlining the business.
MySmartPlans is a software-as-a-service solution with an experienced digital information librarian as part of your team, who creates transparency, organization, and efficiency in construction projects. They are the driving force behind Data Governance, which mitigates the risk associated with insufficient document oversight. MySmartPlans has been improving the industry for 16 years and has a revenue aggregate of over 19 billion dollars. Build on time, on schedule, and with audited as pre-discovery files that are proven to prevent litigation!
Honors & Awards
Business Of The Year Kansas Women-Owned Businesses 2017
Rule Breaker Award New York Rule Breakers 2015
25 Outstanding Businesses Under 25 Employees Twenty Five – 25 2012
CEO of the Year City Union Mission 2009
Women Who Mean Business Biz Journal 2009
Vision of Excellence National Association of Women in Construction – 2009
About MySmartPlans
Shelley Armato and Dominick Armato
Shelley is the Founder and CEO of MySmartPlans. Her husband Dominick is Co-founder and President. They suffered firsthand the effects of chaos in the industry. Dominick, a 45-year contractor, was wildly successful and one project with insufficient data caused them to shut the doors on that company. But they rose again and reinvented the construction industry by streamlining the business.
MySmartPlans is a software-as-a-service solution with an experienced digital information librarian as part of your team, who creates transparency, organization, and efficiency in construction projects. They are the driving force behind Data Governance, which mitigates the risk associated with insufficient document oversight. MySmartPlans has been improving the industry for 16 years and has a revenue aggregate of over 19 billion dollars. Build on time, on schedule, and with audited as pre-discovery files that are proven to prevent litigation!
MySmartPlans has saved thousands of hours in costly rework and has allowed us to collaborate with our team members in the most efficient manner possible.
Craig Childers
MySmartPlans helped us focus on the project rather than collection of data & documentation. The MSP team knows what needs to be included and does a great job gathering, managing and ensure timey responses on required information. It also gives us a centralized location for project documentation, giving us comfort of knowing where to find information in the future. MSP allows us to work smarter and be smarter.
Northwest Florida Beaches
Technology has made promises over the years that someday we would all be paperless and all electronic, but there has been a missing link in sharing information between groups. MySmartPlans is the medium that fills that gap.
Rick Thompson
As a construction litigator…to be able to point and click and find the documentation that relates to that specific change order, whatever, in seconds as opposed to days or weeks manually would be a game changer.
Bill Quatman
What you offer was a refreshing change because it can take weeks, sometimes months, to get documents from various parties at a construction project. And having an integrated centralized service I think is a great idea…
Wayne Kalayjian
It’s such an efficient way to share information. The real value is in accelerating our decision making. MySmartPlans was the one place everyone could go to get real time information.
Stop Construction Litigation! This live webinar will discuss building with clean data creates accuracy that eliminates construction litigation on 99.8% of projects. Join us on March 30th at 10:30 am CST. Defend your Claim and Protect your Profits. Passcode: PCTuS4
Booth #429 This is where CFOs and top professionals in construction come together with CPA firms and providers of accounting software, banking, and financial services, HR management and benefits administration, insurance, management consulting, and surety and bonding to share the latest industry products, services, and tools. Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center
Airport Leadership Forum, in Dallas Texas, will bring together airport leaders and key aviation stakeholders to exchange best practices and innovative case studies, create long-lasting relationships, and provide focused business-airport collaboration for practical progress in aviation development. Participants will include senior airport representatives, airport associations, private sector companies, and NGOs. Through roundtable discussions, question and answer (Q&A) sessions, case study presentations, and site visits they will share experiences, and best practices and debate common challenges.
From hiring owner’s reps to initiating construction management at risk, airports and other facility owners have put various models in place to create accountability during their construction projects. According to a report by Mckinsey & Co., cost and schedule overruns are the norm in the overall construction sector. It is estimated that overruns in capital expenditures for infrastructure projects average above 130% of the original quoted capital, and schedules run 20 months beyond original agreements. As a result, there’s an overwhelming lack of transparency and trust.
Shelley Armato is president and owner of Marathon Digital Services, the parent company of a business that designs software to provide airports and other facility owners complete control over their documentation during construction projects. Its software application, MySmartPlans, focuses on creating accountability, transparency and efficiency.
What’s going on?
One problem is data silos. It’s not unusual for mega construction projects to involve more than 500 vendors. But even smaller projects have thousands of details and data points to manage. Too often, data from owners, architects, and contractors are isolated or stored in a way that makes it inaccessible. This creates a lack of transparency, slows down projects, limits communication/collaboration, and decreases the quality and credibility of data.
McKinsey ranks construction as one of the least digitized industries. Knowing that the world will need to spend an estimated $57 trillion on infrastructure by 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth, how will legacy systems for managing construction documentation keep up?
Hiding Mistakes & Miscalculations
Unfortunately, the issue isn’t just the amount of data. It’s about the manipulation of data happening behind the scenes. We’ve seen projects that have:
missing documentation for schedules and inspection logs;
meeting minutes and schedules that have been changed without approval; and
closed documents that were opened and amended.
Contractors regularly change specs behind an owner’s back or without providing essential information. On one project we analyzed, the contractor told the owner it would have to switch to a particular type of glass that was 70 times more expensive than what was originally agreed upon because of a “shortage of glaziers.” There was no shortage, just a contractor who was setting precedents for litigation on the back of this project.
In addition, mistakes are hidden and crucial conversations are avoided. We worked with one government contact that miscalculated the cost of an air-conditioning system. Rather than admit the mistake, the engineer changed the contract without telling the client—upping the bill by $12 million.
Such misdeeds and misinformation create speculation and chaos, not trust. When you don’t have complete and accurate information on a project, it’s impossible to hold anyone accountable. That doesn’t just mess with your budget and schedule; it can affect the safety and integrity of a project.
Dismantling Data Silos
What is needed to help owners, operators, and stakeholders mitigate risks, lower costs and prevent schedule overruns? We must solve the data problem.
While just about every large project claims to be “data-driven” and focused on leveraging new technologies like artificial intelligence, building information modeling, and machine learning, evidence suggests that few are backing up this talk with real action. In fact, it can be argued that data is often more of a liability than an asset.
One step toward solving the problem is for the key players involved in a construction project to have critical conversations. Owners need to ask better questions, require documentation, audit agendas and meeting minutes, and hold contractors accountable.
Contractors need to own up to their mistakes and proactively address schedule and budget miscalculations so everyone can solve issues together, out in the open.
Finally, owners, operators, and stakeholders must mitigate the risks associated with insufficient document oversight. Imagine moving construction into the current digital age with information governance where every detail and communication about a project is recorded and stored for instant retrieval.
If our country’s crumbling roadways, collapsing bridges, and aging airports are any sign of the state of the current construction industry, it’s imperative that we put a solid plan in place to create transparency and accountability before the $3 trillion in infrastructure improvements supported by the White House begin.
