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        • 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 and Dominick Armato
          Shelley is the founder and CEO of MySmartPlans. Her husband, Dominick, is a co-founder and president. They suffered firsthand from the effects of the 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 technology-enabled service  and platform 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 19 years and has a revenue aggregate of over billions of dollars. Build on time, on schedule, and with audited pre-discovery files that are proven to prevent litigation!

          We have the most advanced construction technology for building world-class facilities in the world. Use this for our identity!

          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 Track Record:

      17 years in business

      100% of our 2,130 projects were protected from litigation

      $23 billion in project value completed

      99.9% of projects were completed on time & on budget

      18% project on-site savings

      The MySmartPlans Manifesto

      MySmartPlans Track Record:

      17 years in business

      100% of our 2,130 projects were protected from litigation

      $23 billion in project value completed

      99.9% of projects were completed on time & on budget

      18% project on-site savings

      Learn More

      The MySmartPlans Manifesto

    • AAA Construction Conference

      Four States Airport Conference 2023

        • Customer Testimonials

          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

          Construction Attorney
        • Case Studies

    • SMART Airports & Regions 2024

      Wednesday 10 – Friday 12 July 2024 | Colorado Convention Center

      2024 Health Care Facilities Innovation Conference

      Sunday 21 – Wednesday 24 July 2024 | Anaheim, CA

      4 States Airport Conference

      Wednesday 21 – Friday 23 August 2024 | Kansas City Marriott Downtown

        • Get Started With MySmartPlans Now

          Ask a question (we respond within the hour), book a demo, or connect!

          Get Started With MySmartPlans Now

          Or - Ask a question (we respond within the hour) or connect!

Paper Costs Eliminated

Businesses use paper for many reasons, and that is no different in construction projects. There is a new way to do business that eliminates the demand for paper. This new method is called electronic data interchange, or EDI. EDI allows businesses to communicate with each other electronically, without the use of paper. EDI reduces costs by eliminating the need for paper, improves efficiency by reducing time to exchange information by paper, and increases accuracy by eliminating errors in communication.

A cost that can be easily reduced or eliminated is paper and printing expenses. We know this because we built our company PrintingKC on reprographics! We have a thriving printing company that has been in business for over 15 years. We have perfected paper processes, the paper industry, and supply for construction projects.

Paper Prices

There is a price associated with paper, printing, filing, organization space, printers, workers, recycling paper, and backup papers all add up to a sizable additional cost

Consider the following statistics: (Source: Paperless Project)

  • On average a document is copied 9 to 11 times – if you multiply 11 copies times millions of pages generated daily, the paper piles really stack up.
  • Paper document filing costs average $20 per copy –filing costs increase in tandem with growing piles of paper – that adds up to major costs very quickly
  • Large organizations lose a document every twelve seconds, costing companies between $350 to $700 a piece to recover.

Once the papers are collected, organized, and stored; who is managing those documents, and how often are they accessed? The majority of documents sit in filing cabinets collecting dust until they are eventually shredded or pulped – at which time, another tree becomes a casualty in a paper-driven office.

Lost Documentation

How many times have you lost your cell phone in your house? That is one simple item that we use every day but we often misplace it. Imagine millions of documents, managed by numerous employees: the amount of misplaced misfiled, and incorrectly copied documents is outlandish. Every document that is lost puts you at risk for litigation, extra costs to retrieve that document, and a loss of customers.

It is important to keep track of documents for safety and compliance reasons, but there is a better way. You can have instant access to any project document from anywhere in the world at any time!

Redundancy

Documents are copied and stored in numerous locations or lost and re-copied. So there is a large amount of redundancy in paper trails. There is no reason to have one paper document copied 9-11 times, yet that is the average. This level of repetition and redundancy eventually creates more work to sift through documents, when looking for something important. Paper documents often get put in the wrong place and are difficult to find. This increases retrieval time and can often lead to frustration.

Time Spent Searching for Documents

How much time is wasted looking for a paper document? It is difficult to estimate the number of billable hours wasted annually searching for documents. It is easy to understand how this can become a huge time-consuming operational expense, as you can see from these labor statistics below.

Consider the following: (Source: Price Waterhouse Coopers Study)

  • The average office worker spends 8 hours a week managing paper documents.
  • The cost of finding a single document is $122
  • The number of lost paper documents per year for a mid-sized business is 750
  • 7.5% of all printed documents are lost. (Source: National Association of Office and Industrial Property Management)

The biggest operational expense is people searching for documents and lost documentation. If a company can’t find its documents, it can’t do business. Time and money are wasted and it could have been prevented. These combined factors prove that the cost of paper far outweighs the benefits you would expect.

PrintingKC scan paper processes project photo

Eliminating Paper

Technology is the solution to eliminating paper. Technology stores all complete information in an organized manner, that is easily searchable; no matter what employee is needing access to it. Different departments are allowed to access the same documentation from any device. Technology includes more space for storage, an organization that is easy for anyone to understand, linking of documents that are connected, simple updates of information, and finding documentation in minutes, as opposed to hours!

Technology as a Replacement

Technology can eliminate paper while increasing project communication. A construction management software that houses all project documentation in one easy-to-use software as a service. Subcontractors, general contractors, and owners have access to the latest drawings and data, ensuring a complete digital twin during the build and 50-plus years into the project’s future.

We saw a print problem in the construction industry and created our construction management software-as-a-service MySmartPlans.

MySmartPlans creates project communication, transparency, complete data, auditing, and a customized construction solution. We strive to eliminate paper costs completely! We have proven we can increase productivity for tens of thousands of projects with our software, and this is just one example of a customer benefit to using MySmartPlans. The irony is not lost on us that we started out, and still run, a successful reprographics printing company. But we have evolved to reduce paper, as it is not the most effective, real-time way to communicate.

Recommendation

We will continue to offer our reprographics printing services, but we recommend that you begin slowly implementing paperless projects with MySmartPlans. There are no hidden costs associated with construction document management because construction projects already need a construction management system in place to track RFIs, submittals, meeting minutes, addenda, etc. Therefore, using MySmartPlans as the construction management technology creates your paperless documentation included in the price!

The most significant benefits of going paperless are:

  • Reduced search time for paper documents
  • Elimination of lost documents
  • Reduce copying and scanning costs
  • Encourage employees as opposed to hindering their work
  • Improved project coordination
  • Eliminating construction litigation with full searchable data!

Additional Benefits of Using MySmartPlans

MySmartPlans includes a team of Digital Librarian/ Project Information Managers that organize and audit every document for you. Ensuring that the data we put into your project information system is correct, updated, linked, organized, centrally located, complete, and available in real-time. Not only do we create a transparent construction project with communication, but we reduce time, cost, and waste by eliminating the need for paper.

Learn More

Learn more about how you can begin slowly implementing a paperless office with MySmartPlans. We would be happy to discuss the benefits of paperless construction document management with you in greater detail.

Contact us!

Shelley Armato, CEO shelley@mysmartplans.com 816-479-0261

Dominick Armato, President dominick.armato@mysmartplans.com 816-479-0259                    

Mike Beyer, Printing mike.beyer@mysmartplans.com 816-221-7881

 

 

Works cited:

Price Waterhouse Coopers Study

National Association of Office and Industrial Property Management

The Paperless Office – Its Time has Come. The Paperless Project.

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