EllisDon is a leading, employee-owned construction services company delivering projects in every market sector around the world. Having started over 70 years ago, today EllisDon completes over $5 billion worth of construction volume annually, with projects including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, ON, Atlantis The Palm Hotel & Resort in Dubai, UAE, and the Federal Courthouse in Miami, FL.

As Director of Insurance, Geeta Ramdas works in the legal department at EllisDon to manage insurance claims and any litigation matters in which the company may fall suit. We spoke with Geeta and Parita Thakkar, Solution Architect at EllisDon, to learn more about their journey to Litify.

The challenge

It’s critical for EllisDon to be able to collect and track the data related to their insurance claims and litigation matters — What are the causes of slips and falls? What are the causes of the claims that are brought in? When do they happen? What projects are causing them to happen?

“This information is important because we need to know for the project teams when events are likely to occur and how can we prevent that risk. It’s not just about handling the files. It’s about being more proactive, so that we could run these metrics and keep ahead of our risk hazards,” said Geeta Ramdas.

However, EllisDon had several challenges in trying to manage their data, documents, and resources effectively.

Prior to Litify, the team tried to manage the claim and matter data in an ever-growing spreadsheet, which “as you can imagine,” said Geeta, “it was very limiting.” As the spreadsheet became more complex, it was increasingly difficult to use and analyze the data. Geeta sometimes needed to distort it in different ways, and ultimately, a spreadsheet wasn’t the best way to capture all this information.

Finally, after making the best of the spreadsheet for as long as possible, the company hit a breaking point. As EllisDon grew and expanded into different sectors, the types of information and metrics they wanted to track could no longer be formatted that way.

Evaluating Litify

First, it was important for a new solution to streamline communication — Are there tools for communicating across the team? Can they easily share documents? Can they build out reports for each team’s function to align on tasks and results?

Second, it was equally important for the solution to be highly configurable and completely cloud-based. According to Parita, this is where Litify stood out: it was the only software that could be totally personalized to EllisDon’s processes and requirements. The other systems in the market would have forced them to adapt their processes to fit the software, which they didn’t want to do.

As a result, the learning curve has been quite short for the new users who have been working in Litify. The team was able to configure Litify to closely match the process they were already running via spreadsheet, which has helped with onboarding and adoption as no one has to learn a new workflow.

Life with Litify

Reporting is now a breeze. With Litify, the information that was once tracked manually in a spreadsheet is now automatically available. Previously when someone had wanted insight, there would be a delay as Geeta and Parita dug into the information, edited it, searched for and entered anything that was missing, and put it all together into a presentable report. It became tedious to not only create the report, but to constantly recreate it each time while ensuring the information was consistent. Now, if someone asks for a report, the data is shared instantly.

This has helped reduce burnout as the team is saving manual time building reports and has also positively impacted resource management. The team can now easily see how many files are open and closed, their cycle times, and all the related tasks. There’s a lot of versatility that helps them keep on track and enable growth over time, such as increasing their closing ratio year-over-year.

Using Litify’s document management capabilities have also “been a godsend,” said Geeta. “We used to spend so much time creating files, collecting them from stakeholders, organizing them into desktop folders, and then constantly repeating the process each time there was a new one to add or find. Now that they’re in a centralized place, it’s a safe haven. As I’m going through a report and need something from a team member, I can actually go into the file and quickly see it. I’m not hunting for the information or the latest version — I know it will be in the file.”

The results

One of EllisDon’s key successes on Litify is their loss run process, when they have to provide information to various parties to underwrite the cost of insurance. This process went from taking four days to taking less than an hour — nearly a 100% decrease! With all the necessary data and reporting set up in Litify, they’ve drastically reduced the processing time.

“We’ve already had about 12 loss run requests this month, and we got them out in a pinch, which saves us time and helps us get back to other reports and tasks for other stakeholders too,” said Geeta.

Overall, Litify is reducing administrative tasks and workload. In addition to time-savings on reporting, EllisDon has increased the time it takes to find and send documents or do a file review because all the information is now at their fingertips instead of needing to dig through a spreadsheet.

The team has also increased their confidence in the accuracy and completeness of the information they’re sharing. Geeta can now run a report for their board members, and cross-check the information against a broader litigation report to ensure they’re catching everything. It provides checks and balances while helping to identify any missing items faster and validate what they’re reporting.

What’s next

Over the past year, EllisDon has been focused on getting started in Litify and taking time to learn the system. They’re eager to turn their attention to now putting their metrics to work and producing the reports and dashboards that will drive better results for the company. The upcoming year will be about using the data to push for closing and settlements and to look for areas of improvement.