SMPS Webinar
Beyond AI: The People-First Strategy Your AEC Firm Needs to Win Work Smarter
ZOOM
Apr 25, 2024
10:30 AM (PT)
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UJAMAA Construction, Inc. is a Chicago-based general contractor founded in 2002, delivering projects across sectors such as affordable housing, healthcare, and data centers. With dozens of projects per year and thousands of historical contacts, UJAMAA’s marketing and preconstruction teams needed a better way to manage opportunity data, institutional knowledge, and pipeline visibility as the company continued to grow.
Before ProjectMark, UJAMAA relied on a mix of legacy tools, including Unanet, spreadsheets, and individual knowledge held by executives and project leaders.
“We had institutional knowledge spread out amongst project executives, vice presidents, all this information in different places, but no centralized source of truth.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding, Marketing Manager.
The team needed more than another spreadsheet. They were looking for a system that could centralize opportunity and project data, act as a searchable library of past work, support real pipeline visibility, replace clunky systems, and scale with the organization.
Unlike other construction CRMs that felt bloated or overly complex, ProjectMark was intuitive and fast to update.
“It’s very intuitive, not clunky. You can hop in, hop out, make updates without being bogged down.”
— Jamell Foster, Marketing Coordinator.
Generic CRMs lacked the industry context UJAMAA needed, while other construction tools tried to do too much without doing the basics well.
“The construction-focused ones were super clunky, and the non-construction ones didn’t have the features we needed.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
Justin had early exposure to ProjectMark as a beta tester and followed the platform’s evolution closely.
“Talking to the team and seeing where things were going, it was clear this was the place to be.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
Data migration was a critical concern. With projects dating back to 2002 and thousands of contacts, UJAMAA needed a solution that could move historical data accurately and quickly. ProjectMark delivered. Full migration was completed in approximately one to one and a half months. Previous system migrations had taken three to three and a half months. Minimal internal lift was required.
“If you put a dollar value on the time saved, it was almost the cost of the other software solution twice.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
Training and adoption were top priorities from day one.
“Training was extremely important. I feel like you guys did a very good job guiding us through every aspect of the software.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
ProjectMark worked closely with the UJAMAA team to walk through real workflows, ensure data cleanliness before import, make the system usable for both marketing and preconstruction, and support fast team-wide adoption. As a result, ProjectMark became part of weekly preconstruction meetings, not just a marketing tool.
UJAMAA now uses ProjectMark as the definitive pipeline view, eliminating misalignment between business development, marketing, and estimating.
“Now it’s all in one place. There’s no comparing BD versus estimating anymore.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
The team can see where projects are in the lifecycle, understand estimating capacity and workload, and adjust pursuit strategy accordingly.
Analytics and reporting quickly became the most-used feature.
“The reporting is the go-to. We run reports at least twice a week.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
Filtering by project type, size, and sector allows UJAMAA to build stronger proposal packages, quickly surface relevant past projects, and respond faster to new opportunities.
With less time spent managing data, the team can focus on higher-value work.
“The efficiency we gained let me focus more on proposal design, and that’s helped increase our win percentage.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
Over the next 12 to 24 months, UJAMAA sees ProjectMark continuing to serve as a centralized project and knowledge library, a forecasting tool for leadership, and a collaboration hub across departments. They’re also excited about upcoming features like resource planning, which could eliminate the need for additional software entirely.
“Putting everything in one place would save a huge chunk of time and money.”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
When asked what they would tell peers in the construction industry, Justin didn’t hesitate.
“Out of the construction-focused CRM solutions, ProjectMark is the best one. Why use multiple tools when you can have one that actually works?”
— Justin Dwaun Redding.
Want to learn more about how ProjectMark helps firms like UJAMAA win more work and manage opportunities better? Book a demo today.
See for yourself how our modern CRM is revolutionizing the construction industry.
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