Rogers, Lovelock & Fritz Streamlines Operations to Deliver Great Designs

Listening Intently to Clients is the Best Strategy

Rogers, Lovelock & Fritz—better known as RLF—is a fully integrated team of architects, engineers, interior designers and planners that share a dedication to creating exceptional designs and providing outstanding service in every project.

RLF manages projects in the federal, cultural and education sectors and is recognized as a market leader in healthcare. Its projects in this sector make up more than 80% of its current portfolio and can be seen everywhere from the United States to Japan and Italy.

“We are heavily focused in the healthcare market, so as you can imagine, after the pandemic hit, there were several upgrades that needed to be made to medical facilities, including the ones that are currently in the design-build stage,” explains Kimberly Piety, Specifications Manager at Rogers, Lovelock & Fritz.

The firm puts the needs of doctors, nurses and patients at the heart of its designs to deliver better experiences for everyone. And it makes time to listen to caregivers and family members so it can address the issues most important to them, too.

This was more crucial than ever in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic when—after learning about the detrimental effect of isolation on patients—RLF began to create new innovative solutions to bring humanity back into healthcare spaces.

The company had a simple goal: to make sure that in the case of any future pandemic, the caring and nurturing human contact that is critical to healing would be protected.

Delivering the Right Tools to Deliver Excellence

Creating innovative facility designs doesn’t just rely on the expertise and dedication of RLF’s team. The firm also needs the right tools to deliver excellence. As Specifications Manager, part of Kimberly’s job is to create processes for the firm’s specification writing. To do this, she uses Deltek Specpoint—home of AIA MasterSpec®, specification software that helps deliver better-built projects.

“I'm just really excited about Deltek Specpoint,” Kimberly tells us. “The product brings in attributes that makes the specifiers in our firm ecstatic.”

Specpoint’s product library also gives the team access to the building products it’s required to use by some of its healthcare clients. And it’s making processes quicker and easier, as Kimberly explains: “We now have that visual ability—and that automated ability—to bring in the product cards or the proper assemblies to make that process more efficient and less labor intensive for our specifiers.”

Efficiency and Productivity for Rlf’s Entire Team

Transitioning to a new system can always be met with some pushback, but RLF’s team was won over by the practical capabilities and less labor-intensive way of working provided by Specpoint. “The transition for me was smooth and exciting,” says Kimberly. “And once I was able to share a presentation with the firm and show them the actual platform, they started embracing it, too.”

The design team at RLF was used to MasterSpec Word documents, but the fact users can go into Deltek Specpoint and select what they need means they have welcomed this new way of working. “They want to write accurate specs rather than reusing specs from old projects full of possible errors,” explains Kimberly.

“Let's be honest, the authors save specs for last. So it's important that they can go in and be efficient and spend less time writing specs. Deltek has really given us the opportunity to do that.”

Better Collaboration, Discrepancy Reporting and Error Detection

Kimberly and her team are already seeing huge benefits with Specpoint. ”I love being able to start building our office masters for our clients,” she says. “I like the team collaboration aspect. We have our admin, our authors and our reviewers able to access the software, which is especially important during our QC process. And the discrepancy reporting—that's huge for me.”

And with a new construction administration (CA) component for Deltek Specpoint expected in the near future, there are only more benefits to come. This particular feature will help automate the process for catching submittal errors and bring in best practices which are vital for RLF’s clients with specific requirements.

Kimberly tells us what this will mean for the firm in practice: “When we run a submittal register report, it will be accurate and error free. Because, as we create the specs, each section is automatically updated as changes are made. In essence, that's going to flow through into CA and lessen our error rate.”

A Proven Technology Platform to Delivery Consistent Quality for The Future

As well as increasing performance, Deltek Specpoint will also help RLF continue to deliver consistent quality in the future. “The accuracy is there, and the efficiency checks the boxes for our quality control needs,” says Kimberly. “We do have clients with specific quality control requirements, and I do foresee Deltek implementing some of these requirements in the updates to come in Specpoint.”

“Quality control validation reports that show discrepancies are also coming to Specpoint,” Kimberly adds. “I’m really excited about that because it’s really going to take away a lot of the quality control labor that we are now having to do manually.”

With ongoing support from Deltek, RLF has a partner that will help the team meet its evolving needs and achieve its goals. “We work very closely with the Specification Solutions Customer Advisory Council. We meet and we give the developers opinions and advice on the things that we as the customer need,” Kimberly explains. “When we speak with the senior developers at Deltek, they’re very responsive to us and any troubleshooting that we may need help with.”

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