CHA Consulting, Inc. is a full-service engineering consulting and construction management firm serving clients in the government, industry, utility, education, and commercial development fields.
CHA was founded in 1952 and specializes in infrastructure, buildings, power, fire protection services, construction and facilities management, and specialty services. Today the Albany, NY-based firm has 44 offices across the United States and Canada.
CHA needed to rethink the way its end users found information.
Employees experienced difficulties tracking down policies, procedures, and standards across multiple locations, including the firm’s intranet, internal network, and learning management system. To save themselves the trouble of locating what they needed to find internally, some users turned to unreliable peer advice or internet searches, creating standardization issues in their work.
Aligning training schedules with employees’ project schedules was also a challenge.
CHA had already been using Pinnacle Series for more than five years, but it recently became clear it was time to redefine how the firm utilized the platform.
Jessica Chambers, Associate Vice President of Technology Integration for CHA, led the initiative to reintroduce Pinnacle Series to the firm. The restructure began by redefining the e-learning platform as a resource for end users on design technology workflows and software training, and IT policies and procedures.
CHA evaluated other solutions before its Pinnacle Series relaunch, but the platform’s custom content options, along with its library of industry-standard workflows and best practices, won out.
“Pinnacle provided a lot of flexibility to organize information to allow for targeted distribution,” Chambers said. “That official information gets into the hands of our users faster than if they did a Google search.”
CHA has also utilized Pinnacle Series in initiatives it’s working on with Autodesk as part of its Enterprise Business Agreement. Chambers’ team can now expose users to new Autodesk products, such as BIM 360, before implementation, and host live training events or post recorded training sessions as custom content.
The firm also distributes Autodesk Accelerator demonstrations through Pinnacle Series’ work groups instead of users having to access them externally.
“By working closely and collectively with Autodesk and Pinnacle, our content libraries remain current and custom,” Chambers explained. “It helps me achieve my goals for technology integration at CHA.”
Since relaunching Pinnacle Series, Chambers has seen an increase in users exploring Autodesk content and assigning themselves learning paths. CHA has also experienced a reduction in help desk tickets and errors in adopting new technology workflows such as Bluebeam QA/QC when users complete assigned training first.
“Autodesk has helped us identify and develop new solutions to meet our project technology goals, and Pinnacle provides us the platform to distribute and reinforce those solutions,” she said. “The partnership allows us to reduce the total implementation time with minimal resources from my team.”
Pinnacle Series has also provided CHA with a valuable tool to assist with integration and onboarding following mergers and acquisitions.
CHA has acquired six firms over the past two years, including one since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The firm leverages Pinnacle Series to provide training, standards, and documentation to end users to integrate the acquired firm into CHA within a 90-day time frame.
“Onboarding a new organization within 90 days is a very aggressive schedule, but it allows CHA to save a tremendous amount of operating costs,” Chambers explained. “If we didn’t leverage Pinnacle Series through integrations, especially during the pandemic, this target would be nearly impossible.”
Ultimately, redefining how the firm utilizes the Pinnacle Series platform has given CHA and Chambers’ team a new way to accomplish its technology goals and made finding resources faster and easier for end users.
“Leveraging Pinnacle for technology adoption closes technology gaps that we need to deliver our clients’ projects,” she said.
