Leading Construction Firm Cianbro Uses ShareFile to Design a Simple and Cohesive Team Member Experience

Cianbro, one of the largest, 100% employee-owned construction firms in the country, uses ShareFile® to simplify and empower the end-user experience with a focus on security and flexibility.

Construction firms are pioneers in hybrid work. A large portion of construction work is done remotely away from fixed facilities so the site teams must be able to securely access project files and resources in any location and on any device. Not surprisingly, a secure file sharing and collaboration tool is essential to their daily workflows.

This is especially true for Cianbro. With 4,000 team members working in 42 states across the country, Cianbro provides diverse construction services in a variety of industries, including: infrastructure, Iindustrial/manufacturing, power and energy, commercial building, marine, and electrical engineering services. In addition, their integrated design/engineering, fabrication and coatings, modular, telecommunications, and specialty services allow them to serve as a singular source solution to their clients.

As a fast-growing organization, Cianbro contends with geographic complexity, company acquisitions, and a mix of cloud and on-premises file storage environments, with a layered support and administration model that attempts to empower their end usd-user community. In addition, the steep learning curve that team members faced when traversing between existing and emerging technologies had become cumbersome to access the information they needed to work efficiently.

Cianbro needed to identify a solution that would standardize their file structure and use a single product across all markets – they chose ShareFile.

Key Benefits

Simplifying the team member experience

In the past, Cianbro team members struggled to access project information from different devices, like an iPhone, iPad, and laptop. Data was distributed across multiple platforms within file structures that varied by market. This design was inconvenient and inefficient for the end-user community and became even more complicated when people were working in locations with limited internet access.

The Cianbro IT team, led by Russell Rodrigue, chief information officer (CIO), and Brian LeComte, IT director, selected ShareFile to help achieve two main goals:

1. Standardize the file format across all markets to make it easier to find pertinent information.

2. Empower end users to manage their own content and files with strong security administration protocols.

“Cianbro started research on ShareFile and implemented a pilot project, that yielded great results, leading to the company-wide redesign of our client folder structure. This new direction produced sweeping changes in standardization and consistency across the entire company,” said LeComte.

ShareFile has enabled Cianbro to reengineer key business and system processes as part of their continuous improvement efforts. It also provided a global approach for collaboration across their operations. As the company continues to grow, standardization is important, and ShareFile will play a key role in simplifying collaboration for their team members.

One of the key benefits Cianbro appreciated was the integration on the Windows platform, especially with their native drive mapping and ShareFile for Outlook integration. Because the integration was familiar to the end user, the company did not need or require user educational sessions. Change is not easy and can create anxiety with the end users. In Cianbro’s case, the team quickly bought in because of the familiarity.

With the Microsoft Office 365 integration, the ShareFile app is mounted as a drive letter in Windows. This simplifies the user’s access to content and applications and provides a cohesive user experience across mobile and desktop devices.

Moving to the ShareFile solution has enhanced the way Cianbro team members share data, improved collaboration efficiencies, and has enabled the company to reduce its infrastructure costs, specifically for file storage. These efforts resulted in Cianbro significantly decreasing their IT operating expenses. It also increased their savings on new storage infrastructure purchases annually.

Empowering hybrid work in a secure and flexible way

The ShareFile mobile app is one of the features that stood out for Cianbro. As with most construction companies, many of Cianbro’s team members work in the field. They often deal with connectivity issues and a high influx of subcontractors who work on projects for short periods. At times, team members and contractors may even have to work in locations with no internet connection.

Offline, mobile capabilities enable workers to access and manage files in a secure way, even if they’re working on top of a mountain. “I love the fact that the product uses an SSL-like software VPN, and we didn’t need a VPN client to access the mapped drive,” commented Rodrigue. Another major benefit for Cianbro is users’ ability to maximize the tool’s security features, especially the auditing and reporting feature accessible to power users. “The self-service model allows power users to run a report on folder changes over a week or security user changes over the last month, and they can often solve issues themselves,” LeComte said.

Lastly, internal and external collaboration has improved with ShareFile, as the organization can share information quickly and securely among clients and subcontractors, as well as operations, finance and IT groups. And with the Outlook plug-in, attachments are automatically sent as a ShareFile connection to avoid burdening the company’s email servers. “These features were valuable in the sense that it changed the way the company collaborates,” Rodrigue added.

"ShareFile has become a critical service offering throughout the company, enabling improved file sharing performance, simplified administration, and a satisfying user experience."

Russ Rodrigue

Chief Information Officer, Cianbro

Conclusion

Looking ahead, Cianbro will continue to leverage ShareFile to facilitate their cloud migration and further consolidate their disparate file-sharing tools. In conjunction with a company-wide rollout of Microsoft Teams, they will look to use ShareFile and its native integrations to achieve standardization across all products and platforms.