Successes - Cotleur and Hearing
Innovative Environmental Design Company Keeps Competitive Edge with Westbrook Fortis

Cotleur and Hearing produce innovative and highly-visible environmental design work in the pressure-cooked environment of land use, wetland protection and open space remediation in South Florida. With their core values based on innovation and quality of their designs, Cotleur and Hearing has implemented the Fortis integrated document management system to keep them at the leading edge of their profession. The Fortis system enables the firm to transmit their work to clients electronically and to archive and retrieve their firm's knowledge base rapidly and securely.

Background
Cotleur and Hearing, a full service landscape design and consulting firm in South Florida, pursues a three-fold business focus encompassing landscape architecture, land planning and environmental consulting. As a sixteen-year old firm with hundreds of successful and award-winning design and planning projects behind them, Cotleur and Hearing is always looking to improve their methodologies and business approach and to innovate.

With increasing momentum from their municipal customers moving towards receipt of electronic project transmittals, the firm's founders, Robert Cotleur and Donaldson Hearing, recently decided to make their project management and transmittal environment paperless. “We expect most of our government clients to require electronic project submittals at some time in the future. In fact some are requiring an electronic submittal now. To get ahead of the curve, we decided to go to complete electronic project submittals now, both for a competitive advantage in our field and to improve our project effectiveness. Furthermore, we were starting to run out of space to store our closed project files," said Robert Cotleur.

Challenge
The design services business, a highly competitive market, presents the constant challenge of assigning appropriate value to the quality and experience of the services provided. To that end, handover of project documentation, the paper transmittal, has always been the concrete measurement to the client of the work of the designer.

Enterprise document management (EDM) provides the opportunity for leading edge architecture/engineering (A/E) organizations to introduce a competitive advantage in the quality and usability of this project handover; at the same time giving the client a more usable set of “as designed” documentation but also changing the way the client and designer interact, review projects, and communicate.

On the designer side, the challenge is to move all of the organization’s designers to an electronic medium. In the case of Cotleur and Hearing, the key to that has been the access to old project information. The powerful ability to search closed project files for ideas that can be re-used has been a concrete benefit that the designers can see.

On the client side, the ability to make project information transparently available is a compelling benefit for the many public sector customers that Cotleur and Hearing have. 

Solution
Cotleur and Hearing defined their requirements for electronic project documentation in 2006. Following the recommendation of a staff member, who had worked successfully with the Fortis system at another company, Cotleur and Hearing evaluated a solution presented to them by MTS, a document management organization who implement Fortis in the Southeastern USA. Finding that Fortis was a close match for their requirements, they selected and installed a complete Fortis document management system in October of 2006. 

With an eye to ensure the effective implementation of the solution, they created a new position of administrator of the system and that individual takes overall responsibility for centrally ensuring that all documents for each complete project are converted to electronic format. Cotleur and Hearing now provides a complete electronic project submittal for each design and consulting project. A typical submittal is 10-20 pages in length. The submittal will normally include several E-sized plan drawings or sitescapes, color graphics, permits and descriptive text. The A-sized documents are typically scanned and indexed while the E-drawings are rendered as PDFs by the AutoCAD design system or are scanned by an oversize scanner that is also a component of the solution.

Hard copies are discarded in favor of the electronic archive on project completion. This is beginning an evolution toward a completely electronic record of each of the completed Cotleur and Hearing projects.

As time permits, depending on the current project load for the system administrator, the sixteen-year archive of the firm’s completed projects, is systematically being added to the Fortis system, reducing the physical storage of old project information, and increasing the searchability and access to the firm’s intellectual property base. Cotleur and Hearing’s corporate policy is lifetime retention of all old project information.

The repository currently contains some 5,000 project documents, with close to 1,000 being added monthly. “The system was able to be implemented quite rapidly. It is extremely easy to use and there have been absolutely no problems in using the Fortis solution with our design business and documents,” says Fortis administrator Suzanne Hearing.

Results
For Cotleur and Hearing, the most powerful business benefit comes from the search capability of Fortis. Now instead of spending time and effort identifying and searching for physical files in paper archives, staff can locate and view the needed document immediately.

With the Fortis solution in project use for seven months, the benefits already realized by Cotleur and Hearing include:

Moving project documentation to the Fortis document management repository has been a complete win for Cotleur and Hearing and their clients.

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