Kaizen is a Japanese term that translates to “continuous improvement” or “change for the better.” Over the course of my career, which spans more than a quarter-century, including the last 20 years at New Orleans-based architecture firm EskewDumezRipple, kaizen has become a guiding principle in how I approach my work.

A big part of my job as director of finance and principal at EskewDumezRipple is to constantly be seeking ways to do things better, which in turn can lead to improvement in the outcomes our project teams deliver to clients, and in the overall bottom-line results our firm produces.

During the past several years, my team and I have applied the principle of kaizen to our firm’s processes, systems, and technology infrastructure. Now we’re reaping the benefits of the investments we’ve made to improve in those areas. Kaizen is indeed producing change for the better.

Founded by Allen Eskew in 1989, EskewDumezRipple is a national architecture studio whose portfolio of work ranges from intimate interiors to large-scale urban planning projects. We’ve grown significantly in recent years with the opening of an office in Washington, DC, and today we’re as profitable as we’ve ever been as a firm, largely because of an organization-wide commitment to excellence — in project outcomes, in the community, and in how we run our business. That commitment has led to numerous awards for the firm at the local, regional and national levels.

Yet as the firm began to really establish a presence nationally during the last decade, I began to see signs that our systems and processes, and the technology that supported them, were holding us back from meeting that standard of excellence. As head of the firm’s finance operation, where I have a unique view into how individual projects and the entire organization are performing, the signs were especially evident. A lack of timely access to fresh data that people could trust led to slower, less-informed decision-making at the project and firm levels. It had become difficult to identify issues early, in month one or two of a project, when course corrections are most critical and impactful.

The financial system on which the firm relied lacked the tools to communicate data and trends to decision-makers in terms they could readily understand. Architects are visual people who best understand numbers when they’re presented graphically. Personally, I was spending valuable time searching for information and generating reports that would have been better spent helping people interpret the numbers, put them in context and make decisions accordingly — and collaboratively. Because ultimately, one of my most important roles as director of finance is to work closely with firm partners to ensure we’re sticking to our design and business values, while also assisting each project manager in tracking their individual project performance targets.

Eventually, firm leadership concluded that as a growing firm, our people, our projects and our clients deserved better than the status quo. It was clear that certain software we were using was reinforcing inefficient processes and systems. In particular, it was obvious to me we needed a more modern, capability-rich finance and project management platform, one built specifically for architecture, engineering and construction firms. On the business development side of the firm, meanwhile, it was evident we also could benefit from a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that would readily integrate with our finance systems.

Kaizen indeed. It’s been more than two years since we shed our outdated software — and all the issues it was causing — in favor of an integrated ERP (enterprise resource planning ) + CRM platform purpose-built by Unanet for AEC firms. By just about every relevant measure, the move has been a rousing success. We’re now meeting our firm’s standard for excellence in key areas of the business where we were lagging prior to switching to Unanet:

Timelier, better informed decision-making, the result of project managers and other leaders having access to fresh, easy-to-digest insight about projects and KPIs thanks to dashboards that take real-time data and present it in highly visual dashboard formats. The dashboards were very easy to create and customize.
We’re much more timely in flagging and resolving project issues. Instead of relying on outdated data to track projects and identify issues, my team and our firm’s PMs have fresh data to track project KPIs and collaboratively address issues early in a project.
PMs are energized and love the ERP system because it gives them a stronger handle on their projects, with self-service tools they can use to see exactly where projects stand. They know exactly what their resource needs are at each point in a project, and those updates are valuable in prompting them to approach clients at just the right time to discuss service adjustments and the like.
My time is spent less on chasing down and organizing information into reports, and more on the type of work that moves the needle for the firm, including collaborating closely with PMs and leadership on strategy and execution.
We’re paying attention to the right data at the right time because we have a single source of trusted data across the organization.
In Unanet, we’ve found a genuine technology partner. They don’t just listen to our feedback, they act on it. And their product roadmap gives us confidence that their ERP + CRM platform will be able to grow with us.

“We build places for people” is the principle that guides us at EskewDumezRipple. By following my own guiding principle of kaizen, I’ve been able to play a role in ensuring that our project teams are empowered to design built environments where people will thrive, and that our firm can continue living up to our own high standards.

About the Author: Jenifer Navard is a principal and director of finance at EskewDumezRipple, a national architecture studio based in New Orleans. She has more than 25 years of experience in business and financial management, including auditing with a top-five public accounting firm, financial accounting for SEC firms, and managing midsized companies in a diverse range of industries.

The Kaizen Factor

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