EllisDon is a global construction services company with 15 offices and 4,000+ global employees. They complete over $6 billion of construction per year. Recently, they chose to improve their contract risk review process.

Their previous process involved:

Manual, time-consuming processes. They spent hours performing keyword searches and conducting cross-references between documents, trying to find risks. Their legal and admin teams also spent substantial time and effort generating comment and disposition tables.

Disjointed collaboration. They used multiple tools to review documents and track risks, which separated their teams from each other. This created limited collaboration between their project managers, estimators, and legal teams during pre-construction.

$20 million CAD per year in missed risks. Despite investing significant time and effort into contract risk reviews, they still left risks in their contracts. These risks and unfavorable terms led to disputes and an average of $20 million CAD in losses every year. These largely resulted from avoidable claims that could be prevented with better risk identification and management processes.

EllisDon solved these problems by implementing Provision — the first end-to-end contract risk management tool built for contractors and subcontractors.

With Provision, they have…

“Reconciling supplementary conditions against base documents saves me six hours per contract,” said Ryan Di Lella, Manager of Contract Risk at EllisDon.

From there, Provision automatically creates redline comparisons between document versions, reconciles comments, and highlights changes.

Provision also gives EllisDon a chat function to quickly and easily retrieve information from documents, while providing hyperlinked definitions and clause filtering to explain contract language and manage specific clauses.

As Alexandra Ciccarelli, a Project Manager at EllisDon explains, “Provision made finding critical information much faster, preventing missed deadlines.”

“There was one big risk that Provision found that we actually didn’t understand or appreciate,” said Ashley Maxwell, a Project Manager at EllisDon. “I was able to immediately point to it and go, ‘Hey, here’s what it is, where it is in the document.’”

EllisDon uses Provision to find standard contract risks, and to create their own custom risk checklists tailored to specific projects. This allows EllisDon to better understand their contracts, find the risks they care about the most, and address them proactively — before they become costly disputes.

“If people knew their contracts better, we could eliminate 15–50% of disputes annually,” explained Christian Wiechmann, of Commercial Services and Project Controls at EllisDon.

In Total: $1.8 million CAD per year in project savings from using Provision.

As Ryan Di Lella at EllisDon summarizes:

“Provision is indispensable for streamlining contract review, enhancing team collaboration, and proactively managing project risks. It’s a must-have for any firm aiming to reduce disputes and improve operational efficiency.”