How a Multi-Family GC in the Southeast cut scheduling costs by 71% and brought its schedule in-house

The setup was common to what we see in the industry. The contractor's schedules lived in Primavera P6, maintained by an outside consultant, while the team worked in Procore day to day. It created a gap that required constant manual reconciliation. The structure of the external schedule made the day-to-day harder:

• The schedule fought real-world updates. Built as a contract deliverable, the P6 schedule carried dense logic ties and constraints that did not always match how the work actually sequenced in the field. Recording what had truly happened on site often meant working around the logic rather than with it.
• Updates were slow. A single schedule update with the consultant could take an hour or more.
• Progress lagged reality. Because updates flowed through an external system, the schedule did not always reflect what the field knew, which led to misleading delay and progress reports.
• They were maintaining two versions of the plan. Actualized dates were re-keyed between systems to keep the owner-facing P6 current.

The cost was the headline, but the friction was the real story: six figures per year for a schedule that couldn’t keep up with the work being done in the field.

The contractor didn’t set out to replace anyone. The first plan was modest: keep the consultant building master schedules in P6 and use Outbuild for field updates, giving the internal team more visibility and getting superintendents engaged with the plan. Four things carried the decision:

• The Procore integration. Linking schedule activities to RFIs and submittals connected the schedule to work the team already managed. It was the capability that won operations leadership over early.
• The field could actually use it. Superintendents update progress straight from the jobsite on an iPad, which made updates faster and more accurate.
• It put the team in control of the plan. For the first time, the team could see and correct schedule logic and break work down to the level of detail supers manage day to day.
• The cadence changed. Long, infrequent update cycles gave way to quick weekly updates, a rhythm the superintendents took to.

The contractor valued its consultant’s expertise for claims and litigation support and had no interest in giving that up. Outbuild started as a tool that augmented the consultant’s work. As the internal team grew more confident, the consultant’s role shifted toward higher-stakes claims and advisory work while day-to-day scheduling moved in-house.

Well before any formal commitment, this contractor began holding internal schedule meetings and updating Outbuild by hand, running it alongside the existing setup rather than betting everything on it. That phased approach is a big part of why it stuck: by the time Outbuild was doing the real work, it had already proved to be a valuable tool. The team ran Outbuild in parallel with the existing process for months. Internal schedule meetings and manual updates at first; and within weeks the team was sold, and the long external update cycles wound down. Superintendents were won over by the faster, more frequent cadence. At the end of their first year, they opted to renew with Outbuild for a three year term.

Who got trained. The rollout reached the whole team, not just the schedulers. Project managers, senior and assistant project managers, superintendents, and field engineers, up through project executives, corporate trainers, and operations leadership — each of these received training on how to use Outbuild for their role.

Moving the schedules over. Existing schedules were moved into Outbuild by importing the P6 export files directly, which rebuilt each schedule in Outbuild. Schedules already loaded into Procore could be pulled in through the Outbuild-Procore connection instead and they started using Templates in Outbuild so they can quickly start new projects. 

What made it work. Outbuild's onboarding did the heavy lifting: a structured, tailored training plan across the master schedule, Lookahead Planning, and the Weekly Work Plan and analytics; dedicated iPad training for superintendents and flexible one-on-one refreshers; a dedicated Customer Success Manager for hands-on setup, integration, and import support; fast escalation to product specialists when P6 exports got tricky; and live chat, a knowledge base, and a community to get unstuck.

They started seeing the benefits of having their scheduling in-house within the first few months. Now, the contractor runs its own schedules. The plan lives inside the company, the team updates it directly against real field progress, and owner reporting comes straight out of the same live schedule instead of a separately maintained P6. Because the schedule finally matches how the team builds, updating it has stopped being a chore, and more of the team engages with it.

The meeting, then and now. When an outside party owned the plan, engagement was low and the schedule on screen was dense and hard to follow. Today the meeting belongs to the team. Project managers and superintendents run it and own the plan. Outbuild's master schedule and Lookahead Planning are on the screen, and the team works live: correcting logic on the spot, checking how a slip affects the critical path, flagging subcontractors, and logging Schedule Impact Requests (SIRs) to document and justify delays so the lookahead and the schedule stay in step. Leadership and operational reviews run on objective data instead of anecdotes.

What they run in Outbuild. The team now handles field scheduling entirely in Outbuild and meets weekly instead of monthly to get ahead of problems. Day to day they lean on:

• Lookahead Planning for near-term work, with Roadblocks to call out anything needed to start or finish a task on time.
• Schedule Impact Requests to document delays that have already hit and adjust the schedule accordingly.
• The submittal workflow with Procore. They link submittals to schedule activities, track status, and push required on-site dates from Outbuild back into Procore.
• The Executive Dashboard so leadership can gain a clear view of project health, risk, adoption, and performance across the company.
• Progress updates from the field, with superintendents updating progress on the iPad app, even offline.

What they can see now that they couldn't before. The biggest shift is visibility. The team can finally see the constraints and logic ties that had been hard to spot in the old setup. They can watch how a delay ripples through the critical path and act on it immediately. Leadership reviews real numbers: weekly work plan completion, commitment reliability, roadblocks, lookahead engagement, and trade accountability. The timeline's filters and columns (including an expected-progress column) make the state of a job legible at a glance. They can even see who else is in the schedule and what they are changing, in real time.

Two examples of the difference:

• On one project, the original P6 ran a six-day work week while a cloned version used for pay applications needed to be five days. A senior project manager caught the discrepancy and corrected it in Outbuild, so the project's end date came out right instead of drifting off unnoticed.
• On another, a concrete deck activity was marked complete while its submittal was still open. Outbuild flagged it, and the team went straight to the submittal in Procore to close the gap before it became a field problem.

Because the schedule matches how the team builds, superintendents meet weekly instead of monthly, catching issues while there is still time to correct them.

Financial

• Scheduling cost cut by 71%
• Payback was effectively immediate; the annual Outbuild cost is a fraction of the prior scheduling spend.

Productivity

• Day-to-day scheduling now runs in-house, with no re-keying between systems.
• Superintendents meet weekly instead of monthly: more frequent, but shorter and self-run, versus the hour-plus external update cycles.

Operational

• One live schedule feeds both the field and owner reporting; the reconcile-by-hand gap between systems is gone.
• Leadership and operational reviews run on objective data instead of anecdotal updates.
• Delays are caught and acted on in real time. Critical-path impact is visible immediately, so subs get notified and issues get resolved in the moment.

Adoption

• Ownership of the plan shifted to project managers and superintendents, and more of the team engages with the schedule now that it matches how they build.