Customer Stories: Reliance realizes the benefits of Template optimization

Reliance Environmental Inc. (Reliance) is a full service environmental consulting firm specializing in Brownfield redevelopment, due diligence, site characterizations, storage tank removals, and remediation projects. Reliance is headquartered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the company’s service area includes Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Ohio, and Florida.

As a small-to-midsize firm with approximately 15 employees, maximizing the efficiency of Reliance’s time and resources is extremely important, especially when preparing ASTM Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) Reports. ESAs are often short turnaround, low-budget projects with specific compliance requirements that can carry a high liability. 

The CHALLENGE

Quire collects an extensive array of metrics to help our Clients analyze their business processes. One of these metrics is reporting time (i.e., editing time spent by User, editing time by Report Status, and editing time spent working on various Report Sections*). This data is extremely valuable to our Clients as it allows them to make real-time, data-driven decisions and permits them to better manage workflows and project assignments. 

Quire’s metrics indicated that Reliance averaged 12.7 hours of reporting time per ESA Report with their original ESA Template, while the industry average for firms with a similar volume of Phase I ESAs was 6.75 hours.

The GOAL

Work with Reliance to optimize their Phase I ESA Template and increase their efficiency without compromising on either quality or content.

Quire’s staff includes industry experts with decades of experience in due diligence and ESA Template construction. The Quire Team has honed a suite of best practices and data presentation strategies that we share with our Clients to enable them to efficiently achieve their business and reporting goals with optimal results. Quire partnered with Reliance to implement the following changes and realize peak results:

The Steps Taken

  1. Reorganized Phase I ESA Sections, placing critical decision-making Sections first and moving boilerplate content toward the end of the Report.
  2. Removed duplicative content, reducing editing time and helping to eliminate inconsistencies.
  3. Added Locked Text – a Quire Feature that reduces the potential for erroneously deleting or changing standard language that should not change from Report to Report.
  4. Presented select narrative Sections as SmartTables – a versatile Quire Feature that allows for the use of Dropdown Cells and Checkbox Cells, providing for efficiency and ease of use for both the writer and reviewer (especially when using Quire’s Mobile App). This Feature also makes the content more easily digestible for the end user.
  5. Incorporated specialized tables, auto-populating content through Quire’s extensive API integrations with multiple regulatory data providers.
  6. Streamlined the completion of the Site Reconnaissance Section of the Report by exercising Quire’s ability to easily show or hide specific Report Sections, 
  7. Utilized Quire’s Hide/Unhide Feature to allow nonexistent or non-required items to be easily hidden from Report output but available when necessary.

The Results

Reliance began using their new, optimized Template on February 15, 2021. Within the first two months of use, average report completion times decreased 38%, yielding an average reduction of 4.8 hours per Report. As Reliance continues to use their new, optimized Template, additional data indicates that Reliance’s reporting times continue to decrease even further each month. 

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*Quire calculates editing time by comparing the timestamps associated with each edit and adding the durations. If no edits are recorded for one minute or more, then the User is considered to have been actively editing for only one minute. Inactivity is assumed to begin after 60 consecutive seconds with no edits.

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