From Binders to Runbooks: How Phillips International Caught $400K in Scope Creep

Phillips International is a U.S.-based real estate and property management company overseeing a national portfolio of retail, office, multifamily, and hotel assets.

With teams spread across regions and a constant stream of regulatory and safety updates, the operations group depends on clear procedures, current guidance, and fast communication between corporate, properties, and vendors.

For years, Phillips International ran on a mix of binders, regional handbooks, SharePoint folders, and the memories of a few long-tenured managers.

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) lived in PDFs, email attachments, and local drives; each region maintained its own version, and no one could say with confidence which document was current when an incident hit.

New site managers spent months shadowing their predecessors just to learn “how things really work here,” and corporate leaders had no consistent view into whether required checks, trainings, and inspections were actually happening.

A single playbook workspace that replaced scattered binders and folders with searchable, tagged, versioned procedures — owned by the right people and visible to everyone who needs them.

• Knowledge architecture — mapped SOPs, runbooks, and regional variations into one global structure with local notes where variation is required
• Indexed playbook with search, tags, and clear ownership so incident commanders can pull the right runbook in seconds
• Governance board and change log — every procedure shows what changed, when, and why; policy updates no longer get lost in email
• Guided runbooks for new managers so they reach independent shifts in half the time instead of months of shadowing
• Structured metadata and event logs — ready for automation, analytics, and future AI assistance without a rebuild