Christine Acker works for construction software and app developer PlanGrid, but she’s also a civil engineer with a master’s degree in engineering management (both from Cornell University) who’s worked for Skanska USA and Clark Construction Group. When she walks you through manual vs. virtual conflict resolution, you get it.
“During foundation installation, an ironworking foreman brought up a question about a bearing pile orientation,” she says of an incident from her Clark Construction days. “I didn’t have that set of drawings on me, so I hiked 70 feet up and out of the hole to the trailer (10 minutes). Two drawings had conflicting orientation, so I called a superintendent and got the structural engineer on the phone (20 minutes). Then I went back out to explain this to the foreman (10 minutes). Not wanting to wait around for me, he’d moved to another part of the jobsite to keep his crews busy (20 minutes to find him).”
She spent 60 minutes getting an answer that would have taken 30 minutes to get using a construction-collaboration app. However, even if everyone on that job had the tool, only a few would have used it.
According to a recent PlanGrid and FMI Corp. survey of 600 construction professionals, crews spend one-third of their time looking for project data and documentation, resolving conflicts between what’s on paper and what they’re encountering in the field, and rework. Eighty percent of general contractors and subcontractors give project managers and field supervisors tools for doing all that virtually rather than face-to-face, but only 20% consistently use it.
That’s a waste in more ways than one.
Focus on Field Needs, Not the Back Office
Productivity software should allow users to customize a solution that fits their internal processes. Therefore, not bothering to ask field crews how they work and what they need is one way to waste your investment in technology.
Another is ignoring the future needs of project owners, whose real work begins after completion. One-third of the information they need to optimize maintenance is lost during digital handoff: the process of exporting and transferring data from the various software systems, programs, and platforms the various project partners use. Contractors excel at building things but not so much at turnover.
In fact, says FMI Principal & Florida Consulting Manager Gregg Schoppman (also a civil engineer, University of Florida), exiting a project is his clients’ biggest pain point. Contractors spend so much energy on delivery that gathering and submitting turnover documents is often haphazard and incomplete, and owners are getting wise to this. The research arm of global management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. finds the transition from project planning to construction launch rife with opportunities to cause problems that won’t manifest until it’s very expensive and time-consuming to fix them.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. Your firm can’t control the weather or jobsite conditions, but it does have complete power over internal planning, process development, implementation, review, and revision. Productivity slippage is common but controllable, but only with discipline. Technology can increase profits by completing projects faster with fewer glitches, but people aren’t machines. The things that cause problems will happen regardless of how much you spend on software and devices unless you develop and enforce protocols for using the technology.
This issue of Concrete Construction profiles at least two concrete contractors that have overcome the most difficult aspect of technology: data entry and management. See if you can guess who they are by the time you finish reading this article.
One Template, Many Projects
Every business owner’s heard the maxim that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Doing each step consistently improves profitability over time, but, says Gregg, processes aren’t the province of the few, the large, or the special. Whether it’s to account for inventory, send materials out, jobsite planning, turnover, or the myriad other tasks (including using building information modeling (BIM) for preconstruction), protocol requires participation by everyone within an organization that touches the project in any way.
“Everyone has manuals and standard operating procedures, but no one ever reads them because no one is ever managing by them,” Schoppman says. “We let people have autonomy, but we confuse autonomy with lack of structure. When I talk to clients about processes and procedures, they say, ‘That’s too confining; it takes away my creativity.’ I scratch my head and go, ‘What does that have to do with anything? The problem-solving part of things, the collaboration, is where you should be creative.’
“Take Starbucks: You get whatever you want, and it always looks and tastes the same. That’s because there’s standardization. They allow employees to be creative, but have figured out a way to let them operate with guardrails.
“Now think about ABC Construction, a $50-million-a-year roadbuilder or civil contractor. Is there the ‘ABC Way’ of doing things or is it ‘John’s Way,’ ‘Mary’s Way,’ ‘Steve’s Way’? Everyone looks for the silver bullet, but the secret sauce has about 100 parts and you have to be strategic.”
One client was demoralized when he started working the company, but after five years had added $10 million added to the bottom line. “They didn’t know their costing very well and were very isolated internally. They had something like 10 project managers and 12 ways of doing things. They actually submitted two bids to the same customer one time.”
They turned it around by making operational excellence part of their business strategy. Builders think that because they tackle a wide variety of projects, they need to create a specialized solution – a new recipe card, if you will – for each one. That’s not necessary. All projects follow the same basic sequence, so a system developed for the fundamental building blocks applies whether you’re building a highway, high-rise, or warehouse.
Unfortunately, contractors are sometimes victims of their own success. It’s difficult to say no to work, but overbooking puts your reputation at risk. Moving superintendents and project managers on and off jobs like chess pieces results in neither starting nor finishing projects to the best of their ability.
Uniting Stakeholders
More than 200,000 U.S. companies work in construction, which makes the industry one of the nation’s most-fragmented. That’s one reason, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, productivity has declined for five decades.
Contractors also contend with inexperienced and, in the public sector, risk-averse customers; national, regional, and state-by-state codes and regulations; skilled labor shortages; and procurement processes that focus on price instead of value. Partners try to offload risk onto contractors instead of sharing risk.
In mid-November, contractors, engineers, and technologists met in Cleveland to address why most projects underperform: go over budget and deadline. In addition to Acker, Schoppman, and McKinsey Strategy Consultant Corey Hopper, Infrastructure Imperative conference speakers included Anne Ellis, P.E., FACI, F.ASCE, CEO of Ellis Global in Washington, D.C., and co-author of the Concrete Design and Construction section of Standard Handbook for Civil Engineers, Fifth Edition.
She reminded attendees the slump test celebrated its centennial anniversary last year, and “the only thing that’s changed in 100 years is the cone has gotten shinier. Silicon Valley will take over our industry if we don’t do it ourselves.”
Alpha Corp. Market Strategist Andrew Lindsey offered a tool for preventing that: block chains. A digital ledger of transactions between two or more parties that is immutable, tamper proof, decentralized, and encrypted, the technology could solve the problem of project participants using different platforms.
The conference also tackled how to streamline project delivery and build more-resilient concrete structures. We interviewed each speaker. To plumb their expertise, click here to read our Q&As.
