The Digital Future of Design to Shop to Field by DEWALT

JOSH BONE: Good afternoon. How is everybody doing? Everybody motivated, everybody awake, and everybody feeling good, right? No? Well, you're going to be after this presentation, so that's good.

Look, we're here today to talk about the digital future of design in the shop. And the great thing is, the future is today.

My name is Josh Bone. Some of you may know me as BIM to the Bone. I've been doing BIM for a very long time. I've got a song and everything that goes along with the title.

I've got my buddy Jake Olsen here. Jake is the VP of Field Sales, Field Engineering with DeWalt. He does a lot on the side, where you were instrumental in bringing over that transition from Powers to DeWalt and making that transition.

Jake's going to be talking about today the pre-fabrication side and showing you how things get from the shop. And then we have Tony Nicolaidis. He's the VP of Marketing for our connected systems. He's going to be talking about how we deliver this to the field.

And I'm going to kick this off talking about design, because it all starts with design. And I want to say this morning, one of the things that came up was automation. Automation is the future. This is what it's all about.

I've been preaching this now for years. I believe in automation. I thought maybe Autodesk stole that from me a little bit today, so you know, I didn't go back and make these slides after the keynote session. I believe that design automation-- I'm going to define that for you in a minute, but what it does is it changes the way we look at our process and it streamlines our workflows.

That simple message of more, better, less, that's what we've been talking about with design automation and the tools that are out there today to help you get more, do it better, with less. Design automation takes our tools today, and we further the capabilities of these tools at the design stage because it's giving us so much more. And it's so critical that we have the opportunity to design this at the design phase.

A lot of you have probably seen this slide from Patrick MacLeamy with HOK. This is the MacLeamy curve. And it's been fundamentally used for so many different discussions in our industry and how we have to shift things to the left. How do we develop partnerships, how the trades get involved, and start having conversations at the design stage so we can make as much impact as efficiently possible without impacting the cost?

Design is where so much of this starts, and the discussion happens around this, but we have to bring more information into this. To do design automation, we had to do this earlier in the process, because that's what's going to be automating our down downstream workflows.

This is a big deal. This is a simple opportunity for us. The question was posed today, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? How are you going to start looking at automation? Well, we think we have some simple workflows here for you.

How all of this starts with design automation is it's about thinking about supply chain from the very beginning. We are starting to drive supply chain decisions in the design process.

This is a completely different shift. How are we going to get more out of BIM? We should be doing more than coordination today. If all you're doing is doing coordination with a BIM, you're missing a huge opportunity. It's that back end product that drives pre-fabrication and automates more processes is where we have to build strength and leverage Revit with tools like HangerWorks.

HangerWorks is one of the design automation tools that are out there today. We can stack multiple software solutions. BuildingSP has their tool with ClashMEP. We take ClashMEP, and we start building this into HangerWorks. We can stack multiple software solutions. But this is just simple and easy way that all of you can go back and take that question that was posed in the keynote this morning-- what's your plan? What are you going to do? How are you going to start to automate your process?

We're not saying come out of the gate with a robot. Don't start off with an artificial intelligence program. That may be in the future, but there's opportunity right now that's clear and present for us to automate our workflows.

The thing for me that has been so challenging with BIM is our level of development and our level of geometry, and we're always trying to get more from BIM. To do that, we have to improve our models. And how do we improve our models? We increase our level of development. We have more information that's associated with all these components that can help drive downstream decision making processes.

For me, where all of that has to happen is in a spec-driven process. If I can define a spec and say that my hangers need to be this far apart, that I need to build in certain calculations, I want to refine that process, define my spec clearly to automate downstream workflows.

If I do that in HangerWorks, I define what tools I want to use, what do I want to enable, what do I want to disable, how do I want to strap that duct, how do I want to define it. I can build my rules into my spec and I can define multiple specs. And then as a byproduct, we're automating the process of placing our hangers.

And all of this is intelligent. This is not a dumb hanger. This is a very intelligent hanger that we're able to generate point load calculations off of. This is now taking that step much further. I, for many years, guess what I did?

In Revit I made a dumb family that I would go in, had no intelligence, I'd drop it into plan, I'd cut a section, get it to the right height, and I'd array it. You told me to do hangers, I did coordination of my hangers. It was a bunch of dumb hangers that had no downstream workflows for me. We have to improve how we're using these tools. So there, all the point load calculations are being calculated. That's an automated process from defining this through the spec driven process.

And then what else is it doing? It's automating our engineering calculations. Whether we're using Rigid Strut or Gripple Seismic Cable, that, again, is a click of a process. I select an area conduit, I select pipe, it goes in, it automatically places the hangers, it goes in, does all your point load calculations. And again, now we see that it's automating this process of doing the engineering on our hangers, even doing the seismic engineering for us. Getting more for less.

Now how many times have you had been in a coordination meeting, you've gone through and you've coordinated, life is good, we've got everything clean, and then something comes back from the field, or at some point you're in that coordination effort, the team says, you know what, we've got issues with the slab? We're exceeding our design load calculations on our slab. I've had that happen to me, and it's one of those, what do we do now? We start redesigning, we start issuing new ASIs, we've got to reroute everything. That process and the whole effort that we put into that coordination effort has now been increased, and we have to go back through the process again, which is very deflating for a number of us focusing on the coordination effort.

What if I told you early on, with our tool, we can do a heat map location of where are we exceeding the design load calcs on the slab? This is something that we can run through this process, go back to the engineer, have real data, and say, we can't build it this way. Go through, do more coordination on your end, figure out how we need to do this. Let's think about it, but it's better to know that upfront than on the back end. How many of you are dealing with seismic issues in the room? All right. Look, this is a one-click button. It's taking all that information that we saw built into those hangers and we're getting all that information downstream. The conduit smart, the piping smart, the cable tray smart, that information is being built into that, which is driving all this.

Look, it's important to understand that this one too can impact your entire BIM process. How are you driving your BIM process today? How much are you getting out of it? Again, we're always looking. Today I deal with a lot of general contractors that say, you know what, don't even worry about placing hangers. Because they know the amount of time and effort that are involved in the process, they are not going to take the time to even coordinate hangers. And what ends up getting us in the field? Hangers, kickers. All the things that we don't model today is what kills us during the BIM coordination process and decreases that confidence that we have out in the field of why we're doing BIM in the first place. BIM's still a third leg of the whole process. It's not design, it's not construction, it's somewhere in-between. I think this can help drive that with providing better, more robust models.

Now the beautiful thing is, we've designed our spec, we've gone in, we've defined that, we've clearly laid this out. We've got our hangers, it automatically placed those. It's gone in now and it's done my calculations of all my point loads. It's doing my engineering. More downstream byproducts of this process and driving this through the spec, we have all of our bill of materials. You know how much strut you have of what size? We can break all of that down in this workflow. That's all just something we can pull directly from the model. It's all there. We can send it out, and we can even go back in-- another quick byproduct-- how many of you are using Autodesk point layout? Using Trimble layout? How many of you are using Robotic Total Stations? It doesn't matter if it's a Topcon it doesn't matter if it's a Leica or a Trimble one click of a button-- it's already built into this-- go right out to APL or your Trimble, works with both workflows, with any device, and it creates all of your points for you for all your layout. It's built into the software.

Spool sheets. I know how much time our team spends. I've done BIM consulting for many years, and the time that it takes to create the shop drawings, a lot of times, is two times the amount of time that it took for us to actually model it, because we have to go through the process of dimensioning, setting up our sheets. This lays out our sheet automatically. The sheets are already created for us. Our spool sheets are there, just generated with a click of a button on the output. It's doing all of our dimensioning, it's creating our label list. All of our information there is being driven from that very early stage. And then to get the most out of this, to look at kitting, to do our labels and start driving this now-- Jake's going to talk to us a lot more-- that again, is all part of that design phase. Design automation is a simple and easy way that we can start to push this and drive this forward.

Now here's what I'm excited about. Worked very closely with a BIM consultant in the Atlanta market, and we took on a project that they said, let's go through this and let's do this and just use fab parts. Fabrication parts is what we used inside of Revit for most of the work that you see across the industry. How many of you are using Revit and using fabrication parts in Revit? Most. Or you're doing fabrication and not even doing Revit. What we saw is, on one project, is that one floor was done. It took them 4 and 1/2 hours to place all the hangers, do everything they needed to do with placing the fabrication parts and going through the workflow. We turned that around and said, let's use Hanger Works. We went through the next four floors and we averaged right around 35 minutes per floor compared to the 4 and 1/2 hours that it was taking us before.

The time that it takes today to set up my spool sheets, the time that it takes four to create my dimensions, the more time and the more laborious of a process, it increases our errors and omissions-- that something doesn't get created correctly, that's something now is miscommunication and translated out into the field. When we automate that process, you get more out of that person that's in your office, that's doing BIM. You're helping and enabling them to use a tool that speeds up their process.

We look at the job now-- and we're working with someone here in the room, we'll drive into this a little bit later-- but we take a $15 million project-- 17,000 hangers. 17,000. And if you start to break down these numbers and look at the amount of time that it takes, we're seeing this exponentially with even smaller projects. But you start to look at some of these numbers, this is a tremendous cost savings for you. We just had the conversation at Mechanical Contractors Association of America, how do we keep our BIM costs in check? How do we manage all of this? How do we have better discussions? Well one of the easiest things we can do to manage this is to be more efficient in how we do BIM. Take more from the model in automating that process. So kicking off from design, let's kick it over now to the shop.

JAKE OLSEN: Perfect. Thank you, Josh. So I'll take a well-coordinated model, a model that's got actionable content in it, and we'll see what we can do with that next. Really, how do we take the process of getting our MEP system suspended from the ceiling when we've got a model with the content-- real, actionable content, real content-- in there according to the spec at the right place early-on in the design? How can we use that downstream to save some money to increase productivity?

And we've been working on this for about eight months, now, having people using hanger processes changing the way they do business, so we've got some pretty good data. So I'll share two stories today, two contractors, real numbers that they've measured in the field by using, basically, automated hanger replacement routines to save money. So really, again, an LOD 400 type of content, getting that out to the field in a way that saves us money. I mean, at the end of the day, if we're not saving money doing BIM, we're spinning our wheels. And I think a lot of people-- to Josh's point-- are using BIM for coordination and then forgetting about all that great data that they've created that could be used to save some money.

So first one, Franc M. Booth, a Bay Area mechanical contractor piping and sheet metal. Stefan is here, so I'll embarrass him a little bit, but Stefan has shared some great data, and he's built a tremendous process to take BIM hanger data and turn that into money for their business. In fact, I think Stefan would tell you that they can hardly do a job today unless they use their pre-fabrication processes. Their estimates, their bidding, is so well refined by pre-fabricating that without this process, they can't make money. So almost every new construction these guys do, they're using this process.

So this is a few photos of his hanger pre-fabrication area. Right in San Francisco, so not the cheapest place in the world to build things. What you see on the left is a TigerStop, that's an automated fence that pulls data directly from a model and sets up cut lists. So it also has the benefit of looking at your total cut list you need for the job and building smart cut routines so you're minimizing your waste. So for example, if you know you're going to have 20 foot sticks of strut, making sure you're optimizing that as you do your cuts.

Staging, he's got, basically, hanger assembly areas. It looks very much like a factory, there. Very different than building things on the job site. We've talked a lot about that in the last couple of days here already, how do we build a repeatable process? Something that's air- proof, that's easy to do, that I can bring in labor that is not the experienced labor that's moving out of the market, but people I can put them in a process that's well-defined in the work environment. And then finally, staging the materials properly. So that's a hanger cart that Frank M. Booth has built, tagged per the area with all the predefined clevises, trapeze, all the assemblies that need to go out there.

So he's using this process on a regular basis. And by doing this, he's collected a lot of great information about the savings, so I'll walk through some of that. And I think some of this is probably intuitive. So let's talk about doing things in the shop versus in the field. So first off, labor. When I have a process that works more like a manufacturing process, with well-defined steps, with a work environment that is easier-- I'm not bumping up against other trades in other interactions-- I can use less skilled labor. I can use a more mix of apprentices in that process than I would need out on the shop to do that same operation.

So right out of the gate, the average labor rate that they see when they build hangers in the shop versus in the field is $75 versus 110. That's fully burdened Bay Area labor rates, and that's a very direct measurement. We can take that number and we can calculate savings right there. There's obviously additional costs that we're saving. I think probably a lot of people here can imagine the insurance side of things. We have an insurance rate in our shop quite a bit cheaper than having insurance in the field, so there's additional benefits to bringing those operations into a shop process, and that's the pre-fabrication story we've all been talking about the last few days. So savings there.

The next savings-- again, I think this one's easy to get your head around-- when I'm out in the field trying to do construction operations, I've got all the problems that we have in the field. We've got other trades in our way, we've got staging issues, we've got set-up and break-down issues every day. So just when Frank M. Booth measures the time it takes to build a hanger in the shop versus in the field, they see quite a difference. So these numbers come straight out of their experiences of just sending a crew out. How many hangers can we build in a day if we build them in the field, how many can we build a day if we build them in the shop? So again, you start to see some big savings here. Less than a third of the time.

How about material waste? Again, I talked about the ability to nest those cuts to take advantage of large-- if I've got to build hangers for a large area, I can put those all into a sheet and properly schedule my cutting so I minimize the amount of waste. And they've seen a very real measurement in material savings. If I'm out in the field doing that, 20%, and they measure a 3% waste in the shop. So that's a direct cost. I have to buy material. I buy less if I can build my stuff in my shop.

There's indirect cost, as well. And I was telling the story to somebody earlier. I'm in the Bay Area, as well. The new Google project is kicking off-- and I don't know, is there anybody from Hathaway Dinwiddie here? All right. So Hathaway is the GC there, and we went out and met with them. Every bucket of waste that comes off of that project, they're getting a huge fine for. So where does that 20% of field scrap go that's bucket full of pieces of strut, threaded rod, and strut nuts and that type of stuff? Well that gets waste on the job that has to get taken off. Google wants to build a minimum-impact type of building, their new campus, so being able to reduce the amount of-- just from a sustainability standpoint, from a reduced waste standpoint-- that's an additional benefit that, on top of the 3 to 20% material savings that we already talked about.

So we took these numbers on a job that Frank M. Booth worked on. A $50 million job, 17,000 hangers. And I'll tell you one of the first things you find when you try to figure out how many hangers are on a job is, it varies wildly based on the type of project and where it's built-- is there seismic, that type of thing. But these are some real numbers that they've seen. So taking that material savings alone, not the cost to send the dumpsters off the job, there's a $15,000 savings on that job just for those hangers, which is not small. But I think everybody probably has in their mind a hope for a little bit more savings, and that's on the labor side.

So when they measure the labor required to do that operation in the field versus bringing it into the shop, using, again, a well-populated model, the LOD 400, massive savings are realized by doing that in the shop. And these are the types of savings that you can lower your estimates against, because you're so confident that you can pull your risk back and bid against these lower costs to do things. So those are real numbers. Very, very significant when you talk about trying to win work and make money in the tight, ever tight, margins of contracting.

So for me, their process is very well refined. And we've spent a lot of time kind of touring around and I think other people have started to work on this as well. And I would say in the last few years, getting good content in the model, building proper hangers, and then using that to fabricate is becoming more popular. So if these numbers aren't sexy enough for you, I've got a little bit of hanger porn. So those are racks, pre-assembled, ready to go out to a job site. Here's another fabricator and contractor in Texas that's fabricating hangers. So taking that same process, spooling things out of the model and then sending them out to the job based on the work area. So for me, an obvious trend that is saving people money and making them more competitive.

The next business I want to talk about is a new one. Who knows what a SaaS model is? Everybody knows "software as a service--" SaaS. If you live in the Silicon Valley, everybody wants to be the next SaaS. So I'm going to introduce a new business that I'm going to call the HaaS model, so that's "hangers as a service." So we had a distributor in Salt Lake City who basically-- this is your construction, typical construction supply house that sells piles of strut, rod, nut, anchors, all that type of stuff-- and they said, in that market we had a few contractors that started really modeling hangers using Hanger Works. So some big jobs in Salt Lake City now have been modeled with Hanger Works.

And then they went and they placed their orders to the distributor for strut, big piles of strut. And this guy said, well, wait a second maybe I can add some more value. Since you've spent all that time modeling, as a distributor, I think there's an opportunity for me to add more value. So this is brand new business, a few weeks old, but he just basically built-- his name's Blake-- Blake just launched a new business called Strut Hanger Pro. And he will take in your model, your populated model with hangers in it or any of those spool sheets, and he'll actually build the hangers for you in his shop and send them out to the job complete with engineering calculations. Salt Lake's a seismic market, so he's doing the stamping, the calculations, the kitting, all straight from that model.

So he moved himself up the supply chain by optimizing a well populated model with hangers in it that's got the right data. And now, rather than just sending piles of strut out to the job site, he's actually taking those same processes, turning it into a manufacturing operation, and sending out hangers. Here's a few examples of some of the tagging he's doing. So he's tagging them based on your information as a contractor and sending them out to the job site based on the way you've labeled your hangers in your model.

So pretty interesting. He just a just started doing this. He told me he's already 20,000 hangers in on a couple of different jobs, and he's been able to collect a little bit of data too. So he's got a big electrical contractor there that's all over this. They said they're never going to build another hanger. And they've been measuring the time savings of having pre-fabricated hangers versus the way they used to do it, which was to go out and kind of fab stuff up in the field. And that's gone from a 10 minute-- or from a 45 minute effort of getting a pile of strut, cutting it, putting the rods up-- to getting these pre-assembled hangars from Blake, Strut Hanger Pro, and popping them up in the ceiling. So 45 minutes to 10 minutes, which was pretty similar to what other contractors like Frank M. Booth have seen.

Where I see the real power of this going though, is on the seismic side. And if you look at-- and I've talked a lot about this to a lot of people in the room-- but our seismic workflows in the BIM modeling process are broken today. We think about that last, or very late in the process. If we can pull seismic discussions earlier into the design process, we can save a pile of money. So Blake has got structural engineers on his Strut Hanger Pro team that will take your coordinated model with seismic in it, finalize them, kit them, figure out where you need extra hardware, where you need rods stiffeners, attach the brace angles, and actually send out the kitted seismic hardware with stamped calculations out to your job, all from your model. So really changing the whole seismic workflow.

He's got a big job going on now, I extrapolated it out to that same project so it makes sense with the $50 million project, but he's thinking he's going to save over $100,000 in just seismic engineering expenses by bringing that process up earlier in the workflow. So pretty exciting. For me, it begs another question, which is, if we all agree that pre-fabricating portions of our hanger assemblies, or pre-fabricating makes sense, and in a market we have 20 to 30 big MEP contractors that are all going to say, OK, this is what we need to do to compete, you know, it doesn't make sense for us to build 20 to 30 hanger fabrication stations in all these different shops. Or is there an opportunity in certain markets, or for certain projects, to see more like we see in Salt Lake City with Strut Hanger Pro, where let's take volumes of scale, let's deliver our models to a central place where you probably were going to buy your materials anyway, and rather than getting piles of strut dumped on your job site, getting assembled hangers, tagged per your model, scheduled per your build structure, your build schedule, out to the job?

So it's a good question. It leaves-- you know, there's obviously, that's shifting who's doing the work and when they're doing it. But I think there's some real opportunity to take some of those kind of monotonous fabrication and optimize them, automate them, in central locations. So obviously a well-populated model enables that. So I'll leave you with that. I'll turn it over to Tony who will bring us to the field.

TONY NICOLAIDIS: Thank you, Jake. We're almost done. Everybody doing OK? We'll talk about the field now. Because as we know, all of these tools are excellent tools, but taking it that last mile-- the last, most important mile-- and being able to have all of these excellent design tools in the field, in the built environment, is that paradise. That paradise we call lean construction, which one day maybe we'll see, right. But we need to bring all these tools to the field and that's what we're going to talk about right now. You can just walk AU for five minutes and realize there are a tremendous amount of digital tools that are available to all our contractors out there to improve your workflows.

But this has all brought one major problem under a major spotlight, and that is site connectivity, and having a durable, reliable solution on-site that you can trust to be connected on-site and get all your data whenever you need it. So in the next three weeks, we're going to be launching a job site Wi-Fi solution. I'm not going to get into the features and benefits, we invite every single person to our booth for more technical details. I will tell you, though, it's a wireless mesh system. You buy one product and you can put them as much as you can as far and wide on your job site as you want. It is built for the job site, and it's reliable in terms of being able to withstand all the job site rigors-- temperature, humidity, dust, water, all that good stuff.

But what we're going to focus on today-- and at least in the discussion moving forward here-- is going to be pilots that we've done, and most importantly savings in ROI in your pocket for a contractor. So we were lucky enough to do a few pilots, and the first one was with Mortenson. I saw Taylor Cupp earlier, and he may have stepped out. We all know Taylor Cupp and Rick Khan from Mortenson, they were a tremendous partner. We know they are very technology-embracing general contractor.

So Taylor put us on a 64,000 square foot job site on the campus of Penn State. And with five-- so it's a fairly small job site as we all know, you guys do some big work. On a fairly small job site, we fully meshed the whole job site, meaning you could walk anywhere on the job site, have access to the signal with five access points. OK? And in the end, we let the key foreman from Mortenson use the system, and here is what basically came out from what Taylor and the team calculated.

We saved 10 minutes of walking around-- on a very small job site by the way, this is not a big job site. On a very small job site we saved 10 minutes of their time from having to go to the trailer to download all their data, be it BIM 360, be it emails, be it whatever information they needed, digital information. We saved 10 minutes of time per person. That came out to a 2% labor savings rate, that's $175,000 if you look at it across all their foreman, if all their foremen were to use the system across the whole project, right. And you know, either Josh or Jake brought it up earlier-- our tight margins in construction-- this is a meaningful number. Especially on a very small job site, here, that we had. So a 2% savings rate using Wi-Fi fully meshed with Mortenson on the campus of Penn State. That was the first pilot we'll talk about.

The second one, couple of points to make about it. Number one, there's no contractor name on this slide on this slide because we're demobilizing this site in Atlanta as we speak. So until we get all the numbers dialed in, all the contractors, both the GC and the subs sign off on that, we're not going to really show any dollar amount for this project. A couple other things to notice, this is a much bigger job site. 530,000 square feet, a much longer project, and 10 access points.

Now if you do the math on the coverage, you're going to see that doesn't make sense versus the Mortenson pilot. The reason why there's 10 is because the GC in this case decided to go with a hotspot strategy, meaning there was one access point per floor, so it wasn't fully meshed. You knew to walk on this side of the floor to go download your data, OK. That's why it was 10 floors, one access point per floor.

Now we did something a little more granular on this project. The electrical subcontractor foreman, we put a Fitbit on his hand. For three weeks prior, we tracked his steps, and then we tracked them after Wi-Fi. So here are his steps before Wi-Fi. Step count on the y-axis, and time on y-axis, yeah, and time on the x-axis. We took out lunch because it looked too zigzaggy all over the place. And this is basically what the foreman did over the time period that we had him on. Each dot that you see is a half an hour of time during the day, and we averaged those dots for those half-an-hour's throughout the project.

We found interesting, fun facts, like the foreman was walking about 1,400 steps per hour on site, when he was on site with his crew, right. Fun facts like that. But the thing that we focused on is this area right here, this little valley. And what we found is, there was two dots of very low activity. The foreman said-- and we went to the foreman, we said, what's going on? The foreman said, the first thought is my break. So I'll go back to the trailer, I'll hang out with the other electrical contractors, plumbing contractors, we'll be in the break area. They're not exactly sitting still, they never do, and we'll be in the trailer area there. Then we asked him what that second dot was, and he says, I spend the next 30 minutes-- sometimes up to an hour-- downloading data in the trailer because there's no site connectivity, OK.

So that was interesting. So when they said, OK, that was pre-Wi-Fi, now let's overlay that post-Wi-Fi, and that's the orange line that you see here. So again, we'll focus on the valley for the sake of time today, that little valley area. Couple more fun facts. 960 steps per hour before Wi-Fi, 1,200 steps per hour post, which we thought, huh, that's interesting. We went back to him and said, OK, what's going on there? And we focused in this area right there. He said, right after break I went back on site. He no longer needed to stay in the trailer to download any data because he can go back on site and be with his crew, work with his crew, and keep the schedule of the project going, moving forward.

So that's obviously-- I don't have to explain to everybody, the use-cases for Wi-Fi are real simple. This is the advantage, and a quantified advantage that we saw on this pilot. We will be-- well let's go one more here before I say this. We don't have dollar amounts, but what do we give back, conservatively, to this foreman? 30 minutes of his day. I'll bet you it's more than that when we all roll it up in the end. That's 2 and 1/2 hours of his week came back. If you do it, extrapolate that over the project, this guy will spend 24 more days with his crew, working with his crew, as opposed to sitting in the trailer and having to download data and being tethered to the trailer. So increased time, on site versus the trailer.

We will publish this once we get all the numbers done with the GC and the subs. We ask you to come over to our booth to make sure you're signed up. The Mortensen case study is published, we are demobilizing here in Atlanta. We have just mobilized two more pilots and we're going to do a third pilot by the end of the year. So we plan on sharing this with the industry, obviously, but we'll have hard numbers signed off by contractors on those sites overall.

So I think the thing overall-- at least in this one, because this was our-- you know, you get better as you do pilots, our first pilot was a disaster, Mortensen was a little better, this was even better than that-- was that it changes the way he worked and affected him for the better, which is what we want technology to do. We want technology to affect contractors, all you guys, in a positive way and it makes your lives easier, and better, and more efficient no matter what. OK. So the other great thing is happening organically in the industry is the fact that people are using Wi-Fi to do their own experiments. And I love this because we weren't involved in this.

So Lincoln Wood-- I'm sure many of you know Lincoln Wood from Turner Construction-- he allowed us to get on site in a job site in northern California. And working alongside the team from Alive. For those of you that don't know Alive, they're out of Florida. I would get to know them. They make an autonomous-- well what they really do is, they have a platform, a software platform, that allows a contractor to use that autonomous rover to go along a predetermined path that a contractor sets and takes 360 stills and then patches those stills together to get progress on site. So they were experimenting with it as they're working through all their bugs and getting off the ground.

And you can see we sent them two Wi-Fi access points. You can see the Wi-Fi access points sitting on the top of that air conditioning unit. And instead of having to take the rover, the rover goes through, they have to take a stick drive, take it back to the trailer, the Wi-Fi backhauled all the data immediately right into the Alive software platform you see here in the middle of the slide. Quickly, immediately, and it was right back to the contractor, which obviously backhaul will give you if you have access to it. So the great thing here is the connectivity is allowing other technology to be born on site overall.

So to finish up, you know, we didn't start with a plan to do Wi-Fi. Our plan started, obviously, with our tools which I'll talk about in a second, obviously. It started with wearables. We did a bunch of research and realized, if we don't do something in terms of connectivity, all this is for naught. So we brought us here to where we are with Wi-Fi. Now talking about our core business-- and we'll finish up with this-- we've launched our Tool Connect platform which has Bluetooth technology built into both our drills, our impact drivers, our batteries. It's a phone-based system that will allow you to track your assets wherever you are. There is a tool-- there is a tag, a Bluetooth tag for all your other assets. And the great thing is, if you have 20 volt products that do not have the Bluetooth technology built in, we have this thing called a connector. You slip it in right between the tool and the battery and boom, it is a Bluetooth enabled product. I would ask you to stop by our booth and put your hands on the product, we have it all and we're showing it all.

This is step number one. We have piloted now a number of different IoT technologies. IoT, as we know, is the buzz of the industry. We are piloting. We just finished a pilot, we start another pilot in December with the right tech stack to make sure that when we launch the construction IoT platform-- which is step number one, here, that you see-- that there is significant ROI just like there is on Wi-Fi for you guys. So keep posted. Stop by our booth, get as much information as you want. We appreciate your time, and we'll open it up for questions for the three of us here, if there are any questions. Yes sir?

AUDIENCE: Industrial [INAUDIBLE], Josh. When you're doing the automation on the hangers-- quite often when I've seen other automated products, it depends on all these other factors for it to automate. What has to be in place for me to drop hangers for conduit or pipe?

JOSH BONE: So right now you can use fabrication CAD map items that you bring in. You can bring those in through an MAJ export into Revit so we can work with fabrication CAD map parts. So we can use that, or can be a Revit family. All we have to do is, once that information's set up in there and you install Hanger Works, you define your specs. So you set up to process, and you go through and you tell it how you want your spacing, how you want to set your vertical proximity, your horizontal proximity, and based off all the information we define-- and we can do more or less-- it goes through there on those rules. It places it based off those rules. So it works on slope pipe, it's--

PRESENTER: It's one of the things is the floor system.

JOSH BONE: That's right.

PRESENTER: So that's something that is not always in the file, so what are you hanging from?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

JOSH BONE: That's a--

PRESENTER: [INAUDIBLE], is it PT? So--

AUDIENCE: That and concrete.

JOSH BONE: That's right.

AUDIENCE: It's easy. I'm concerned about bar joists. It will actually locate bar joists and hang from bar joists?

PRESENTER: Yep. It looks out for that.

JOSH BONE: You can move it from a metal pan over to a bar joist and it will change the way that it's hung based on the fact of the system, so that you can re-engineer any point. So you can so you go back through the process and redesign it as you're going through it.

TONY NICOLAIDIS: Other questions? Yes.

AUDIENCE: Quick question for Tony.

TONY NICOLAIDIS: Yes sir?

AUDIENCE: Maybe it's getting out a little too far, and I know you guys are just piloting products--

TONY NICOLAIDIS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: --but have you guys had any thought into exterior-- before a building's built-- for site Wi-Fi? So while guys are digging in the ground and tractors are driving around.

TONY NICOLAIDIS: Yeah. So we're looking at that for a Phase 2 product, in terms of what to do exterior when there's nothing there. You know, we have a connectivity product road, just connectivity. There's just a lot of great things that we can do here. So the short answer is, not yet, but keep an eye on it. Absolutely.

AUDIENCE: Then speaking quickly to connectivity, what issues do you have with the build as it progresses and the walls--

TONY NICOLAIDIS: Oh, excellent question. So we have done very open, you know, as the building's going up, or a horizontal or a vertical site. We'll get-- and this is real numbers-- you know, 35 to 45 megabits per second, you know, bandwidth. So you're getting tremendous bandwidth. The place where we are right now-- we have a site in LA going on right now where they're glazing-- and we're working through some of those last-- the last ends of the project. And we may have to look at situations where your origin point in the trailer, and we have to set up another origin point and the building meshes from there. Just bring the origin point closer.