Description
Key Learnings
- Explore the business ROI of integrating accounting and operations software.
- Gain a stronger understanding of Autodesk Construction Cloud Connect and how to use it for smoother workflows.
- Learn how to harness the power of your data with Power BI dashboarding for descriptive and predictive insights.
Speakers
- HSHeather SoderquistHeather Soderquist-Vice President of Construction Innovation A contractor's ability to innovate continues to be a key element to gaining and keeping a competitive edge. Innovation in construction is an important differentiator separating good contractors from excellent contractors. In her innovation role, Heather collaborates with her project executive peers to evaluate and streamline their company's processes, as well as research, and develop all field operations technologies, and implements and trains each. Additionally, she manages the company's Virtual Design and Construction professionals. Heather has been with Jacobsen Construction for more than 18 years – most recently in the role of Director of Operations Training and Development. Before that, she successfully served operations as a Project Manager on many significant projects while at the same time serving as a key leader in developing many of their current technologies. Heather's hobbies include hiking, backpacking, traveling, and volunteering in her community. She loves construction and the people who work in it.
- Josh CheneyJosh Cheney, Autodesk – Senior Manager - Strategic Alliances Josh Cheney is part of Autodesk Construction Solutions at Autodesk, with a specific focus on the Integrations and ERPs. Josh has over 19 years of construction/construction tech experience, and a focus on ENR 400 firms. Relevant Experience and Highlights: Viewpoint Construction Software – Construction-specific ERP ISEC, Inc. – International Specialty Subcontractor BuildingConnected – Bid Management Software Procore – Construction Management Autodesk – Project Lifecycle Management
- DUDanylle UtleyDanylle Utley Project Accounting Manager has been with Jacobsen Construction for over 24 years. From the early years as a payroll clerk, elevating the role of the project accountant, or taking a turn in the field as a cost engineer, protecting the financial bottom line has been at the forefront of Danylle's career at Jacobsen. Danylle helps to bridge the gap between field operations and corporate accounting as the subject matter expert for Jacobsen's Cost Management Integration. Danylle's unique laugh can be heard throughout the building as she collaborates with estimators, project managers, accountants and executives during monthly financial reviews or during Autodesk Cost Management training sessions. When Danylle has time away from reconciling data, she can be found sitting in the car listening to podcasts, avoiding household chores, and hoping her family already has dinner on the table.
JOSH CHENEY: Welcome. Thank you for joining us. We have an exciting session in store for you today. If you're following along in your Autodesk University catalog, this is session CS 2953 at Autodesk University 2024. Our class session is elevating Cost Management, the power of integrations and dashboarding.
For anyone that's attended an AU event in the past, we always include a safe harbor statement. Really the intent here is to make sure that anything that's covered in today's session can't be held against us in the SEC. So we want to make sure that we're following best practices here. All right. Today's speakers. We'll get things started with Heather Soderquist from Jacobsen Construction. Heather, take us away.
HEATHER SODERQUIST: Hi, everyone. I'm Heather Soderquist, VP of construction innovation. I lead our Cost integration and data strategy. My background is in field operations. I began my career as a project engineer, advanced through to project manager. And about five years ago, I transitioned into the corporate office focusing on strategy, technology, and training.
JOSH CHENEY: Up next, Danylle.
DANYLLE UTLEY: Hi, everyone. I'm Danylle Utley. I'm the project accounting manager at Jacobsen Construction. I've been with Jacobsen over 24 years, started out as the little payroll clerk that hand keyed time cards for everybody, and then have worked my way up through project accounting on various job sites. Spent some time in the field learning a little bit of Cost engineering, and now I'm back in the office managing other project accountants and helping out with our Cost integration with Autodesk and our ERP.
JOSH CHENEY: All right. Thank you. You both are amazing to work with. And really appreciate you guys helping us out with this session. All right. Alice Adelman, over to you, please.
ALICE ADELMAN: Hi, everyone. I'm Alice Adelman. I'm an integration solutions engineer here at Autodesk. So I primarily work with our customers and helping them to build out custom integration workflows using both our APIs as well as ACC Connect, our integration platform.
JOSH CHENEY: OK. Joe Fields, the data guru.
JOE FIELDS: Hello, everyone. Yeah, my name is Joe Fields. I'm the senior manager of business intelligence and reporting within Autodesk. So predominantly work with Power BI, helping customers build out custom dashboards. Also help build templates that we provide to customers and just all around kind of helping customers with their data needs.
JOSH CHENEY: OK. Then myself finally, Josh Cheney, director of ERP and financial partnerships. My team is twofold. The first portion of my team focuses on connecting our ACC Cost Management application with a number of different ERP and accounting applications focused on construction. And then the other half of my team focuses on helping our customers and our channel partners with implementations of Cost Management. Tyler Patton from my team specifically worked with the Jacobsen team on their implementation. And we'll drill down on that a little bit later in the presentation.
All right. So for today's presentation agenda, the Jacobsen folks will take us through who Jacobsen Construction is. And then they'll also cover what Jacobsen looked like before Autodesk Construction Cloud became part of their technology stack. From there, we'll focus on what Jacobsen's goals and digital journey look like with Autodesk Construction Cloud and then the critical need for their ERP integration. Jacobsen uses Viewpoint Vista. And that's the application we integrated with.
Then we'll have Alice Adelman come in and talk to us more about some additional impactful integrations that Jacobsen's leveraging. And then we'll wrap up with Joe fields taking us through some of the dashboarding and analytics that he's helped Jacobsen develop over the past couple of years. All right. Heather, do you mind telling us a little bit more about Jacobsen Construction?
HEATHER SODERQUIST: Of course. Thanks, Josh. So Jacobsen Construction is a mid-sized general contractor. We're based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, with additional offices in Hawaii, Arizona, and southern Utah, Saint George. We are proud to be on the ENR and Best Estates list and proudly as an ESOP company where everyone in our company, from laborer to CFO, are owners of the company. And as we jump into the next part, which is our integration journey, I can't think of a better person than my partner in transformation, Danylle, to walk through what life was like for ACC.
DANYLLE UTLEY: Great. Thanks, Heather. Yes. But before there was ACC at Jacobsen Construction, we had a lot of yellow pads of paper, a lot of Excel spreadsheets, and a lot of emails. And what we found is that we had three departments that work hand in hand, but not really. The pre-construction, accounting, and operations departments, they were all using the exact same budget and data cost for reporting. But they were all inaccessible to one another.
And then when we tried to get operations into the ERP so that they could help connect and be more proactive with their reporting, connections were clunky and slow using the VPN and sometimes impossible on certain job sites. We found that we were losing a lot of data when workflows were disrupted, when personnel changes occurred, because we didn't know where the data was and who had it and who had ownership of it. And as you all know, Excel can be easily manipulated, overwritten, or even accidentally broken. We wanted to make sure that our people were elevating themselves in their productivity and not just being data entries people, data entry people.
So that took us on to, how do we make and elevate our people so that they become analysts and not just data entries? And we're going to go on some goals that we set forth and how to go along our digital journey. So when we first started the process of going to ACC, we wanted to get our project managers out of the ERP. We wanted to make sure that they were using the software that was designed for them and that they didn't feel like they were being forced into an accounting program to do their Cost Management on the project.
We wanted to modify and simplify all of their cost flow along with their people and their systems. So we wanted operations and pre-con and accounting to be cohesive in the data that they were representing to one another and use it all at the same time and not have to recreate it. We wanted to remove those data silos amongst those three departments so that we could improve our accuracy and timing of monthly project financials and create actionable reporting that everyone had access to and that we were all playing in the same sandbox.
HEATHER SODERQUIST: So here is a little timeline that represents kind of the journey of where we started and where we are today. As you can see, we started this journey in 2019 when we went out with a traditional RFP to vendors. We had a slight hold or pivot during 2020, as you can imagine, but quickly got back in place and started really navigating through that. And by August of '21, we had selected ACC. And by December of that same year, we were implementing some two major projects that we are starting.
In 2022, we started our phase one of our Cost integration. And if you can read on the slide, those are just what we had defined as our phase one. And in February of '23, we went live with that first phase.
And you may be asking yourself, why is there such a big gap when probably a lot of other people have implemented so much quicker? And for us, we used that opportunity to really start navigating and asking ourselves, where do we want to be not only in this year but in the next five years at Jacobsen? And how are we going to move our business forward? So we really took the time during those months to really vet that and explore opportunities and really just ask questions-- some of the business processes that we currently had in place. And did they make sense going forward?
We also in that same year of 2023 implemented our second phase of Cost integration. And you can see that there. It included subcontractor pay applications and monthly projections. And as of this year, the two phases are complete. We've ran maybe over 100 jobs within our Cost integration. And as we look into 2025, we continue to build on that integration platform.
JOSH CHENEY: OK. Some portions of this were really critical. And Jacobsen made that clear in their RFP process. And so as Jacobsen was working through their needs and analysis and overall evaluation of ACC, they really landed on some key critical elements to their overall evaluation and what they wanted Jacobsen to look like when they did move over and start running Autodesk Cost Management integrated with Viewpoint Vista.
So a number of different areas that were key. But maybe a few different questions for you, Heather, around some of these. So the first was configured workflows. So whether there's a massive number of user defined fields or customer specific customizations, multiple business entities, or data transformations, Morpheus Technology Group, our system integrator, prides itself on delivering integrations for complex customers. So with all that in mind, where did Jacobsen spend time with Autodesk and Morpheus to configure Jacobsen's integrated workflows?
HEATHER SODERQUIST: Yeah, thanks, Josh. So I'm actually going to pivot and ask Danylle to answer that question, Josh, only because she's coming from more of the accounting, which I think has a different perspective. So I'm going to pivot that one to Danylle.
DANYLLE UTLEY: I appreciate that, Heather, because, yes, there's always been this conflict between operations and accounting and who gets to win and who's in charge. And we wanted this to be more of a collaborative. And so having the perspective of operations, what they need as a user on the end, that was kind of always our forefront of what was going to be their end result. And how can we get the accounting that we needed so that we could maintain our financials work in the ERP?
And so we spent a lot of time with Morpheus going through our business process, defining what is a budget code? What is a face code? How are cost types used? Where do the commitments begin? We spent a lot of time with Morpheus really diving deep into Jacobsen's processes to make sure that we knew where the source of truth came from and who was going to own that source of truth and how we were going to then transform it into the next level.
So if the budgets became from pre-construction, they were the source of truth. And they got moved to Viewpoint or Vista. And then Autodesk is the source of truth for our commitments and our change orders. And we spent a lot of time going through every possible scenario of what about this and what about that?
And it was really beneficial for us to have Morpheus there as this referee to be able to say, well, have you thought about this? And have you thought about that? And does this happen all the time or just some of the time? And really tighten up our process as well so that we could make an easier, simpler transition as we're trying to keep two systems in sync at the same time.
JOSH CHENEY: All right. Thanks for that, Danylle. And I really appreciate the intentionality that you all had. Instead of just jumping into it and immediately trying to get the systems talking to each other, that planning is really an important piece.
Interestingly enough, I also spent time working at Viewpoint Vista, both helping sell their product and then also implementing it. And I know that Vista does an amazing job of capturing data. But then it also requires you to go elsewhere in the application and run a report to really understand the evolution of a project. So, Heather, how has ACC given your end users and leadership greater project visibility and the tools to be more proactive and less reactive?
HEATHER SODERQUIST: It also kind of hit on that where it says more actionable data. As a result of moving to ACC, we've discovered this built in tool that ACC has which is called Insight as well as Power BI as a way of obtaining a lot of information in one place very quickly. An example of that is that before ACC, it may take us five different reports to get to the information we were looking for. Whereas in ACC and Power BI, we have one single dashboard giving us that exact same information. In addition, the benefits of being able to just have information go across departments or across the organization in just a couple of clicks has made it so much easier for our leaders to get the information they're looking for and move on and make the decisions that they need to in a very timely manner.
JOSH CHENEY: Got it. OK, super helpful, Heather. Thanks for that. And then the last one I'm going to hit on here is better project outcomes. So back in 2019, when Jacobsen was pulling your RFP together and evaluating project management applications, what were some of the outcomes that Jacobsen was really chasing? And then how has the ACC and Vista integration helped deliver better project outcomes for Jacobsen?
HEATHER SODERQUIST: So I'll give you two examples. As Danylle mentioned earlier, our field people viewed and still do view Vista as the accounting tool, which made it very difficult for us to get a buy in for our PMs and PEs, our PMs and our executives out in the field. What we'd see them doing is taking that data from Vista, putting it in Excel spreadsheets, and then maybe doing the work or maybe sharing the data. Or we were getting pieces and parts to it.
ACC has really been a game changer in really that thinking of the source of truth is much better defined. It's really clear. Our AP and our AR is coming from Vista. But our budgets, our commitments, our change orders are all coming from ACC. And I think having a tool that works for everybody is a game changer. Viewpoint now can be the source of truth for accounting. And ACC can be the source of truth for our field. And nothing is siloed.
The second outcome I would share with you is that we wanted to reduce our project managers' time that they were spending on producing their projects' financial reports to within an hour. And this was a significant reduction to what we were seeing, which was sometimes two and three hours by the time they manipulated all the graphs, they got all the data extracted from Vista and into Excel. So we couldn't be more pleased with that outcome.
JOSH CHENEY: OK. Thanks for that, Heather. So Morpheus Technology Group, mentioned them already. I look at them as mentioned here on this side, kind of the partnership and the commitment between all of our organizations to really get this integration not just off the ground, but so that it had real value for Jacobsen.
So I knew areas of customization were a critical piece. Not only did Jacobsen want ACC and the integration to do what it was intended to do. But also, Jacobsen had specific company workflows that were a key focus throughout the life cycle of the integration work and then also understanding how ACC worked.
I think another part for you all was the automation piece. And working with Morpheus, we figured out that we were able to jump over some of the processes that are required inside of Vista that can be time consuming or confusing. So the automation piece, helping move data forward without some of the interfacing or the posting inside of their application was a big one.
Heather, I want to come back to you a little bit around the partnership and commitment. I know that Autodesk had a vested interest in seeing you all be successful with this integration along with Morpheus, right? And it took three stakeholders in this process to really arrive at a successful integration. So how did Jacobsen ensure that both Autodesk and Morpheus were committed and were good partners with you all as we were growing the relationship?
HEATHER SODERQUIST: Yeah, all of those points that you have on that screen definitely apply to our experience and what we were looking for. And as far as partnership and commitment and what we're going to do, I think really having a clear expectation of what the outcome is and what the goals are that you're trying to achieve made a big difference. It's really easy when you get into the integration and you're still learning to get distracted or misled on what is the end goal.
And so I think ultimately having that vision statement of what is it that you're out to accomplish and then going back to it regularly and reminding your partners of what that goal is really made a difference for us. I know we were early in on the integration. And our customizations were-- we had a whole lot of expectations. Everything from sub jobs to how we process-- we have progressive budgets-- things that at the beginning were very new to Morpheus and even Autodesk at the time. And they all embraced it.
Once we could explain exactly the why behind it and what the business need was, all of the partners came to the table and, in fact, us in some cases had to question, is our current business process really going to work with where we're trying to go with integration and automation? And in some cases, we did have to make some adjustments-- not major, but some-- to make it work with where we were going in the future. And so I think it really took flexibility, having a vision, and then also just being patient with each other as we moved through the process.
JOSH CHENEY: Yeah. And Heather, I know we've talked about it also. So not just what the existing features look like inside of the application, but Vista has a release twice a year, September and December. And they roll out a number of enhancements that they've worked on. Autodesk Construction Cloud being a SaaS product, ours are kind of continuous releases.
So I know you've talked a little bit about the maintenance or maintaining of the integration. So that piece of growing with Autodesk-- and as features pop up, hey, this is a great feature request that Jacobsen had. Now it's in the product-- working with Morpheus to then incorporate that into the overall integration. All right. So--
HEATHER SODERQUIST: Oh, sorry.
JOSH CHENEY: Go ahead, Heather.
HEATHER SODERQUIST: I was just going to say, the last comment I would just make on that is I think it's a trap to think that you're just going to do an integration because if change isn't happening, it means you're not growing. So really setting an expectation that an integration and working with Autodesk means that there are going to be changes and that you need to be prepared to grow with those changes, which is phenomenal. It's exactly what we need to continue to build and grow into the future. So just setting that expectation that you will always need to do some type of maintenance or change should be expected.
JOSH CHENEY: Thanks for that, Heather. All right. So talking a little bit about the directional flow and processes that Jacobsen put in place. We've talked about this. This is pretty standard in terms of the recommended flow that a number of system integrators have, including Morpheus Technology Group.
Now, I think one of the nice things that Jacobsen did was instead of trying to take on all of this at once was really kind of an iterative process-- learn ACC, understand which direction the integration is really going to operate most optimal for you, and then taking those in bite size chunks, and then coming back and saying, all right, now we're in phase two. We're ready to move beyond some of the core competencies, migrating projects, vendors, and so on, and getting deeper into commitment change orders, subcontractor pay apps, and so on.
So I view this as a really important piece. Something to kind of keep in the back of your mind, though-- and this for our audience-- is in certain instances, the accounting application is going to have constraints. It's just part of the rules of accounting. In this case, you have to set up a schedule of value or a contract item before you can actually set up what your budget or final estimate looks like and relate all of your phase codes to that main contract item.
So that was something that we had to work around on the integration side. And I know Heather, that's something that you all are potentially going to look at and change at some point in the future. But any other thoughts that you might have around the directional flow? Or did Morpheus kind of deliver on these different directional flows? And did Jacobsen have to augment your business process at all to accommodate these?
HEATHER SODERQUIST: What you're showing on the screen, Morpheus made a recommendation on the directional flow. We at the time, we decided that was the right directional flow for us. But I know that many other companies have different business processes. And so their arrows may be going different directions.
And I think that is what's so great about this integration is the flexibility. It really comes down to what's your business process, and how do you want the data to flow? It really comes down to just maintaining where's your source of truth, and how does that work within your organization?
And as you alluded to, Josh, we did it one way, the way that you have it on the screen. But we also know that Autodesk is growing and building more integrations and building more features within pre-con. And so we very much intend that some of these arrows, specifically budgets, will be moving a different direction in the future, which is, again, very exciting to do. But for us at that time, their recommendation made a lot of sense and has been working quite well for us.
JOSH CHENEY: OK, great. All right. The last slide that I want to hit on here is really kind of the activities and milestones around really what the whole process looked like from the planning phase all the way out through improving and feedback. Now, Danylle, I know that one key or critical mass for Jacobsen was learning how the applications work before you guys delved too far into what the integration process looked like. So talk us through, Danylle, if you don't mind, really what that planning phase looked like at Jacobsen.
DANYLLE UTLEY: Yeah, absolutely. And I would just like to point out that we did not step over the ACC implementation delivery services. And Tyler Patton, he was our partner in that. And his knowledge base that he brought to teaching us how ACC worked was instrumental in us understanding how to even begin with the integration, because if you don't know where you want to be and how it works at the end, you don't know how to get there.
And I knew that we were getting there and understanding it when I was able to finally say, no, Tyler, this is how your system works, and this is how we want integration to do it. And he's like, oh, OK, yeah. And so I knew that with Tyler's expertise, we were finally understanding how ACC worked. And that helped make the integration a lot easier because we would know how to get data from point A to point B because we knew where we wanted it to go at the end. So don't skip over that planning.
JOSH CHENEY: Yeah, I mean, we have an incredible asset in Tyler Patton. Our customers love him. And Tyler comes from industry, so has a great basic understanding of really what our customers are looking for and then has a mastery of Cost Management also.
I always like to bring this slide up because there's really different milestones at each phase of not just the implementation but also the integration. And there are feedback loops. And Jacobsen dedicated a meeting at least once a week to go through, OK, we've gone through this training. We understand how this works. Now here's what our goal is from an integration standpoint.
And so anyone that's telling you these integrations are plug and play, that's really oversimplifying the process and really eliminating some of that opportunity to make the integration your own. So Danylle, great call out there. Really appreciate the constant improvement that you all drive Autodesk to deliver and the nice words that you had about Tyler. All right. So with that, I'm going to transition over to Alice Adelman to take us through a little bit more of some of the additional integrations that Jacobsen has with ACC.
ALICE ADELMAN: Great. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, everyone. So with Jacobsen's ACC and ERP integrations completed and implemented, we also saw additional opportunity to use ACC Connect to build out additional custom integration workflows to even further streamline Jacobsen's processes and project workflow.
And so a brief background and overview on what Autodesk Construction Cloud Connect is. So ACC Connect is our integration platform that allows customers to integrate and transfer their data between Autodesk applications and other third party applications in their tech stack. And some examples of some of the types of tools it can integrate with-- Cloud storage tools, PM tools, accounting tools, business intelligence applications, and e-signature applications, which we'll double click on in a second, and many more.
And what's unique about ACC Connect is that you can build out these integrations in the way that you want them. So rather than having sort of a one size fits all integration that some of our more native integrations may offer, ACC Connect actually allows you to build highly specific bespoke workflows that are tailored to fit your requirements or your processes. And it does this by leveraging triggers and actions to watch for certain events taking place like files getting uploaded or contracts being approved. And then those triggers will fire off the action steps in the order that you want them and in this way help keep all of your multiple applications up to date.
And for end users in the office or in the trailer, once these workflows are set up for you in ACC Connect, they're sort of running in the background while your end users can just kind of go about their day to day business, approving their contracts, and updating their data. And meanwhile, ACC Connect is running in the background automatically copying your data to various different third party applications that it needs to. So it's a great solution that delivers a lot of value to our customers.
So a quick overview of how you can use ACC Connect to connect with your other third party applications. Here are just a couple of our most common use cases and examples of some of the things that our customers are doing with ACC Connect and third party applications. So document management is obviously a big one. Customers want to be able to synchronize the files and drawings and data that they're managing in Autodesk Construction Cloud and share that in the cloud and vice versa. And so we integrate with tools like Box, SharePoint Online, Ignite, Google Drive. And we also include e-signature applications under that umbrella as well, so tools like Adobe Sign and DocuSign.
Project management reporting and analytics is another common use case for us, so enabling our customers to automatically add form or RFI or issue data to a spreadsheet. And we can also sync back for issues in RFIs to make that a two way live sync. We also integrate with tools like Power BI and Tableau, which Joe Fields will kind of talk about a little bit more at the end of this presentation.
But we can use ACC Connect to extract data out of Autodesk Construction Cloud and bring that into SQL tables, which we can run those dashboards on to allow for company-wide dashboard visualization. And then finally, Trello and Asana, which are more horizontal task based applications. We can synchronize things like RFIs or issues with those applications as well. And then finally, accounting and ERP tools like QuickBooks Online, Sage Intact, and Xero and Acumatica to bring in data like expenses and payment applications into those tools as bills or invoices and conversely to monitor for new or updated AP bills and bring those in as expenses in Cost Management, allocating them to their appropriate budgets.
But more specifically, ACC Connect supports e-signature integrations with leading e-signature solutions like DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and Dropbox Sign. And these workflows allow our customers like Jacobsen to better facilitate their digital signature collection workflows to help improve and streamline their project workflows. So with ACC Connect's integrations with DocuSign, customers can automatically send documents, subcontracts, change orders, pay applications, or just files from Docs, and automatically send these files for signing via the signature tool and conversely automatically upload signed copies of those files back into Autodesk Construction Cloud when completed. So using these workflows, your project team never has to leave Autodesk Construction Cloud to send or manage the delivery or receipt of their contracts or files.
So now to get into how Jacobsen used ACC Connect specifically for their DocuSign integrations to streamline and accelerate their project workflows. So I'm going to turn this back over to Heather to discuss some of Jacobsen's integrations, needs, and goals. So Heather, what were some of Jacobsen's main goals in areas to improve your e-signature workflows?
HEATHER SODERQUIST: Well, Alice, I'm going to tell on ourselves for just a little for just a minute. So it really wasn't that long ago when we were sending out contracts and change orders and other documents in PDF via email. We then improve this process by investing into DocuSign. But that still just wasn't getting us to the right level of efficiency and automation that we were looking for.
What we were really wanting to do was find a way to send off our contracts, our change orders, everything that we were creating within the ACC platform and then essentially forget about it without manually having to manage each step in the process. And so this integration that Alice is going to go into more detail about was exactly what we were looking for and really has taken all that manual effort off of our current workflow.
ALICE ADELMAN: Great. Thank you, Heather. So yeah, as Heather just stated, so Jacobsen's previous or non-automated workflow included many manual processes as indicated here in the red steps. And this really wasn't scalable or really feasible to even implement as a workflow moving forward in the long term.
So once the Cost document was ready for e-signature, they had to manually download that file out of Cost, then manually upload it into DocuSign to prepare for signature collection. And that process included manually setting the signature and date tag placements, adding recipient information, and then actually initiating the DocuSign send. And then once the DocuSign was signed by the signatories, your Jacobsen users still had to manually download a signed copy of the DocuSign and then re-upload it back into Cost. And so this is clearly not a workflow that was sustainable or scalable by any means.
So with Jacobsen's automated state, almost every manual step of that workflow became automated or consolidated into Cost. So the integration could automatically download the Cost document out of Autodesk Construction Cloud and upload it into DocuSign and then automatically set the signature and date tab stamps in the DocuSign envelope using anchor tags. And then it could automatically send the DocuSign to the recipients, which would be consolidated and identified using custom attributes in Autodesk Construction Cloud Cost on the actual contract itself.
And then the workflow would pull the signatory information from these custom attributes and send the DocuSign automatically to those recipients. And then once it was completed by the signatories or signed by the signatories, the workflow could automatically download a signed file as a PDF copy and upload it back into the contract object itself as an attachment and then finally execute the contract to signal that this contract has been signed and completed.
So from an end user's perspective within Jacobsen, the workflow to them looked like this. So it went from that previous slide with all the red steps to basically this. They would enter their necessary information in Autodesk Construction Cloud, the recipient info, the document package, and select the ready for DocuSign checkbox, and then set the Cost object to the sent status. And then the integration would take care of all the steps in the middle so that in the end, the end user would simply see an executed contract with an attached signed file.
So after being able to successfully deploy the initial workflow, we found the opportunity to incorporate a few additional workflows to the scope. And this covered certain outlier scenarios. So additional customized workflows like this can be available to customers with the purchase of consulting service hours. And these would be based on the needs identified during discovery and scoping.
So the first was a workflow that uploaded signed copies of the Cost payment application into SharePoint Online. So Jacobsen had determined that they had wanted additional backup copies of their signed vendor invoices and cost pay apps and had them uploaded and sorted into SharePoint Online in a specific folder structure that was organized by payment period. So when a cost pay app was signed within DocuSign, the workflow would download a copy of the signed file and not just upload it to the Cost pay app itself and execute that pay app, but also create a new subfolder for this pay period in SharePoint Online and upload a signed copy of the file into the pay period subfolder in SharePoint.
And then additionally, we found other workflows for other outlier scenarios as well. So the next was in the event of one of Jacobsen's signatories if they declined to sign the DocuSign. And this could be for a number of reasons. The recipient was incorrect or the amount was incorrect, for example.
So in these scenarios, we were able to build a workflow that could capture the recipient's reason for declining to sign. And then it would revert the contract or change order back from approved to the previous status, so either submitted or open. And then it would email the creator of that Cost object with the decline reason and a URL to the cost object so that they can then update the record with the necessary information and resend.
And then finally, we also implemented a voided DocuSign workflow that would detect if a DocuSign was voided for reasons like an invalid email address. Or maybe the DocuSign wasn't ever completed by one of the signatories within a certain time frame. So in this scenario, the workflow would detect a voided DocuSign, find its corresponding contract or change order or Cost object, and then revert it back to the previous status, and then notify the cost object owner of this update so, again, they could adjust the information and then resend the DocuSign or send a reminder to the signatories to sign.
JOSH CHENEY: That's amazing. Alice, thank you so much for that. I mean, it's really incredible to see the number of configurations that you put in place and that learning process as you were going through this. And it was like, aha. Oh, we can do one additional thing with the integration. So really cool. ACC Connect is a highly flexible tool. And love that we were able to marry up to a lot of Jacobsen's processes.
All right. So with that, we're going to also shift over now to Joe Fields to take us through a little bit of Jacobsen's data strategy, but then also having Heather and Danylle provide some of the reasons why they were looking at specific reports and maybe what life looked like before that, too. All right. Thanks, Heather.
HEATHER SODERQUIST: So this is a timeline similar to the timeline I discussed earlier. However, in this timeline, I'm focused on data. And also, I hope what it does is also illustrate just how quickly anyone can become data proficient.
Joe's going to talk more about and get more into the details of what those terms up above as far as data, being data aware, proficient, and et cetera. He'll talk about that later. But really for us, just the message I want to get across is that the real advantages and opportunities with data and what we can do with data really began to emerge about mid 2022. And this is when our Cost integration was really starting to take shape. And we started seeing how we could merge data across platforms to create these dashboards, again, instead of all the reports. And it was going to make a real difference.
And if you notice, when we started this journey in '21, we were aware. We were aware we had a lot of data, more data than we even knew what to do with. But we really didn't know how to leverage the data or put the data in an organization that actually would make a difference.
In '22, we started learning about Power BI and the Insights tool that comes with ACC Build. And we started seeing what could we do more? If we can do this, then what?
And 2023 as, again, the Power BI report started really to take off, we realized that we didn't have the infrastructure that was going to be needed to really leverage that across platform data. So what we did was we started building this year our data lake and our data warehouse. And we have now transitioning all of our projects' financials over into Autodesk and Power BI reporting. We're moving away from the Excel reporting and almost exclusively into Power BI. In the years to come-- we're hoping by next year, we'll be data savvy, and we'll be data driven, and we'll have all that infrastructure that hasn't been there fully in place and having all of our departments across all of our organizations utilizing that.
That's the journey. But how did we actually start getting there? And what we thought we needed to do was we needed a data strategy, which was very new to us. Data and how to leverage data was very new. And so we put together this data strategy with the intention-- and I'll just read it to you. "Create a unified data strategy benefiting all departments within the Jacobsen organization. Centralize meaningful data that can be shared among departments and prepare our organization, future growth, and AI technology."
As we formed this committee, we selected one member from each department to serve on the committee. This approach was to allow us to incorporate diverse perspectives and address unique data needs from every department. And as we got into that, we realized that we also need to outline the roles and responsibilities of each of these project members and also what the chair would do.
So if you'll turn the slide, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail. I'm not going to read all of this. But I do want to highlight that it's really important that setting clear expectations for the committee was really going to be crucial for accountability and high performance out of each of our members, especially where we were introducing this new concept. And we were asking all of these departments that once lived all by themselves in their own little world to come together and unify how do we identify source of truth? How do we use data across departments that actually would make a difference?
And this really takes a really strong level of communication. And as we started doing this, we realized that we had many people that were really new to this idea of data and what to do. So I put together a small graphic. It's very simple. I wish I was better at design, but I'm not. But really what I did was-- the idea and the concept was just to visually help people understand what did that look like.
So in the top section, as a committee member, they were the liaison. They were going back to their business leader to discuss what was important. What were the challenges? What was the data that they never really had easy access to that if they had available to them would really make a difference for their reporting and their KPIs?
They'd bring that back to the data committee. And then as a committee, we'd strategize who else has those same challenges. Who has those same needs? And how do we put it in a way that all departments can access it and also maintain internal securities?
So the second one really is just showing you all of the different departments, their data flowing into the data lake and the data warehouse, and then pushing out into our dashboards via the Power BI mainly. It sounds silly, but it really took a visual simplicity like this to really help people understand what really they were going to do and how that intertwined with their business leaders and the committee. And with that, I will turn the time now over to Joe, where he'll give us a deeper dive on the importance of data and also show you some of the examples that we've been doing.
JOE FIELDS: Awesome. Thanks, Heather. Well, before we get into some of the examples and talk about Jacobsen's story, I kind of want to set the stage for why is this important? Why is data important? So I like these stats here. This is a study we did a few years back with FMI looking at surveying our construction customers and kind of seeing some of the problems they have and how they're using data.
So no surprise, you kind of can hear it from Heather, what she was mentioning that all the different data sources they're pulling in, there's just more data than you can really handle sometimes that you need to work through. Compound that with the need for quick decisions on things is that you need to be able to sift through that data very, very quickly and make some decisions. But the nice part is that customers are employing more data teams and data professionals to help work through those.
On through the data journey, as Heather mentioned, kind of showing where Jacobsen has landed throughout this process with their data journey. So you can really start anywhere. But most people starting in that data aware stage. They're just getting digitized. You've got data scattered all around the place in different systems. It takes time to pull things together, figure out your workflows, and you move on up into that data proficiency stage.
You're looking for things like a common data environment where you can put all this information into a resource where you can pull that data from. You may be looking at your data collection process, any workflows. And you might have some bumps along the way. You need to make some adjustments while you're going through this process. It's just a natural evolution. But really the idea is that you're moving forward, and you're finding ways to improve and keep moving up through those different phases.
As you get into data savvy, you're pulling information from various different functions and workflows. As Heather mentioned, they have got the data committee that they use that kind of brings together many different functions within Jacobsen and talking about sharing their stories of what data is important to them. And you may find some overlap. And being able to find that data and service, it can actually benefit multiple teams.
In this stage, you may start to employ dedicated data teams. This doesn't have to be a huge department necessarily. You can find your Excel gurus within the office. That's where I came from. I was a big Excel nerd. And it really comes a little more naturally, I think, to those of us that spend a lot of time in Excel. But sometimes those people really gobble this stuff up. And they love given that opportunity.
But you can also find third parties that can help with this as well, partners that can help with these data integrations as well as within Autodesk. My team actually focuses on helping customers build out custom dashboards.
And as you move on into more of a data driven workflow, this is when you're going to start to really define things a little differently. You're looking at predictive analytics that help you mitigate risk. This helps you with lessons learned using some of that past data for historical purposes to look at your future projects that you're chasing after and then also how you can better manage those projects.
So it takes time to work through. Remember in the earlier slide, Jacobsen has been working on this for several years. But along the way, you're discovering new things you didn't think about on day one. So it's really a process that you continue to evolve through and grow. And even when you hit data driven, you're going to keep growing from there as well.
And then just to talk about Jacobsen's dashboarding journey. So they start out with some of their dashboards the way a lot of customers start out with our out of the box Power BI templates that we provide to customers. So these are meant to within a few minutes give you the ability to visualize your information within ACC and be able to bring in that data, does some data transformation, relationship mapping, and provides you with some standard visuals. You can really start seeing what's in there, what's in your data.
Jacobsen actually helped provide some of the feedback that built out this cost KPI dashboard that was really crucial that helped get us more into that predictive analytics stage. But from there, really the idea is that we wanted you to make it your own. So you start building this out and tweaking and tuning the dashboards to suit your needs. So throw on your logo, your color schemes, but more importantly, making the information fit what your teams need for their workflows. You may find some information on the template, some things in one graphic, and you want to change it to a table, add some more information. Really just want to give you the ability to quickly get up and running with this information.
And then on from that, you start building it out and developing your own custom insights, bringing in some additional data sources from other tools. And that helped tie things together. And it give you the ability to create some custom insights and KPIs to build out from there.
And then a few examples from what Jacobsen has. So just even some of those earlier examples as they started off on their journey, some descriptive insights like field reporting. A lot of us are doing our daily logs on our job sites, so filling out headcount and hours for the various crews. Pretty easy. We can show that information in different forms to present that depending on the end user that's trying to digest that information-- seeing the form information, who completed it, how many subcontractors we had on site, how many crew members and that type of thing.
But we also go further with that and start to look at tracking information. So this graphic here I like because you can actually see one quick view. Select a project, select a year, and it'll show you. At a quick glance, you can scan through and see days that there were a daily report completed. And if there was a daily report, how many have been filed and completed. So it can be really helpful if you've got some contractual obligations or an owner that's really pushing you to-- they need to see those daily reports completed. You can see and identify any holes, any gaps in that data and then also provide some additional things like average hours, average headcount, things like that as well.
And then moving on into more predictive insights. Like I said, cost KPIs. Jacobsen helped us define some of those cost KPIs that we provide to customers. So really important things. Remaining contingency, looking at that to gauge the health of your project and see where things are at. Other things like percentage change orders over contract value. Really important big jobs are going to have big change orders. We want to be able to gauge the change orders relative to the contract value and really tell at a quick glance how things are going from there.
And then just blow up from that last one that's showing the graphic. But this one is interesting because it's actually bringing in schedule information from P6, ERP, information from Vista, as well as Autodesk Build to really merge that data together. We can look at things like our billing information, projected versus actual. Great example of how you can bring that data together and use data from different resources in one visual.
And then this one. Another great example is this change order log. So controllers could use this, for example, to be able to get a quick view across multiple projects on the change orders that are happening on all the projects. They can expand individual projects, see all the change orders, check on status, dates, and other details, relevant information that they need to see.
What I like about this is that they're using filters, or slicers in this case, that allow the end user of this report to really whittle down that data and look at what's important to them at that time. So they can pick between different change order types as well as the statuses of those change orders. Before in the past, this may have been a series of static, paginated reports that listed out different change orders or different status levels. So really hard for somebody to weed through and scroll through pages and pages of reports. And you can put the power in the hands of the report users to be able to filter that data and see what's relevant to them to really drill into the data. It gives you that flexibility and interactive nature that really empowers them to really drill into the data and find out what's happening.
And then another great example, using different data sources, bringing things together. In this case, we can bring in data depending on the role of the user. So a project manager may want to see certain things. Or an executive, for example. They want to see a quick glance at a certain project, see the timeline, where we're at on the project, look at things like our manpower, actual versus projected type of things.
We can plot the S curves on a graphic to give them a pulse on how things are going. Relevant schedule information, milestone data, things like that. We can also pull in other data sources-- submittal information, RFIs, our safety data from the forms and issues. We can present that information and put those high level metrics right in front of whoever it is based on their job role on the project.
And then we've got one more here with a project dashboard. So some more great information here we can provide on a dashboard view. Also seeing some customers actually using these for external parties. So you may have an owner, for example, that is really wanting to get a pulse on what's happening on their project.
With these dashboards and this data, you can actually do that. You can provide them with relevant information they need to see what's happening on those projects and not really have to spend a ton of time on managing this because there's a lot of things we can automate on the back end. But more importantly, we can also put security controls on this too, so they can only see relevant information. This could be outside parties, owner's reps, and things like that that we can provide that information for.
And then lastly, this just a blow up of that view with project financials showing also some KPIs down there in the bottom, bringing together some various different data points to provide for the end user to be able to see this information. This could be pulling from various different data sources including Excel as well in this case.
And lastly, I'll go over a few things. As we're going through, we've talked about all these different things, things that you should consider when you're weeding through all this data. And I know it can be a lot of information. But you can start somewhere.
But most importantly, data integrity upfront. We need to think about historical information. How long do we need to keep this information for? If you're employing a data lake or data warehouse, it can be really beneficial because you're in control of how the data retention and how to manage that. But you also need to think about that upfront.
Also, like Heather mentioned, the maintenance and ownership of that information and being prepared for changes which inevitably will happen. We talked about Vista, ACC. We're continuing to evolve and put out new features. So having somebody that's aware of those and being able to adapt to that information as those changes come up can make things very smooth and actually improve. You might not be able to do something today that you can do tomorrow when those changes do come about.
And that gives you some more scalability. How much time does it take to work on this stuff? There's a lot of things, like I mentioned, that we can do to automate these workflows. But it doesn't have to take up 100% of someone's time. There can be a lot of other things those people can do. But definitely something to think about as you're growing and ingesting all this data and working with it.
And then lastly, the governance piece. It's really important to think about this. How do we need to retrace our steps? If we need to drill back in if there's legal issues or anything else that comes up, we need to keep that in top of mind as we go through.
And then lastly, just understanding any standards or guidelines we need to follow for security or privacy best practices. There's lots of things we can do to manage this information, to present the information to the relevant parties, only what they're allowed to or able to see. But something to definitely keep in mind.
JOSH CHENEY: OK. Excellent. Joe, thanks for that. Danylle, Heather, very much appreciate you all joining us today. At home, audience members, thanks for tuning in. Hopefully today's session was beneficial for you. And with that, we'll wrap up today's session up. Thank you.