How to Exceed Project Profit Margins by Maximizing Data and Workflows

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Hello everybody. Welcome to Autodesk University, and our class on how to exceed project profit margins by leveraging data and workflows. My name is Esteban Corrales, and I'm a technical sales executive at Autodesk. I work closely with customers on how our tools can help their business goals and their team's workflows. Prior to coming over to Autodesk, I spent my career in the construction industry. I was a project manager for one of ENR's top 20 general contractors.

I'm joined by Dane Pemberton of the US Group of Construction Technology at BL Harbert. I'll hand it over to Dane to introduce himself, and tell you a little bit more about BL Harbert. Dane, over to you.

DANE PEMBERTON: Thanks, Esteban. As Esteban mentioned, I'm Dane Pemberton. I am our US Group Construction Technology Manager. I, as well, cut my teeth in the field as a project manager for 10 years, before I transitioned into our construction technology group. Our group handles VDC, BIM, scheduling operational technology, and innovation for our US operations.

So a little bit about BL Harbert. We're a privately held company with a worldwide presence. We operate as two distinct divisions, an international group and a domestic group. We roughly do about $1 billion in revenue, employ about 8,000 employees across the globe, as well as regularly ranked high in the ENR. We have key market sectors in commercial, health care, industrial, and federal.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: And indicated on the map in blue are locations that we've performed work in across the globe.

DANE PEMBERTON: We also have fairly decent presence domestically, with offices in the states indicated in blue. And just to give you a quick snapshot of some of our clients, we work across the US and multiple different market sectors, including federal, industrial, and commercial.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Over the course of the class, you're going to hear Dane and I talk about BL Harbert's technology adoption path, their approach to choosing the right technology, and how they're leveraging this technology in areas like creating efficient processes, establishing accountability and providing transparency, and connecting workflows to data.

We all know there are several reasons why a project might be losing money. Some are clearer than others. So you're consistently wondering how you can do things better. How can you mitigate the risk of these same issues reoccurring on all of your projects, and from them bringing negative schedule or cost impacts? In other words, how can you make your margins you are expecting to make to begin with?

No matter the size of your company, or the scope of the projects that you're working on, everyone's trying to figure out how they can mitigate risk while increasing productivity and maximizing profitability. Because of this, most turn to technology. Before we dive into the specifics about the technology and how it can help remove these traps, it's important to recognize that everyone is in a different stage in their technology maturity.

Wherever you stand, we know that the process is complex and that the journey is not a sprint. Dane, can you tell me a little bit about your journey, and what that looked like for your team?

DANE PEMBERTON: Yeah, Esteban. So our technology adoption has certainly evolved through the years. Historically it was based on the needs for the people on the projects. When I began my career, we were left up to our own. We would get a budget established with the project for technology and network set up, and we'd run down to the local Radio Shack or Best Buy, call in the Geek Squad, and set up a local network and hit the ground running. As long as we had internet and our own computers we were good to go.

But obviously, through the years, we quickly realized some of the downsides to that model. Things like creating silos, and having multiple bottlenecks.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Yeah, I can totally relate to that. I remember it causing, like you said, a lot of bottlenecks and issues with teams not being sure where to go, or where to find that information at times.

DANE PEMBERTON: Yeah. So obviously it was clear, the silos and those bottlenecks were affecting productivity. And if your productivity is affected, and efficiency is affected, clearly your profit margins are affected. So we knew we needed change.

So to stay in tune with where the industry was moving, and the way technology had advanced, we knew we needed a more modern approach to things like our project management system, to things like network connectivity as the evolution of cloud came into focus.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: We commonly hear that from our customers. How did you guys go about doing that a few ways?

DANE PEMBERTON: A few ways. First we needed some fresh leadership. So we brought in a CIO to help align everyone, and propel our technology into a more current infrastructure, and give us a little bit better and more robust foundation that we could build off of.

Next, we established a group dedicated to our operational technology usage, the evolution of my role for our company. And that was to help us with selection of technology, implementation, and actually putting things to work in the field that would help us see efficiencies and gains. And ultimately, do things like increase our profit margins, increase our efficiency, and things like that.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: When you set this group up, and obviously the company invested in a role, and bringing you on, as well, what was the approach? Once you had this team, how did you all go about choosing that right technology?

DANE PEMBERTON: Well, anyone that's been faced with a decision to select technology probably knows that there's a lot out there. So we took our time. We really sat down and analyzed. What were the goals? What were the problems that we needed to fix? What were the things that were important to us?

And so we came up with a methodical method to evaluate all the solutions that were available, and even some that weren't. Some of the key things that we paid attention to were did they match the culture of our company, and did we see that the cost that we were going to expend for a certain technology or application, did it really meet the value we expected? And were we getting good bang for our buck?

And then one of the big things that we looked at were the companies that we were wanting to partner with. Do they do what they say they are going to do? And so we were focused on relationship building. It was more than just about software. It was also about partnering with a team that matched our goals and those metrics that we talked about.

So we took our time, like I said earlier, and did a very methodical rundown and evaluation of solutions and applications. And ultimately, that's part of the reason we chose Autodesk as part of our technology stack. Most products we looked at were great for today, but we also wanted to be mindful of where we wanted to go in the future.

Autodesk matched what we needed long term. We felt like their forward-looking vision aligned with what our forward-looking vision was. And some of our long-term goals and our short-term goals were being met.

I'm not going to lie, some Autodesk products that we first saw, they weren't the best compared to others in the moment. But we bought into the vision, and we believe in them and the team that was assembled around us, and the team that we've gotten to know. They helped us see the vision that they had, and we believed in it and moved forward. So we feel like we're positioned correctly for the future, leveraging Autodesk Construction Cloud.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Dane, now that you've shown us the why and the how of technology choices, and adopting Autodesk Construction Cloud, how has the platform really helped BL Harbert so far in improving your business outcomes?

DANE PEMBERTON: Autodesk, the Construction Cloud tools, they've certainly enabled us to remove roadblocks that impacted our productivity and profitability. And really did that through four key areas, centralization, standardization, accountability and visibility, and connected workflows and data.

To get into a little bit more of what that means, as far as centralization, as we mentioned about our technology journey, it's very easy to see when you have a decentralized method, and you have teams going and buying individual technologies, and even hardware, for what they want, instead of what was best for the company, you create silos. And you lose some consistency.

So centralizing our model, and pulling everyone into a common environment was really important to us. And so Autodesk clearly enables that for us. The Autodesk Construction Cloud, and the unified platform as it continues to evolve, is really key in helping us in our centralization effort. With standardization, when individuals are left to their own discretion, they'll leverage what they know more often than what you expect, or they should know.

We really wanted to look at ways to get standard, especially foundational, principles in people's hands, things that mattered to them that allowed us to increase some of these other points. But increase visibility, and have some root metrics that are standardized. Autodesk Construction Cloud offers us pathways to standardize our operations.

On having clear accountability and visibility, it is extremely important for our project leaders to have true insight into what's going on, and not being consumed by the time it takes to find out what's going on on a job. They can hit the job and actually start helping make differences, and work with those teams to improve. So all these tie together, but obviously when we have standardization and centralization, the accountability and visibility comes into focus as well.

And then lastly, the connected workflows and data, couldn't do it better without talking about our accounting systems. But it is extremely important that when you have connected workflows, and you can minimize the coming in and out of systems, or coming in and out of technology, you get increased efficiency, as well as better data. So we wanted to avoid everybody having their own Excel spreadsheet to break down cost, or to break down something.

We wanted them to derive the data from a system using some standard templates, and connect those workflows to each other. That increased their efficiency.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: That makes perfect sense, Dane. I think all of those points are so important, and very aligned, obviously, as well, with our partnership, and where Autodesk and BL Harbert are going together to the future.

You know, silos between people, teams, phases of work were something I always struggled with through my career. Multiple-point solutions, creating silos of data, and resulting in people working on out-of-date drawings or specs ultimately always led to rework, and schedule delays, and loss of margin.

What did it look like for you prior to using Autodesk Construction Cloud in these areas?

DANE PEMBERTON: So I think document management is probably a great example of one of those things that getting into a central system really improved upon. Prior to adopting Autodesk Construction Cloud, you typically had your architect or your design team, and they had their own server set up, or document storage container. And they were communicating to the owner, and to the contractor, and to vendors through email, and phone calls, and everything. And most of that data was stored in their own environment.

And then you had us, the contractor. We have, of course, our environment setup, and our data storage, and we wanted everybody using it within our company. And even trying to get people from outside to get into our data storage, so that we could try to reduce some of the overlap. But inevitably, you still had it. Back to that silo mentality.

And then with subcontractors, they had their own environment. So we had three of the key players, typically, for any construction project had their own environments. And oftentimes that data is completely overlapped. Prior to having Autodesk Construction Cloud, even worse than just document management, we would leverage multiple-point solutions, like to view sheets and drawings.

And then we would use a different system to create a transmittal, and actually send things out. And then we would store those in a different location. You can see how you quickly lose efficiency and you get a lot of redundancy and double work. And so we clearly wanted to eliminate some of that.

So with Autodesk Construction Cloud NOW, one of the things that we really liked was we can get everyone invited to the system. Everybody can store documents in their own place, and even though we are in one common environment, we can isolate, and only give access to things that people need in certain areas. Which again helps reduce people from double work, or putting things in the wrong location. So we can also get some increased efficiency there.

It is extremely great to see that clients, and architects, and subcontractors, and our general contracting team can generate a transmittal inside the system, send the documents out for reference. It can be referenced to the sheets set up, and we can get immediate updates, and push updates out to the field. The pros of the system are fairly obvious once you get in there. And when you see this graphic, you can see how a centralized model just seems to make a lot more sense for a project.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Right, Dane, that was awesome to be able to see what good looks like today for you guys on Autodesk Construction Cloud. I want to talk a little bit about standardization. In order to improve business outcomes that we talked about earlier, after you centralize you need a certain level of standardization, yet flexibility, in order to be able to compare your projects apples to apples. And really find those best practices, those risk patterns, and project health.

This also leads to an ease of setup, and really for everyone to know where and how they need to get their tasks done. What workflows did our platform flexibility and standardization really help BL Harbert improve?

DANE PEMBERTON: I think this speaks to some of the things that we talked about earlier, when we were originally talking about our technology selection. As a company, we take pride in empowering our employees to make decisions on their own, empowering them in the field to solve the common issues, and come up with solutions to problems right there. And feel good about the fact that they have the decision-making power for their job in their hands.

With that empowerment, you also have to weigh against what standardization needs you have as a company. So we have two specific examples. Before, RFIs, it was typically, oh no, we encounter an issue on the job, or we see an issue in the drawings. And a superintendent, or somebody in the field, picks up the phone and tells the project manager, hey, there's an issue. And then that project manager has to get into a system, or get on his computer, and write the RFI.

And then they'll email that to a vendor or subcontractor to get their input. Or they'll email it to an architect, or an owner's rep to try to reach an answer. Well, then that architect and owner's rep gets on the phone in probably their own system, uploads it, sends it out to get answers from their consulting team. Or seeks to reach out to vendors to get answers to things that they need to answer the RFI.

They turn around, and potentially may submit that to an owner through their system, get agreement, then get it back to their system. Send it to us, which then we load into our system, and send out. And obviously, you can see where the breakdowns can happen. And the loss in the efficiency, and how many locations that one thing can change.

There's obviously a lot of risk, and things being missed, bottlenecks. And ultimately that can result in delayed responses. And as we know, if a response is delayed, or something's delayed, it usually costs money and time.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: You're describing former headaches of mine, so this is--

[LAUGHTER]

And it's headaches from a lot of people in industry, right, a lot of companies that are going through this process.

DANE PEMBERTON: Absolutely.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: So tell us a little bit about the now.

DANE PEMBERTON: Now, with Autodesk Build and the Construction Cloud, we do have a more concise workflow. We have at least a central source for all the data to live. We have the connected workflows inside of Build that help us take a pen off a sheet, immediately click on that, create an RFI, send that out. And the tracking process is seamless.

We send it to users that are already in the system. They get notified via email or notification on their phone. And they can immediately answer that, or share it to other team members, and it has helped create efficiency through connecting all those workflows together, and centralizing and standardizing what the RFI form looks like, and what the process looks like.

Another example that we wanted to cover is creating libraries. So one of the projects we took on with our technology group was to create a Resource Center inside of Build to leverage across all our projects. We actually came up with a solution where we created a project in Build that is called the Resource Center. And now that we have some of the new bridging tools and features that have been released by Autodesk inside the Construction Cloud platform, we can actually push those forms, and pull those forms into projects across the board.

When you can standardize a form, and I can give access to all of our personnel to a similar form, you only can pick up efficiency. And can also see immediate gains in people not doing something, or waiting to try to find some old form, or creating their own. We've removed those silos. We've removed those pinch points. And we're really happy about the library and the bridging tools inside of Autodesk, and excited to see how those continue to evolve.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: And I love what you and your team have done with this library. Because I remember the risk that came along with so many processes and workflows of using the wrong documentation. Whether it was creating a contract, or an inspection form that was out of date, and getting in trouble for not using the right information can bring a lot of risk on a project. So this is absolutely a great process that your team has adopted.

So let's talk about one of the next big buckets that we believe can bring improvements to teams, and that's really accountability and visibility. When all teams have visibility into what their own teams, but also the other teams on the project, are doing, and need to do to complete and hit their schedule marks and their budget, this really creates accountability into that shared project goal, instead of those silos that, Dane, you were mentioning before. Can you tell us a little bit about those two aspects? And were they important, and how BL Harbert adopted our platform?

DANE PEMBERTON: With all of the technology, and all the processes and procedures in place, if you don't have accountability most of those can fall down. Or you're not getting the gains you expected. So we found them extremely important.

One of the big things for us is all of our projects teams, they typically have a senior leader or project executive assigned to multiple projects. And so what we found is building consistency across our projects domestically helped tremendously in reducing audit time. Time needed for a senior PM, or for a project executive to review an RFI log, or an issue log.

Now that they have consistency, they know exactly what they're looking at. They can go right to the things that make sense. We have common filters and common sorts, and we can leverage the database to give us the information in a consistent manner. And that's been tremendous.

The other is creating consistency in how you generate some of the information. One of these things is issues and issue types, and leveraging the issues tools. So now any issue or any action item that is generated on a job happens in one central location, and has one very similar look. And we can break those types down, if they're a coordination, or safety, or quality issue. We have all that at our fingertips.

And that creates very clear visibility into what's going on on the project, and what issues that we can go solve.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: So Dane, you mentioned in previous conversations that you were starting to look into what we're seeing on the screen here, this aspect of the platform, our Insights tool, that really brings all of the project data together in one place. And helps teams understand project health, the summary, the risk aspects.

You know we have a strong analytics tool, both in the project and across projects, and you can tap into AI and machine learning capabilities like RFI risk factor cards, which I think we're showing on the screen, which really analyzes and identifies those high risk RFIs. And classifies them in the root cause. Why are they happening? Really helping you identify the RFIs that can pose the greatest risk.

To further visualize that data, and also to really take advantage of it in things like Power BI integrations, templates, and standardizing, as we spoke about before, what the different stakeholders on our projects need to see. And have it there at their fingertips, so that they can make the decisions that they need to make.

So let's talk a little bit about connected workflows and data. This is one of our other pillars that we spoke about at the beginning of our class today. A construction technology tool is only a true platform if it connects workflows between the different stakeholders in the whole project lifecycle. And we all know that a project lifecycle isn't only the specific construction piece, but we have pre-construction design. And on the other spectrum, after construction we have operations.

So connecting field issues to, for example, design solutions, RFIs, and tracking the impact of the response to a potential cost or change order, incredibly important and powerful connection of workflows. Linking quality inspections to trackable assets during deliveries, or install, or commissioning.

Now Dane, with all of those connected workflows, we also understand that there is always going to be best-in-class technology outside of Autodesk. And we want to make sure that we're giving all of our customers a chance to bring that technology in and adopt it as part of their technology process lifecycle, whether that's through partner cards on the dashboards, or our data connector, or even our open API system in order to connect other technology with ours.

Integrations is a big and important piece of Autodesk Construction technology. Can you tell us a little bit about how your teams have adopted that side of connections and integrations with Autodesk Construction Cloud?

DANE PEMBERTON: Connectivity is key. It's like we talked about earlier, one of those key metrics, and one of those things that we certainly evaluated when we were going down our technology journey was what was available as far as pre-built integrations? What was available to integrate with things we knew we wanted? Autodesk Build, again, it helps remove some of those silos.

We have diverse market sectors that we work in, and they have specific needs. And sometimes that comes with specific technology, or best-in-class technology that we need for a very certain process. So we leverage the API tools, we leverage our integration partners pretty heavily to connect that to Build. But with the robust PM platform that Build is, we've seen a lot of value in leveraging unique solutions through it.

And it really has built on top of some of that best-in-class technology. So it's extremely important, and we'll cover a few examples for us that have really made a difference.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Awesome.

DANE PEMBERTON: So I would say that RFI reference that we mentioned earlier, and even a feature that we've noticed inside the Meeting Minutes tool, are great examples of streamline and workflows and connecting data. Heaven forbid, you get into an issue that you need to look back on historic tracking. With the Meeting Minutes tool, and linking the reference to when we create an issue, or when we create an RFI, and then we talk about it to an owner, and we document in the minutes that we had a conversation with the owner is extremely important. Because it helps us see the origins of certain issues, and it helps us backtrack on exactly what happened when, what was communicated when, and then how did we get to resolution.

This has sped up our team's ability to recall the backstory, and prevents them from digging through data storage locations, or digging through email, or digging through whatever to try to piece it together. It's all sitting right there on that one sheet of paper.

That connected workflow, in and of itself, has been extremely valuable, even though it's small, that we've seen efficiency gains through that. Another is managing cost activities. It's extremely important to have consistency, especially when you're managing cost. Before, we managed cost activities in several different places.

We would have an Excel spreadsheet to manage projections. We would have calculations off to the side on a sheet of paper. We'd have invoices in a different system, trying to backtrack and figure out where cost went, or what something got coded where. So what we've really loved inside the Autodesk Construction Cloud solution is that we can connect all that data.

So we built an integration to our ERP system, and we've connected all of those aspects together. And just by going through some clicks in the system, and drilling down on certain areas inside the Budget tab of the Cost module, we're able to drill down to some of those things. And so we don't have to print out a dozen reports, and enter in a different job number to then go and pull an Excel file.

So it's been extremely valuable to connect all those workflows together. That one is probably one of the biggest efficiency gains, in and of itself, that we've seen.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: I definitely think that connection that you're showing, Dane, really allows people to make decisions a lot quicker. Which is so important in cost management. We tend to, like you said, have to find information in multiple locations. Having it connected is definitely streamlining that process. So it's great to see the adoption of BL Harbert and the Cost Management tool.

DANE PEMBERTON: Yeah. One of the silver linings to connecting your ERP to the Cost, it allows accounting and the field side to get instant updates. One of the things that we noticed during our evolution in building our integration is we were able to make some of our workflows more efficient. We were able to look at what it took to process an invoice, or what it took to route an RFI and generate a PCO, and then produce that as a change order to the owner.

And we were able to increase efficiency in some of those workflows. And so again, those gains only speak to becoming more profitable and giving our teams more time.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Absolutely.

DANE PEMBERTON: So as you can see, those four pillars we talked about earlier, they are all interconnected in some way, shape, or form. Centralization helping us become more organized, sharing files through a central location, having a central location for people to login to a project and manage things, like a project hub, is extremely valuable.

On top of that, we build standardization in that hub, and we get to improve productivity. And we get to remove some of the barriers for our teams, so that they can do those inspection reports and utilize some of those templates that we provide. And then once we had centralization and standardization, the accounting and visibility came right into play. And we can be more proactive, and we spend less time trying to figure out where things are, and more time trying to figure out how to answer questions to problems that we have.

And then lastly, connecting all of those together and being in a common environment and data environment allows us to build the integrations. And it helps us make more informed decisions quicker, and avoids delays in getting information across our teams and across our systems.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: So we've covered a lot today. But to really sum it up, what value have you seen technology really drive today?

DANE PEMBERTON: You know, at the project level it's helped us start projects faster, more confidently. We've removed the ambiguity of what you need through that centralization. We provide our project teams a common toolkit. They get the standards, the templates, the things that they need to hit the ground running immediately.

And then we've streamlined their workflows. At the company level, we are starting to see a return on our technology investment. Our teams are invested in using the system. It's intuitive, it's easy to use. It's allowing us to spend more time training on the things that are foundational. We are focused on our operation and process optimization.

We're spending less time supporting technology, and more time leveraging it. And then our company-level reporting, that accountability and insight, is helping everyone see things through the platform, and gaining the visibility into what our operations at a company level really need. So it's been tremendously valuable there.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: So, now that we've seen what your adoption has looked like currently with technology, what's next? Where is BL Harbert going to, and what's your vision?

DANE PEMBERTON: It's a great question. I think we spoke to it earlier. We spent a lot of time building a great foundation, assembling great partners, getting our technology up to speed and current. So now, one of our biggest goals for the future is expansion.

We want to continue to grow our technology footprint. We want to continue to grow our utilization. We want to take advantage of what we know we have inside these systems, and really leverage the analytics to resolve company problems. Find out where we need help the most.

Some of that root cause stuff you talked about earlier, through the AI engine, that's a big goal of ours. And so with the ACC foundation, we're going to also continue to look at the emerging technologies, and really the ones that we think improve profitability for the company. And we think by leveraging the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform we can look at things like reality capture and photogrammetry, AI, robotics.

We really think having the foundation is what we needed to help move forward. And so our vision is to leverage that, grow it, and continue to look at ways to innovate.

ESTEBAN CORRALES: Awesome. Well thank you so much, Dane, for all of that incredible information, and walking us through the technology adoption path and future of what BL Harbert is doing with the partnership that we have with you here at Autodesk. We'll open it up now to Q&A.