Your Construction Data Is Like A Social Network

EMILY HEPPARD: Good morning, everyone. My name is Emily Heppard, joined by Tim Vock. We are going to be talking this morning about how Gibson Electric finally solved document chaos.

So I know that this is labeled in the session catalog as a product demonstration, but it's really more of a true case study. We are going to be talking about features of the product, but as you've seen through three days of the expo, you can get a sales pitch, you can understand and learn about features of a product, but all of that is really informative, but stories are really powerful.

And so when you hear from a contractor directly about how they've applied this product to solve real challenges that have made life truly improved and business processes truly improved for their business, that's what really resonates.

And so when we talk about features today, if there's anything that you want to dive into a little bit further or actually see it in action, you can come visit the data booth at Con 226. So that's 226 inside of the Construction section of the expo today. We'll be there till 4:00 PM.

So just to give you a heads up on the structure of the presentation, we're going to get started here with some introductions. So Tim, go ahead.

TIM VOCK: Hi, and thank you, Emily. So that handsome man over on the left is me. And I'm Tim Vock. I am the manager at Gibson Electric. I've had what you might consider a little bit of a scenic tour in my background. Got my engineering degree from Illinois, did some product development for a handful of years, and decided, why not quit that good job and go back to school for economics and get a master's there?

So it seems like a wild jump, and it was, but it gave me a lot of perspective how the world works, an appreciation for conveying complex ideas to the uninitiated and undergraduates.

What did it not leave me with, though, was a good job that paid well. So I went back to MBA school and almost fell into construction almost by accident. And this was back in 2008 or so when construction was booming, the economy was booming, and everything was still so new and nobody really had any experience, especially on the electrical side of BIM at the time.

That people who could turn on AutoCAD and actually talk to a foreman were worth their weight in gold. So that's a little bit of how I kind of fell into the industry, but then-- so I've been in here ever since, and I've been at Gibson Electric for the last 11 years now.

EMILY HEPPARD: Awesome, thanks. And I came to DADO from Bluebeam. So I was at Bluebeam for about four years running their Academic Engagement program, working with students and educators getting technology into the hands of our next generation of builders.

And then came over to DADO because I really, really believed in this mission of making life easier for folks in the field, easing that access to documentation, eliminating confusion. And so I'm really proud of what we've been able to build at DADO, and I'll tell you a bit more about the company here in a second.

But I am also the daughter of a project manager who just retired on Friday last year, about 40 years in the industry. So I don't think I've ever seen him so happy or relaxed in his entire life, but grew up visiting his job sites and really developing appreciation for the stewardship and the pride that goes into building our environment and that responsibility to communities that builders have.

And so I really am so fortunate to have found a home in this industry and be able to work with folks like Tim and you all. And so yeah, that's how I landed in construction. But we are just going to give you a quick overview of both Gibson and then DADO. So Tim, go ahead and tell us about Gibson Electric.

TIM VOCK: Yeah. So I work for Gibson Electric, which is an EMCOR company, one of the larger electrical contractors in the Chicagoland area. And we do all kinds of projects. Mostly commercial, some light industrial, big and small. So we have a long history across the Chicagoland area and our sister companies across the country.

And like probably many of you here in the audience, as you even though we are a BIM team, we've all become increasingly involved in stuff that wasn't traditionally BIM, like all of the-- basically anything that has to do with getting information from the office to the field and back ended up in our court for the most part.

And all the document control responsibilities that come with it, because we were the only ones who could really play both sides, at least in our company where we had kind of one foot in the office, one foot in the field, and would directly get all the problems if they didn't work, right direct from the foreman because we were oftentimes on-site.

So we ended up kind of becoming the technical experts because this was-- they needed somebody to be able to understand the depth of these programs and set everything up and be on the ball of the whole time.

EMILY HEPPARD: And then can you walk us through Gibson's tech stack as well?

TIM VOCK: Yeah. So how many people here are subcontractors? How many of you are electrical subcontractors? General contractors? OK. I know we all have our challenges, and it's certainly not easy being a subcontractor. We have to deal with a lot of stuff. We kind of have to make everything work according to what our customers do.

And we have a general contractor who's in Dropbox, so we have to use Dropbox. We have another customer who's in SharePoint, so we use SharePoint. And I have dozens of logins. I have a text file on my computer just to remember where to log into every project to get all the information across various customers.

It's obviously a big pain in the butt. And then we have to take all this from all these customers and still make a system that works for us here in Gibson Electric, because I don't want all of our foremen to deal with the same headaches that I have to deal with. So as much as I can streamline that workflow, it's all the better.

So I know there are many ways to do this. Certainly if any of you have some good solutions, my contact information will be up at the end, so please let me know because I'd love to learn from you and that's what we're all here for.

And we've used many obviously solutions. Some of these we only work with externally, some of them we do for our internal. Like OneDrive we use for a lot of the stuff that we do within Gibson. But one of the solutions that we brought in to our tech stack recently is DADO. And it's been-- we're going to go through some of the advantages of why it's worked for us.

And like Emily said, this is not so much a sales pitch, it's just kind of part of my story. And in some ways, some of the solutions that we're going to see might make it imply like this is a competitor to some of the Autodesk products like Build or PlanGrid, but in my case, it's actually the opposite.

The way that we bring in DADO, it actually makes Build even easier of a pitch for me to try to get our company into it. So there's actually a lot of complementarities, because one of the great things about Build is it plays well in the sandboxes, and so does DADO, so I can make them work all together.

So we have an extensive tech stack at Gibson Electric, and this is just the stuff that we do with documents, obviously, not even including any of the BIM stuff that we were supposed to do when we got hired, right?

EMILY HEPPARD: Awesome. And then just to tell you a little bit about DADO. So we are a construction technology company founded in 2018 in the Bay Area of California, specifically in Oakland. And we really primarily serve trade contractors.

We have a couple of general contractors as well that we work with, but our core focus is the trades, because there is so little construction technology out there that has been built specifically with trade contractors in mind. So often, trade contractors are asked to adopt a solution that has been built for a different type of business, divert size business, and try to make it work for very, very specific needs.

And so that's why DADO was built. We recently in May became part of Stanley Black & Decker. So we were acquired into the Construction Technology Division of DeWalt Tools.

And our typical customers are predominantly, again, trade contractors in electrical, mechanical, plumbing, we have a steel contractor down at St Louis, we have some wall and ceiling folks as well, but really, MEP is where we live and where we find that our customers have a lot of success.

And our secret to our success is really our partnership focus. So working with awesome people like Tim and our other customers across the country, we really want to work with folks that want to help us refine the product and drive that product vision.

So we wanted to be very specific about who we work with. We never try to push sort of a square peg in around hole type of situation that I'm sure some of you have probably been in before where you can tell that company just wants to make the sale and they want to make the commission and they want to get it done.

But at DADO, we want to be really intentional about who we work with and make sure not only this product is going to be really beneficial for their team, but we're also going to be able to work together to make it the best product that is going to serve their business for years to come.

And then I'm going to hand it over to Tim now to talk about some of the challenges with implementing new technologies that he's experienced at Gibson. But something I forgot to mention at the beginning of this is we are-- the way that this presentation is structured is we're doing 30 minutes of presentation and then we've got 30 minutes reserved for Q&A.

But we would love for this to be more of a conversation. If there's something that have a question about as we're talking today, you have a comment, just go ahead and raise your hand and we'll come by and we just want to hear what you have to say or what you think.

So you can reserve those for the end of the presentation, but if there's something you want clarification on now, just go ahead and jump in. So Tim, go ahead.

TIM VOCK: OK. So there's been quite a few technologies who have entered our space, including just some of these names here that are probably too small for you to read anyway. But even I don't know what 90% of these guys do, at least not yet.

So there's-- I mean, for the most part I think it's awesome, because people are realizing just what a huge industry and what big complex problems we have that can't be solved by anybody who's not coming from our perspective, because we can't just take something that was used for design firms or for a different industry and make it work for construction.

And we've had to do that, tried to do that for years, take consumer-based products and try to make construction work for it, but it doesn't work very well. So as exciting as it is to have all these people finally realizing that there's something to be said here, like Emily said, they're not all coming from our perspective, they don't know what our problems are, the things that we face every day. And those are the types of things that we need to work with.

With DADO specifically, I actually speak to them every week, and they've tweaked their software. They're still, I guess, focused enough that they're trying to make those improvements. So we've seen some good things come along in the recent months.

But really, all these people, sometimes they have a solution, they want me to incorporate it into my workflow, but really, I know what my problem is. My problem, which is probably the same problem that most of you here have because I don't haven't met anybody in construction without it, and that's really information flow.

We spend way too much time trying to find information in order to organize it and make sure that what we find is actually accurate. So when we're successful, we look back and say, wow, did I spend a lot of time trying to find that little piece of information and it was all unproductive time. And then when we fail, of course, we install wrong, and that's the biggest cost in construction.

So this is our problem to solve, this document chaos as we call it here. And it's been a while since we've had anything resembling that middle picture, thank goodness, but it's not as far back as I'd like to believe that it was. When I came to Gibson 12 years ago, we actually had projects that were organized that way and PMs that still had stacks and stacks and stacks of paper.

We've gotten away from that and that. Then we went to the electronic version of that mass of paper, the folder structure over on the left, which came with all of its own problems, because now we have all this stuff to sort through.

So I created all these folders, you've got to drill down through it, you have a folder structure, you have permissions to set to maintain that all these different levels, subfolder levels, making sure everybody can see what they need to see, edit what they need to edit. Giant pain in the butt. Nobody wants to drill through all of this thing.

And then-- for one example, we did the high-rise in downtown Chicago and I asked, how do you want these files organized? Because you have to set up the folder structure at the beginning of the job and you have to know what it's going to be like by the time we're installing, otherwise you can't just go redo it all.

Says, we're going to assign foreman by floor. Great. You have a first-level foreman, I'll make a first-level folder so they can go into the Level 1 folder, they can see all their power drawings and their low-voltage drawings and their fire alarm drawings, everything else. And then the Level 2 foreman would have a Level 2 folder.

Everything is organized this way, we have all of our documents in there. Get to the install, they assign foreman by system. So low-voltage, foreman comes, how do I get all my information for all the low-voltage drawings? Well, easy.

Go into the Level 1 folder, go into the low-voltage folder, and then find your drawings, and then go back up three folders, and then go into Level 2 and then go down to low-voltage and find your documents. And then go up two folders again, and then go into Level 3-- over and over.

So needless to say, neither one of us were very happy with this situation, and it was really impossible to undo at this point of the project. And when people have a hard time getting information, that's when we find shortcuts.

When people just take the files out and they copy it into their own folder on their desktop and then they use that because it's so much more easily organized, and then the problem comes because they forgot to copy out the one that changed that's up here and the only place that we're actually controlling, and something goes wrong, of course.

So the easier we can make all this access to information, the more we can get rid of folder structures and make it easily inflexible than that's all the much better our installation is going to be.

EMILY HEPPARD: And I know that you told me this before, Tim, but did you guys have a company-wide standard naming convention for your folders? Or was this by project?

TIM VOCK: Yes. So we started out by doing it by project, and we had-- every PM had their own folder structure. And then we have a Low Voltage division. They have a completely different folder structure than our Power division. So it's a mess, it's hard to find, you have to constantly explain to people where to find it.

One of the things that our CEO, who was new at the time, decided to do, let's organize this and keep it all in one simple folder structure which pays huge dividends, because I was part of this conversation and I wanted them all to be numbered by basically access.

Like make folder number 1 the one that everybody needs access to, has all the project drawings in it and all this. And then folder 2, be a little bit more restrictive. Maybe just the foreman or the coordinators need that, but not everybody, not the subcontractors.

And then every folder number would get more restrictive until you get like financials that you want to restrict everybody into. And that worked great, and it also makes it easier to archive and if you have to split folders because some of them have to be in the cloud and some of them have to be in the network because of nobody wants the security or financial stuff in the cloud, you can put it back together in a way that makes sense, making archive a whole lot easier.

So we did come a long way in those, but it's still lacking, it's still going through folders and finding folders. And then at the subfolder levels, everything changes project-to-project, because a high-rise is not a data center, it's not a tenant buildout, and that's just how it is.

Either you have a whole bunch of wasted folders that nobody uses and are completely empty, or-- So I guess if you make it complex enough to fit all of our jobs, you're going to have a lot of waste in there, too.

EMILY HEPPARD: Who relates to that? Quite a few. I see some nodding heads, some smiles. So we are just-- I'm going to ask Tim to walk through how he took DADO and utilized specific features to get a handle on this document chaos, and then we're going to walk through some specific examples of how that worked out.

TIM VOCK: OK, so we had a number of issues that we were dealing with at Gibson Electric that I'm sure most of you are-- so at some high level, some of these are some of our biggest problems that I dealt with. Administration time, the first big project I was on at Gibson was a big data center, and we had somebody with full-time document control and just tracking down every drawing and making sure that every foreman and had the correct version of every sharp drawing in order to install correctly.

And it was very important and it was a great job and he did really well, but at the same time, that's all unproductive time. If we can cut it down from somebody having a full-time job to somebody spending a few minutes checking on things every day, it all goes to our bottom line.

We also had issues with forms that we'll get into in a little bit here because we-- at first, of course, we had paper forms and bad handwriting and then people snapping pictures and emailing it in. We digitized all of our forms with Bluebeam tools and we've come a long way and that way, but there are still ways that we wanted to improve that we'll show you in a few minutes here.

And then the biggest problem that we have is that finding information piece, making sure that we have that accurate information. I used to do-- finding information on a project to me used to mean going doing window searches.

You go into that project folder, you search Windows for Level 1 to find all the Level 1 drawings, but then you might find a couple, and then you type "L01" and then "L1" and then "first floor" and then hope that they were all listed in the title of the document, because then you have that list. And then you open them all up and then you use Bluebeam to do a text search within those documents on the stuff you're going to find.

So now we use data to just make it one contextual search that will go through all of that all at once. So that was a huge, huge pull for me for using this type of solution.

OK. Document admin time. So this it pains me a little bit to see these pictures because they were all from projects, a lot of the stuff that I put up here that we actually did all the time. And I'd spend way too much of my day doing this instead of doing actual BIM management like I'm supposed to.

So a typical story for us might be that I would get an email from the project manager. And Bulletin 1 was issued and it's up on Procore. Here's the link from the customer-forwarded email. Tim, can you download and control all of this stuff?

Then I'd hit the link and then it says, access denied because the customer didn't put my email on it. So we'd go back and forth and get those permissions, and then we'd download it all to my desktop, and then I would use Bluebeam to make sure all the pages were labeled correctly and extract all the documents.

And then we'd put it up onto OneDrive where we had all of our document control for a lot of this stuff, and we'd have to either use batch slip sheeting or create a set, archive all the old ones, make sure all the hyperlinks got fixed, all the markups got transferred over to the latest versions. Obviously a big mess and nobody wants to deal with.

And many of these other solutions, including things like PlanGrid, have made it so that some of these steps are a lot easier. You can put up one PDF and it will do a pretty good job finding the drawing-- numbers and names and things and not having you archive the old stuff. So some of this stuff took us a couple of steps towards that solution, but not as far as we wanted to take it.

So now we use DADO. And so what you can see here, we actually, instead of the previous situation, now I get that email, same email from my PM. But at the beginning of the job, I already set up an autosync, which goes into Procore automatically downloads everything that Procore puts under Drawings and syncs it over to DADO.

And you set up a template just like you might in PlanGrid to make sure that it grabs the information correctly and indexes it properly at the beginning, especially if you have drawings from engineers and architects that don't look the same, make sure that it all grabs everything. But this is all at the beginning, all at the frontend.

So we have all those drawings and they're already synced. So these days, when that job goes-- when that Bulletin 1 goes up onto Procore, it's already synced. So I get that email from the PM, I go into DADO, check to make sure that it's all already there, I say, it's done, and then I pretty much delete the email.

AUDIENCE: Just to clarify, this is the GC's Procore, not your own internal?

TIM VOCK: Correct, yes. We don't have Procore within Gibson for our own stuff, but many of our customers use it. So yeah, we often have to go in and sync everything down, and a lot of times it's a manual process for us, or at least it was before. And some of them are in Procore, some of them are in Box, and some of them are in everything else. So we have to be able to manage all of that.

So I know this part, too, there are also other products out there like 360 Sync that will take from one Procore and sync it to the others and that works pretty well, too. DADO had all this built in for all the big ones that we use, though.

EMILY HEPPARD: I think, too, just to add to that, reducing document admin time is something that our engineering teams spent months, if not years refining, because they realized what a massive drain on resources and time and just huge frustration that document admin process was.

And so taking that from hours down to minutes setting, up syncs to these platforms that are commonly used in the industry, this was really, really important for us to get right. And so yeah, you have a question?

AUDIENCE: I mean, the time absolutely kills me, but it's the danger? One guy misses one thing one day and you're screwed.

EMILY HEPPARD: That's exactly right.

TIM VOCK: We have a customer-- even on a recent project, a big customer that puts their drawings on PlanGrid, their submittals on Box, and there RFIs on Procore. But if you go into their Box folder, they have drawings there, they're just not updated.

So that's even a bigger danger-- I would rather them not be in Box at all because I don't want somebody to find drawings that are wrong. I'd rather them not find it and have to go look for some place where they actually are. So of course, this causes a million headaches and just a potential downfall for all of us because if you forget to tell the new foremen on the job not to go onto the-- trust the drawings on Box, then they don't do it and they're installing incorrectly.

So with the DADO for that particular project, I set up an autosync to get the drawings from PlanGrid, the submittals from Box, and the RFIs from Procore, and it works. And now if the foreman only opens up DADO, they don't have to care where there's three other places where information isn't correct anymore, they just go to the one place where it is and they don't really have to care where it came from.

And then the permissions are easier because I don't have to get the customer to add them on to three different sites. I just give them permission to the one, to DADO, and that's all in-house so I can just do that myself. So that makes it a whole lot easier for us.

And then also, all of these different sources-- some of them have pretty good notifications, some of them don't at all. Like you can subscribe to this folder, so I automatically get an email alert when anything is added or changed. But some of them don't work very well and I get a whole bunch of junk.

There's certain sites that I won't name that I just have them all go right to the deleted items because it gives me so much nonsense that I don't care about. So with the DADO, I make an alert to say, any time anything changes, send it to me, because I want to know right away.

How many of you use Microsoft Teams here? We've used it in a big way, especially since the pandemic, and it's been great centralizing a lot of our communications. And I don't know if everybody is aware of this, but like all of your Teams channels have email addresses. And the way that that's really handy is you can just go in and say get email addresses.

So I go into Outlook, and anytime I get these alerts, I have an outlook rule saying, forward it to the Teams channel. So by now, Bulletin 1 might be coming out as we speak, as I'm standing up here. If it does, my Outlook is automatically forwarding it to the team and they see on the chat the email with the hyperlinks to everything that's changed, and I don't even have to know about it until I go back and check later today.

AUDIENCE: I have a question. So how would you-- how would you QA/QC the process?

TIM VOCK: Oh. Now, that's a great question, that's always a trick. So that's-- of course when you first set it up, I set up those links and then I have to make sure that I go on the website to make sure everything's going in. I'll check a bunch of the drawing numbers just like I would in PlanGrid because we've used that quite a bit, too.

I set up-- I'd throw up a whole bunch of sheets in the PlanGrid and then let it sync for a little while, and then I go back and track like, are they capturing the drawing numbers correctly? Is it putting it in the right category? Do I have to go back and fix something?

And I would do the same thing, especially at the beginning of the job here. After so many drawings, you get obviously a lot more confident because everything is being picked up correctly. But then every time I do get one of these notifications, that Bulletin 1 is coming out or a new RFI response, I'll go into DADO and just check that it's there just to make sure that my foreman has it.

And it could be like you have sync rules, too. Like you can have things-- if you want it to pull the drawings automatically but you don't want it going right to the field, you want it to pause there and not be reviewed yet until you went and checked it, we have projects like that where they'll come out with new drawing sets, but this is for pricing only.

So we don't want the field to have that information yet. So you can say, don't automatically push it. Just have it here in a holding pattern. And then I'll have to go in and then I'll have to say, all right, they released us to work on it. Grab all these things and publish them, and then all the foremen now have all that information. Anybody who's not an administrator only has the current ones.

AUDIENCE: How did you set up the-- oh. How did you set up the rule that it would not-- these are for pricing only and not for construction yet? Because I was going to actually ask that question, is, when do you decide if it needs a change order attached to it and we don't want to publish it for the field because we might not have an approved change order yet, but then they will start going doing that work?

TIM VOCK: Right. Yeah, so that's a great question. We do have many projects like that. So in the DADO workflow, when I set up a template, like let's say that it's for drawings, and I'll set up the template so that it knows where to find and it will find the latest-- the issuance, the date, the number all this kind of stuff. And then there's just a checkbox saying, do you want it to automatically publish this if it meets the template?

So the template found all that information. It knows and match because you have something like how DADO is going to check to make sure that it matches your template. And then it's just that checkbox, whether you want it to push automatically or not.

So in some of our projects, we just want everything just to go right through. But yeah, some of our bigger, messier jobs that we have a lot of these changes that aren't approved right away, we have to put in all those stopgaps, but it's really just a checkbox.

EMILY HEPPARD: I loved that tip on Microsoft Teams. I didn't know that. I love presenting, I learn so much. This is so good. So next we're going to talk about digitizing forms.

TIM VOCK: And one more thing about the alerts, too. While I set up the alerts, because I want to be notified of everything, those are customizable, too. So we also have foremen who like-- if you're the fire alarm form, and you don't want to be alerted every time anything comes out for the whole project because they're just going to put it all in their Deleted Items folder and never see the changes that they care about.

But you can set up custom alerts. So I can do a search for fire alarm or FA or whatever it's going to pull up, and then to send immediately to his email address. And so he will get only the information updates that he cares about and nothing else, and you can just turn these on and off. And again, all internally controlled. So it's nice and easy for him to just get just the streamlined information.

So on digitizing forms, we used to have those awful paper forms with all the messy handwriting. And we have since gotten a whole lot better digitized. And we use Bluebeam, they have pretty handy form creation tools. I know Microsoft has some now. There's-- a bunch of them that have nice form creation that makes everything a whole lot nicer, that makes all of your information typable and searchable. And so we have that.

This is an example of something that we do right now. We actually have links to an Email Me form, and then our form will fill all this stuff out on their-- usually on their laptops, maybe on their iPads, and then they'll push it in and it goes up to the PM.

But it's still a little bit messy because one, it goes through an email and then the PM has to file it someplace. And there are good solutions-- like Build has all this stuff built into it, but one of the big things for us is that we can do like this daily construction report, you pretty much have to be on your laptop to do it.

So what DADO allowed us to do is have, I guess, a couple of things. One, it has a really robust voice-to-text, which means that now our foreman can do it on his phone sitting in the front seat of his truck and just hit the little microphone button and talk like you were talking to Siri or something and it would just type everything out correctly and then hit the-- with the thumb and submit.

Because most of us-- at least most of our foremen are not that fast at typing like this. I mean, maybe their 14-year-old daughters would prefer this to a keyboard, but most of us don't. So I actually gave one of these forms to our foreman and he started filling the stuff out.

He has a difficult-to-spell last name, so he had to say his name in the context of whatever he was reporting. And he's used to just going back and fixing his name and that's what he has to deal with. I don't. My last name is four letters long, I don't have this problem.

But he does, and it incorrectly spelled his name and then DADO stopped itself, went back and fixed the spelling. And I'm not the programmer, but I assume it's because his last name appeared in other documents in the project some place, it found itself, corrected it.

And for somebody who has to deal with that problem all the time, this was wonderful to him, and the fact that he could do all this stuff with just his voice and his thumb, at the end of it he said, Tim, I think this is how we're going to do all of our forms from now on very soon. So hopefully that will be the case.

And then on the backend it's also searchable so you can have all of your information, you can filter out all of your forms whether you want certain weather forms or forms that were filled out by a certain foreman, any inputable parameters that you want to add to these filters. And it will also search any of the text that was in those forms also, so that makes it pretty handy on the backend.

EMILY HEPPARD: I mean, you guys have been able to draw some insights, too, from your form data now as well?

TIM VOCK: Well, that's the plan. We haven't gotten there quite--

EMILY HEPPARD: Well, you're about to, then.

TIM VOCK: Yeah.

EMILY HEPPARD: But if we think about-- who uses paper forms on a daily basis at your company? Some, a couple, a handful. When we think about digitizing the forms and then the insights and the data and the trends that we can analyze, I mean, this is a game-changer. So very excited to see how Gibson takes this-- takes this further.

And then the next piece that we are going to discuss is finding information-- I know you touched on that earlier in the presentation, just the difficulty of drilling through folder structures, using Control-F having to be so, so precise with the terminology that you were searching. So tell us a little bit more about that.

TIM VOCK: Yeah. So this is the biggest pain point for me. This, what we see here on the slide is a portion of one of our shop drawings that we issued to the field. So as a little bit of a background, any time I hire somebody on my team, I say, your first objective is to make the foreman happy. Because if the foreman's happy, the job is successful, profitable, everybody else will become happy eventually.

And for the most part, I think it's good advice. I still tell it to people when I do it. At the same time, there are different perspectives, and one of the things that I have get into my foreman with is that they want everything-- all the information on one page.

So this is an example of that. So we have probably way too much information that makes all of us cringe because I have to repeat all this information on all these pages so that the foreman can hand over one PDF or one paper copy drawing to the installer and say, you don't have to look anyplace else, you don't have to go through any folder structures, you don't have to find other forms or whatever, I just want you to have this one PDF and you can see the whole thing, everything you need to install.

Which makes a lot of sense. But for me, that's all redundant information. And if I have to print out the feeder IDs or the run schedule like we see over here, that means any time anything changes in that run schedule, I might have 12 different drawings that I now have to update and reprint.

And then somebody has to go through and make sure that I didn't miss one. What a pain. So I like to have the least amount of information on a drawing as possible even though that's directly opposed to what our foreman does. So we're going to get back to this problem in just a second here.

This is another example of something that we deal with all the time. We have to-- I have to model transformers and switchgear and generators and panels. And so we get these submittals, and sometimes they're 100 pages long. And I just want the dimensions and I want to know where the conduit entry area is. And I really don't care about all the other electrical stuff, at least not right now.

But you have to kind of go through all these things. And sometimes, this page, the page 45 that I'm looking for, was scanned. So that makes it a real pain, and then you have to flip through every page to do it. So in this case, this is something that I did just a few weeks ago.

I did a little voice search on DADO and I said low-voltage transformers. It's pretty good at contextualizing, so if I say low-voltage transformers and something is called LV transformers, it's good at finding that and bringing it up even though that's not how I said it, which is one of the nice saviors for finding that right information.

So it brings up the drawings and the RFIs or submittals or anything else that's relevant to low-voltage transformers when I did that search. And this one was at the top, the submittal, which is what I was looking for. I go in and I did a text search for inches and it brought me to this page because inches, as you can see in the lower-right, is actually on this page.

Even though this was a scanned picture, the OCRs have gotten so good, the Optical Character Recognitions that it automatically, when you push it into DADO, draws all of the optical character recognition. So it's really good at finding even handwritten text now, so it's pretty incredible. We can use this type of things to take a picture of the cover of our panels or QA/QC and it will find the text that was written on that gear and then be able to, when you search your pictures, it will find all of that stuff for you.

EMILY HEPPARD: And I just want to add, before we get into the next section, just touch on something that you said, Tim, about LV versus low-- well, low voltage, AHU versus Air Handling Unit. We've really-- because this tool is built for construction, it's built for construction search, we've built the language of construction into it.

And it continues to get smarter as more people use it and as more people run searches. So we want to make sure that we're including associated terms, but we're also making it really forgiving with things like spelling, or just in the case of your foreman's name, like making sure that it's going to recognize previously entered terms.

I personally can never spell mezzanine correctly, but DADO always returns that result for me because it recognizes that this is close enough that that's likely the term I'm searching for. Whereas a Control-F search either has to be exactly right or you're not going to return anything at all. So that's another piece that we really wanted to build in. Oh yeah, absolutely.

AUDIENCE: I have a question on-- how does this software work if you're already using Autodesk Construction Cloud?

TIM VOCK: That's a great question, because at Gibson, we're still in the evaluating stages, and I'm hoping that-- I'm trying to push my way into using Build as a platform for project management. I know there are other good competitors out there that many of our-- places use. Procore and ProjectSight from Trimble and some of these other ones.