Raising the Floor of Construction Technology Literacy

ZANE HUNZEKER: All right. We got a mic? We got a mic? OK.

What's up? Tuesday afternoon. AU. I'm surprised you made it here.

Question. Who has skipped a class to take a nap? The rest of you are liars.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Absolute liars, because I know I have skipped at least one. We'll call it that.

All right. How's it going? Today we're going to talk about raising the floor of construction technology literacy. That is a mouthful. And I don't want to say that again.

So we are just going to talk about how we're just making everybody intelligent, right? We are taking the lowest common denominator of a company or of a division, of a project, whatever it may be, and we're trying to elevate them, because we're just as strong as the weakest link, right?

So a little bit about me. You may know me as Zane. That's kind of my name.

And I've been in the industry for about eight years, more or less solely in the VDC realm. I quite literally eat, sleep, and drink this stuff. I've had nightmares about projects and woken up sweaty. And my wife goes, Zane, are you OK? I'm just worried about this grease deck. I don't know how we're going to do it. But anyway, a little humor.

So we're here to talk about some of the barriers, potential ROIs of what we've implemented at Swinerton. And you'll notice a trend as we start to talk about barriers.

Now. Does anybody have any idea what might be typical barriers of entry to technology in construction? This is going to be interactive. So I can call on people if nobody volunteers.

AUDIENCE: Funding?

ZANE HUNZEKER: Funding. That is on the list. But it's definitely not number one.

AUDIENCE: Getting everyone on board.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Everyone on board. That's up there.

AUDIENCE: Lack of infrastructure.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Lack of infrastructure. That is not on my list. But it is a very good one.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yes. People not wanting to push themselves forward. Reluctance, as it were. And I have found that a lot of it is actually just their personality.

In kind of summation of these points. And then I do have price on there, so funding or the monetary amount that it takes to get in there.

Now in a typical commercial construction company, there's enough money to innovate, at least a bare minimum. And we'll talk a little bit about what I mean by a bare minimum in a minute.

Sorry. This is air is so dry and it's killing my voice.

But you'll notice that, like I said, most of this is personality types. So I have a very, very old school general superintendent for our metal stud and framing group. I have pleaded with him for years to let us do BIM for his metal stud framing. And he said no, you know, we just need to have the king studs in there, because those are just the critical items. And as long as you miss those, we really don't care.

And through an opportunity where we had more or less zero fee on a job because we were trying to get into this client-- it was a very lucrative manufacturer that we were going to do TI after TI after TI after TI after TI. And they gradually were getting bigger. We actually just got awarded a $10 million TI for that company, so clearly our strategy worked.

And through some of the basic technology that we implemented, we were able to save 20% of our labor costs. And I'll get to that in a minute.

But you'll also notice that there's generally a reluctance in a lot of these I don't want to say older, because that feels judgy, but in a lot of the people that have not had the experience to be exposed to the technology, tends to be, well, why are we doing this, because that's part of my job? So there's almost a fear component involved in it.

So to move forward, what do we do about it? What do you think?

AUDIENCE: Put it in front of them.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Put it in front of them. Sure. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll do it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: There we go. That's a very good avenue to get in there. Anything else?

AUDIENCE: Incentivize adoption.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Incentivize adoption how?

AUDIENCE: Financially.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Financially. OK. Well, I know that my particular division in Swinerton actually rated our superintendents and our foreman based off of their BIM performance. So whether or not they could look at a model, that was a part of their performance review. Those that got poor scores immediately came to me and said, I need training for this. And I said, great. I've just been asking you for three years, but that's fine.

So my suggestion is that we start with the absolute basics. Now, what do you think I mean by absolute basics?

AUDIENCE: Model navigation.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Model navigation. Simpler than that. Because we're talking about construction technology, right? Open a file is kind of still model-based. So it's not model coordination. It's not going to be a model viewer.

Even more basic than that. And it seems to a lot of us in this room that that would be your baseline, right? Well, it's not. You know, sometimes there's tablets involved. And even turning on a tablet for some of these guys is difficult, which seems strange to a lot of us. But that's the reality of some people.

Even just opening up PDFs. I've had superintendents and foremen saying that I just-- I just need this. And it's their sheet of plans that is out of date about two weeks into the project, because they don't slip sheet all of their sheets like we do digitally for the job, right? So they're building off of bad plans that may or may not be months behind what we've actually got in the official document set.

Believe it or not, digital timecards I found was the basis of entry for some of our guys. They were actually writing down their timecard and having somebody else put it in for them. That may seem extreme. But it's the reality of some of these people.

And it's not that they're bad employees, by any means. This gentleman that I'm talking about actually can accelerate a schedule on a casino job for us by two or three months. But with the advent of BIM on his most recent job, all of a sudden he was coming to me, why is all this pipe in the wrong place? They told me you changed it in BIM.

And I was like, yeah, because there was three times as much stuff in this space. And you can't fit all that in here. And he says, well, that's not what it looked like on the drawings. And I said, well, it's what was in the drawings, actually. You just didn't overlay all of them, because that's digital to overlay.

Anyway, so we found that once you kind of break the barrier, so call it the digital timecard, you can then go up to PDFs, and then maybe to PDFs on a tablet, and then maybe a model viewer on a tablet, and then maybe the model viewer on the computer. And then maybe, just maybe they will participate in model coordination.

And how do we do this? Like was said over here, we have to appeal to the person. You have to find out what drives them towards the technology or towards their success on a project. It could be schedule, safety, cost control, prefabbing. Oddly enough, I wanted somebody-- or somebody told me that they wanted to prefab, but they didn't want to be a part of the model. They clearly didn't understand that process.

Some other people want to have a higher level of quality control. Now, what's a really easy way to do quality control on a job? Because we're at AU, it's BIM 360 Field or some sort of online, cloud-based QA/QC platform.

Now, you can do punch lists manually and literally have a card and punch, punch, punch, punch, punch. And that's OK. It's not the greatest. You're probably going to end up with a lot of issues and rework that way.

But maybe that's the rule, right? They want to have something that has very few change orders due to some sort of defect in punch.

So as soon as you can appeal to the person and find out what their core need is you can then start to address it. And finding this common ground, you can explain to them how this technology is going to help them achieve that.

For instance, if they have-- that drywall superintendent that I was talking about, not only did they make up 30% in production value on that job that they ended up prefabbing, they also accelerated the schedule by like a month, which is crazy. And all of that on a job that had zero fee turned into actual profit, which is-- which was great.

Digital documents can help streamline safety protocols. So if they have first work permits, hot work permits, pre-task planning, that sort of thing, if you make that digitally it makes things a lot faster. It's not that it necessarily makes you safer. But it makes you not drown in paperwork. If there's ever an issue on the job, you don't have to go through a filing cabinet to-- and search for four hours to see if they made their pre-task plan, right?

If you have it digitally, you can search by that person, by what date. And you can say, oh, well they didn't actually fill out their pre-task plan. That might have been why they got hurt.

Digital plans can reduce the confusion and maintaining one source of truth. So very similar to the superintendent that I was talking about, he wanted his one sheet of-- or one set of plans. And they were out of date almost immediately. And with a digital plan set and automatic slip sheeting with docs, per se, you can get that one source of truth that's up to date as quickly as humanly possible.

And we also found very good luck when we bought all of our superintendents and foremen iPads. So we actually got rid of some of their computers and just gave them iPads. We were able to link them to the drawings, link them to the model, link them to their timecard, all on their iPad.

And that-- excuse me. And that led them to just create things faster, process paperwork faster, email faster, and all without leaving their beloved job site, without even going to the job site trailer. They could just sit there having somebody grinding over here and they're typing an email. They don't have to go back. Speeds things up.

And to really hone in, you have to stay with them. I'm the divisional VDC manager for Swinerton San Diego. I take a personal responsibility to the success of technology adoption. I am on the phone countless times a week with somebody, usually a superintendent or a foreman, asking me questions about a particular platform, about they heard it from another foreman that had huge successes on a job. And so word of mouth travels, and then they want the same thing.

Most of them aren't ready for it yet. But with a little bit of handholding, a little bit of trust built up between the VDC department and the ops, we get there.

We also have to be available, not necessarily 24/7, not necessarily during the workday. But if I have five minutes between meetings and I get an email from-- a request to talk about something, to explain how they get views on their iPad, I'm going to take that call. And I'm going to make sure that they understand that. I may be a minute late to my next meeting, but I make sure that they feel like they're a priority.

And I know it sounds simple. But so much of this is just interpersonal connection. For instance, one of our ops managers, he is very, very, very, very old school. And when I started at Swinerton, I immediately was taken off to problem job sites to help them fix their problems.

And I got an email from this guy probably two months in, what the expletive, expletive, expletive have you been doing? I haven't seen you once in the office. And I said, oh, OK. Hold on. Let me tell you.

And I wrote him an email about that long explaining who asked me to do what, what I've been doing, our successes that we've seen. And after that, he hasn't asked a single question.

So once he understood, once there was a trust built up, there was some mutual respect. And he started actually looking at models. He started talking to the models that we created for the pursuits. He started understanding our process. And that made us more successful in our pursuits.

And the last thing on the list is repeatedly checking in. I can't understate that enough. Or I'm understating it, rather, that checking into them, making sure that they don't feel forgotten also makes it to where they remember that you exist as a VDC staff. Sometimes you get forgotten after you've signed off and you move on to the next four projects, right? And you just don't touch it until close out maybe.

And the only time that they remember that you're there is that if something gets screwed up. So I take, again, a personal responsibility to check into our jobs at least once a month. Sometimes it's in-person, if I can manage to get there. A lot of times it's just a phone call.

And I even attend-- occasionally we have superintendents meetings every quarter. So sometimes I'll pop my head in there, fist-bump a couple guys, hug a couple, just depends on our relationship, right?

And I found that over the last three years developing these relationships have made our BIM management so much simpler, because they actually look at my plan and all the work that we put in for six, seven months, sometimes a year on their projects as something that actually has value, rather than, I'm just going to build it the way I want to build it. And then all of that work is for nothing, right?

So we end up having not necessarily less rework, because mistakes will still all happen. But they don't get exacerbated, right? It's a very easy, well, here's the model. And I measured six feet from here to the beam. But you have 10 feet and you're right in the middle of where the duct wants to go. Move your damn pipe.

It's the end of the story. It's not, oh, well, why did you put it there? Hold on. You know, the duct work can move over there. That's fine. No. Just stop it right there in its place.

Is there are any questions so far? No. Is this everything you ever wanted?

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Take chuckles as no. OK. So moving on to a couple more success stories.

Our concrete layout foreman. We self-perform concrete, drywall, cleanup services, doors, frames, and hardware all in San Diego. And this happens to be our concrete layout foreman.

You'll notice that a lot of these pictures that I come up happen to have VR headsets on. And that's because we did a whole VR kind of expose of what we can do with VR. And we had a lot of the field staff come in. And that's why I have all these pictures, because that's about the only time I can actually snap a picture of these guys is when they don't know it's happening.

So this guy, he had a fear of losing his job. He was manually inputting, manually doing trigonometry to do all of his layout points, every slab step, every upturn beam, downturn beam. Every single point that he had to lay out he did manually.

And I don't know if anybody in here has ever done that. That is excruciatingly painful for me to hear. It takes so unbelievably long.

AUDIENCE: Is this done in AutoCAD?

ZANE HUNZEKER: Sorry. What?

AUDIENCE: In AutoCAD or just drawn on paper?

ZANE HUNZEKER: I mean, just scratch paper. And then he manually inputted the points into his Trimble Total Station. Yes. Worse than you even thought.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Right. So he had a fear of losing his job, because he thought that I was trying to replace him when I said, oh, you can do model-based layout.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yeah. And so he's like, I don't like that. No. I'm not going to use those points.

And then he-- just in general from that start, he was just very resistive to any suggestion, anything that I brought up to him. And he just-- he didn't have that trust, right?

So it came to a job that had 56 steps in the level one slab for him to come to me and say, OK, how do we do this? And so we got him Revit on his computer. I showed him how to make control points, how to make slab step points, how to make penetration points, or at least double-check them from the MEP guys.

And he actually ran with it. I showed him once. He did the first one by himself, made a couple of issues that weren't major at all. They weren't slab steps. They were just double-checking where the layout points were for the MEPs.

And we also gave him digital documents so that he could flip through the pages to make sure that he could cross-check between what's in real life, what's blocked out on the form work, and what's in the model, because we also gave him the coordination model viewer, and then what he sees in front of him and on the documents. So he can triple-check everything across.

And he now can lay out 56 slab steps in less than a day, because of this trust that had to be built and all of this handholding that, I'll be honest, was months of time. Those months happen to be getting up to that level one slab pour, because he knew it was coming. But the rest of the floors below weren't that complicated, so he didn't want to put forth the effort yet.

But it ended up being extremely positive. And we saved practically a week of his time, which on a project that's already slightly behind schedule is extremely important.

Now, here's one of our general superintendents. Again resistive personality. Wasn't trusting.

And he always thought that he could do better than the VDC staff. He always thought he knew better. Well, you know, I've been doing this longer than you've been alive type of mentality, which is true. He did have 35 years of experience.

So it's not like I could say, well, you're just not doing it right. That clearly will never jive with this guy. And so I had to show him how we can get to the point to where everything can work, minimize rework, and push his schedule like he never thought possible.

So we gave him digital documents so that he wasn't sitting on a physical set of red lines that he himself carried around in this weird pouchy thing. And he had a huge red marker. And he was like, nope, this is over here.

So now he does it on his iPad. And he has his own document set that he keeps track of. So we let him still have his own set. But it links up to a server that has the whole document set that gets updated by the project engineer. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Do you teach [INAUDIBLE] classes?

ZANE HUNZEKER: So I'm going to get into an example in just a second. But we do have model review with-- and I have a class on Thursday at 4:30 or at 3:30, 3:30, 4:30, if anybody actually ends up staying that long, specifically about how we take VR to the trades, how we take VR to more than just the owner, more than just architects, more than just a pursuit meeting, you know. It has so many uses. And I'll talk about that on Thursday.

But we gave this superintendent the coordination model view, right? We gave him access to his iPad to where we showed him a couple of times when he had an issue where he had so many pipes in one location. And it happened to be that there was a few conduit that weren't modeled, because they were really tiny. And some reason, he let electrical go first rather than fire pipe and ductwork. I don't know, not my decision. That's his.

And he ended up understanding that this model that had the sign-off was more or less law, right? The way that we wrote their contracts, they have a legal responsibility to build per model, have shop drawings per the model. And their install needs to be plus or minus I think it's a quarter of an inch from that. I mean, we all lay out with Trimble now. Why are we not more accurate than inches?

And through this process, he realized that he could actually affect things the way that he wants them in the coordination meetings. We invited him to a couple. And the conversation was moving. And we were going to make a major shift change in this I think it was an eight-foot wide duct that was four feet tall. It's one of the main ducts that feeds into this huge convention center.

And he finally piped up and says, no, no, no, no. You don't want to do that. You want to put it over here. And we said, well, why? And he said, because I'm going to tell you to move it there when you get to the field anyway.

It was, oh, OK. Great. Then we'll do that. And from that moment on, he started attending like every meeting. And he was able to steer the project before he ever saw anybody's boots hit the ground. And it made him feel way more confident in the process, right?

So again, building that trust, letting him understand, slowly pulling them in, and you get there. You just get there.

Now, so with our metal framing foreman, again, he thought that the computers were out to get him, that robots were going to take over his job, right? Not the case. And you'll notice the barriers are almost always that they don't trust the process. So that's just a mindset that slowly needs to be chipped away, whether or not with a jackhammer or a little six-ounce hammer, whatever you need to do with them.

And what we started doing is producing model-based layout. And that pushed us into the point to where they could review the layout not only on an AutoCAD drawing or on a cut sheet of some kind. But they could also see it in the model. And then there was one step further, for them to see the result in the headset.

We can actually-- preliminary now we can do this. We preliminary frame in soffits, walls. And then I take the foreman, put him in the head set, and lift him up to the point to where they would be working in a scissor lift, because that's more or less what they would be doing at soffits this height.

And he can tell us, oh, I wouldn't kicker here, because that's impossible. We would-- yeah. I mean, we're good in the VDC department. But we're not perfect, primarily because every foreman does it differently. It's how they want to do it. We let them do it the way they want to do it.

We just need to know how they want to do it so we can preplan around that. And this process allows us to get that information very early.

With that, they also wanted to prefab and see the model coordination throughout. So we started to have representatives from our drywall group consistently on the jobs that had a lot of framing. And that ended up reducing a lot of their rework. Prefabrication in general really reduces their rework when we live and die by the model.

And like I said, this VR, when we plug them into VR, we get so much information back. It's almost to the point where we're trying to make template files per foreman, because each one of them wants to do things differently. So if we had a catalog of, all right, Jimmy wants to do it this way, Jose wants to do it this way, Tommy wants to do it this way, and then we start to reduce our rework and it makes things faster.

We also have some very, very old school estimators that do not like anything but onscreen take-off and a physical set of plans in front of them. Again, they don't trust the model, because somebody gave them some demo two years ago or eight years ago, whenever it was. And they took a raw architect's model and they plugged it directly into their thing. And they just had so many quantities that were off. And nobody did the front work to QC that model.

And so they're just like, oh, this is just a garbage process. I'm never going to touch this. [SIGH] And that takes a very long time to get rid of.

So what we ended up doing with them is not letting them have-- not letting them rely on physical plans. So we start our BIM 360 Docs in precon. We have somebody set it up to where they automatically get updated. And then they don't even have to guess whether or not they're in 50%, 75%, 100%. It's just whatever is in front of them is the current set.

Now, they can have numbers and stuff in Sage, which is our estimating software, that has those different milestones and those prices per the milestones. But in terms of finding where did this information come from, it's easy enough to make it in Docs. And that was-- that was kind of a-- it was a barrier in a way, because they felt like they needed to hand-flip back and forth. And I just don't know why. But that's, again, a personality trait.

We also gave them the design models in a viewer. And they were able to look at the details. So in one particular casino-- I always bring up this casino, because it's $250 million and it has everything from a hotel tower, casino floor.

It has restaurants. It has an event center. It has a huge central utility plant in it. It's got a little bit of everything, so I have a lot of examples from it.

But there were some soffits in this particular casino that had seven steps to it. So in the documents with the line weights that the architects chose, you just saw a big blur of lines. And when you look at that, you go, what the hell is this? And you can fly there in the model and you can see all of these steps and the light coves in them.

So for them, that was a big relief, going, oh, OK. That's what it looks like. I get it.

And we've done this to our drywall estimators too. Originally they were just sitting in onscreen take-off counting and coloring to their heart's content. And then I started just saying, hey, we have this model. I haven't checked it yet, but would you like to reference it?

And there's a little bit of training going on, one on one most of the time. And they slowly got to the point to where they started to ask me, hey, do we have a Revit model for this job yet? No, not yet. Oh, dang it. I really need to have some questions, like here and here and here.

I was like, yeah I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what it like either yet. I don't have the model.

And finally, for-- big one for estimating is 5D estimating, or model-based quantities, right? So we struggled a lot. We went through a lot of heartache as a corporation growing into 5D estimating. And over some time, we now have a pretty good process of QCing the original design models, having a review at the estimator, publishing up to Innovaya and then to Sage. That's just our workflow. You can use any sort of platform you want.

And they now can rely on the hard numbers from the model, from structural and from wall counts, door counts, window counts, glazing, all of the information. And so that streamlines 2/3 of the scope that they're trying to review, because we're not MEP subs, so we still just wait for the MEPs to give us a number. We can put general price per square foot in early design based off of system type. But I mean, you don't need a model to do that.

If anything, we can actually take the architect's model and export out a room schedule. And then they can apply those numbers to that. So we even shortcut that step as well.

So let's talk about some of the ROIs, because I know that was a learning objective. And that's probably part of why you guys are here.

Here they are. So our digital documents have provided us a lot less rework. They've also had faster turnovers on RFIs, because they don't have to go back and page flip. There's not a whole lot of hard numbers that I can relate to this, because we haven't looked at that data. It's really subjective. It's hard to do.

But we have taken a look at the model viewer and what jobs we've given everybody that and what jobs we've trained everybody on that. And we end up with about 10% fewer RFIs. Doesn't sound like a whole lot. But on a job that has 19 ASIs and 2,500 RFIs because of it, that's about a week's worth of time for a project engineer.

So that's something that we can say that we probably saved. We don't know, because we didn't do the project without the model viewer. We did it with it. So we've just seen in general that with specific job types that did have-- and we have a lot of repeat clients. They're not cookie cutter buildings, but they're more or less really close. So we do have some sort of data that we can correlate to this.

And then the prefabbing of metal stud framing is very easy to get an ROI on, because you have historical production rates. So we found on the job that-- on the job that we panelize and prefab a lot of this, that they consistently had 25% to 30% increase in production in metal stud framing alone. That's tremendous. With fees still staying stagnant at like 2 and 1/2, 3% for a lot of GCs, being able to self-perform something and increase your productivity saves you maybe 1/2 a percent on that particular scope, which could roll into another 1/8 of a percent overall. You do that enough trades, enough times, that makes up a big difference over the year.

And we also end up with 15% less waste when we prefab, because the guys aren't sitting there with a big bundle of studs and going, OK, well, what should we do here? Oh, we have a duct over there. Hold on. Let's cut this. And then they throw it somewhere. When you kind of control the production, it ends up being a lot leaner, as it were.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yes. That's the plan. Sometimes that doesn't work. The only times that we've done this prefabrication is in an office layout that has VAVs and a central utility plant. So there's very few large penetrations in the wall. It's typically small pipes, whether it be fire pipe or mechanical piping. That's the only time I've been able to convince them to do prefab, anyway. [LAUGHS]

And then in our model-based estimating, we've had clearly an increase in time to turn over a number, right? I think we did-- when we were first starting to do this 5D workflow, I had an estimator and a junior estimator both spending time doing a steel take-off. And we took a QCed engineer's model and did a model-based take-off. The model-based take-off took us an hour and a half. And the two guys spent almost a week counting and tracing all the beams and everything. And we came to within a half a percent of each other.

So there's quite a bit of time saved. And the more complex the project, the easier it is to make up time. But you just need to spend more time QCing the model. So yeah. That's a note that we spent a lot more time QCing the models, but we're able to turn over numbers so much faster.

And that is everything. Is there any other questions? Yes.

AUDIENCE: How do you tackle technical coordination during production?

ZANE HUNZEKER: So a lot of that is due to the decisions of our executives, whether or not we can pull the trigger, whether or not-- and some of it's actually out of our control. The owners sometimes say, you can't release MEPs until this date, which happens to be the date that we get to the bottom of the hole, and they need to dig trenches like two days later. And you just-- there's absolutely no time to coordinate that

So if it is under our control, we always ensure that we have at the very least a month before we start digging, like that's optimal. But it's all negotiated of how much time, because the PMs that aren't super-savvy about this and they're more cost-minded, they see, oh, well, I'm going to have to pay GCs for the subs for an additional two months? We're not going to do that.

But then when I explain to them, this gives us the time to get super-ahead of schedule and potentially prefabricate a lot of this and we'll see savings in the end, it's just-- it's really hard to prove to them that. A lot of times it ends up being word of mouth from one executive to another, right? So again, that trust element needs to be there.

Questions? Yes?

AUDIENCE: So [INAUDIBLE].

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Got you. So what-- the basis that I've always done-- and we've actually-- I've got this included in some of the subs' contracts. We actually require them all to have iPads, all the foremen on the job. So that's one step.

A lot of it also is that we require the trade that is installing it, even if it is like a telecom trade that they're not really part of it but they're kind of a part of it, they usually get left off on the side, that's probably what you're referring to. So we-- I do a contract review with all the scopes. And I make sure that every single one of them is included.

AUDIENCE: Could you basically push the same [INAUDIBLE] but for them.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yep.

AUDIENCE: Put it in like your--

ZANE HUNZEKER: Put it in legally to their requirements, yeah. So our-- and another thing is that our BIM execution plan has all this information. And we've set goals in there, right? We actually issue that as a zero-cost change order to everybody that has the BIM modeling requirement. And so legally, they have to follow all of that, instead of just, yeah, that's our plan, but we won't do this part. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] question about the schedule. So we run into a lot where concrete people decide [INAUDIBLE] or whatever. They want to push the schedule. And the contractor lets them. And then your guy's like, whoa, we got a bunch of empty floors we could be working on. The bid's not going up. How [INAUDIBLE]?

ZANE HUNZEKER: I didn't hear the first part. Sorry.

AUDIENCE: Where the concrete guy lets the [INAUDIBLE] and they push the schedule.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Oh, pushes it out, right?

AUDIENCE: No. Pushes--

AUDIENCE: Accelerates it.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Oh, accelerates the schedule. OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. And then the whole thing gets [INAUDIBLE].

ZANE HUNZEKER: So we-- and when I say we, I mean me. I talk with the scheduler and talk with the PM. We don't even release them for-- because a lot-- and San Diego is a kind of a special market. A lot of the trades are prefabricating. And a lot of the trades are in BIM. A lot of them are even in Revit, believe it or not.

And we actually release them per floor to start prefab. And so if they show up on a floor that they haven't been released on, we tell them to get the hell out of there, because that's not their floor yet. And since we do self-perform our concrete, we do accelerate the schedule a lot.

And so to that point, I'm also constantly berated by our field ops manager, who's kind of in charge of our self-perform work, hey, you need to get BIM done faster. What can we do to make it faster? And I said, well, let us start earlier. I mean, it doesn't necessarily reduce the time. It just pushes it forward so that we have more time to address it. But yeah, like I said, we don't let them where we don't want them. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: One of the big barriers I can see to starting early is contracts [INAUDIBLE]. Are you doing anything different to get [INAUDIBLE]?

ZANE HUNZEKER: Kickstarted the job earlier? Is that what you said?

AUDIENCE: We have a problem getting contracts signed early enough for subs. By the time they get contracts signed, we're already two weeks in.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yes. So the question was about whether or not you can time-- or the back and forth on subcontracts and timing on BIM. So our fix for that is that we actually have master sub agreements. So we have one agreement for every sub that we deal with locally. And all we do is send them a work order for individual packages, individual projects.

So there's no more back and forth legally. You agree to these terms. And it's-- I think it's a five-year document. And then they can renegotiate after that.

I mean, it's not necessarily something that you can turn over super-fast and change in your own industry. But it's something that we've done. It took quite a bit. But it also reduces our paperwork tremendously, because instead of having this back and forth with legal constantly with our legal, their legal, they make comments, we make comments, we just negotiated a master agreement. You're going to follow these guidelines, take it or leave it. Most of them took it.

And then all we do now is saying, all right. You're going to perform this scope of work on this job in accordance to your master sub agreement. Ready? Go.

And so those work orders, instead of being a 90-page document, it's now like a 5-page document, because most of the legal verbiage is in the master sub agreement.

I believe there's a question. No? OK. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Do you guys try to group educate all those people?

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yeah. Group training is really tough, because some people are rather aggressive in their questions. And the other people that aren't feel like they're never going to get heard, so they just never ask the questions.

I find that one on one is-- I mean, it takes way more time. But the retention there and the trust gets built so much faster, because-- it is a lot more time. But we find that there's higher adoption rates.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Training with ops. Yeah. That's-- again, it's primarily me handling most of them, because my staff is busy doing other things. My staff's actually right there. [LAUGHS] Yeah.

AUDIENCE: The execution plans, they seem old school to me. Is there maybe a new way in BIM 360 that your execution plan could be added so that way the team, everyone can see from all clients to engineers to the construction phase-- everyone can be on the same page?

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yeah. So we actually upload our BIM execution plan onto docs. So it is viewable to everybody. But you're right. It is kind of an old school thought process from Penn State, what is it 10, 15 years ago now?

AUDIENCE: It seems like there should be something more concrete that can kind of apply to all trades, and maybe have sections, and everybody can add to it [INAUDIBLE] templates.

ZANE HUNZEKER: Yeah. I mean, we do have a template BIM execution plan. And we do build upon that. We don't typically have very many requests for additions, because it's-- since I started at Swinerton, it's been the same document. And I haven't had more than one request to change it.

AUDIENCE: With all the new things Autodesk has to offer, it's hard to keep such a lengthy document up. That's why it would be cool if the--

ZANE HUNZEKER: My execution plan's only eight pages. Yeah. We started with a 90-page one. And then we had an internal review and were like garbage, garbage, way too much, don't need that.

And we ended up with, what software are you in? What's your tolerances from BIM to install, what version you're in, who's your contact, and then a couple of paragraphs on like deliverable dates. That's it. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: We issue it as a zero-cost change order to the subs that are involved. And so legally, they're obligated to follow it at that point. A little more paperwork, but it's worth it. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: You mentioned you have a colleague [INAUDIBLE].

ZANE HUNZEKER: Mm-hmm.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ZANE HUNZEKER: Sure. A lot of it is making sure specifically on concrete that they didn't just draw in step lines, because you can do that in Revit. They may just have a slab. And then they've taken model lines and just drawn in where the steps need to be, right? I mean, everybody's seen that before. So that's one step.

The other step in-- and primarily this is the bulk of what we do in [INAUDIBLE], is we take the architect's model and just verify wall heights, because most of them do their wall types really well. But their wall heights are usually garbage. So we review that. And that's-- honestly, that's our number one thing.

Outside of that there's a couple other checks of whether or not the mullions are going to match. But some of our glazing partners in San Diego that we have actually model, which is cool. But it's not very common.

San Diego's a special market. There's-- the AGC has really pushed-- the AGC San Diego has pushed tremendously to get everyone into technology. And that's why BIMForum is actually hosted there more frequently than any other cities, because we have a lot of people and a lot of support there.

But like I mentioned before, a lot of the trades are actually in Revit too, the ones that we deal with. I mean, how many trades that you guys deal with are in Revit? One? Yeah.

It's almost all of our mechanical guys. It's most of our electrical guys. And it's about half of our plumbing guys. Fire sprinkler's the hold-out. They just don't quite get-- HydroCAD for Revit, it doesn't do exactly what they want yet. So they're in HydroCAD for AutoCAD. But-- yeah. Yes.

AUDIENCE: How did you convince the executives and your first superintendent [INAUDIBLE]?

ZANE HUNZEKER: We have an enterprise agreement. It doesn't cost us any more to get another person. That's why. [LAUGHS]

Yeah. We have so many credits in the year. And if we don't use them, then whatever. So-- and in most cases, the field staff are using Glue, which doesn't require a license. It just requires a membership or an account. So that makes it easy. Yeah.