Improving Project Outcomes with Connected Project Controls

John Upton:

Welcome, everybody. Today, we’re going to be talking about improving project outcomes with connected project controls. A few housekeeping notes before we get started. This ON24 experience that you guys see is customizable. So, you’ll see a toolbar at the top of your screen. You can bring in different windows, resize windows, but you will be muted throughout the entirety of this presentation. If you have any technical issues, you can use the chat feature, and we will have our host help troubleshoot any of those. And lastly, there’s a Q&A box that you can open and you can submit questions for us, and if we have any time at the end of the presentation, we will get those answered for you.

So, I am John Upton, Vice President of Product here at InEight, and my co-presenter is Megan Siefker. She’s the Customer Success Director at InEight, and we’ll be tackling this connected project controls process together. A little bit about the InEight platform. It’s an integrated modular product. We’re going to focus most of our time on project controls today. You see a couple products highlighted there. We also have pricing and scheduling and project information management all coupled with the report and explore to bring all that data back into reports and dashboards. A little bit about InEight. We have over 900 customers across the globe, and they’re pumping around a trillion dollars through our products. So, let’s dig into it.

So, what are we going to cover today? We’re going to discuss the disconnected state of project data and highlight where those breakdowns occur. Since we only have an hour, we can’t obviously talk through all of our integrated solutions here at InEight, but we do want to focus on execution, change management, and forecasting. And then lastly, we’ll bring that all together and discuss how connecting them enables better decision-making on the project.

Megan Siefker:

Yeah. So, we’ll kick things off just by where we see with many of our customers today, some of the challenges, hopefully maybe some of these will resonate with you and then how we solve those through a couple of those connected workflows that we’ll walk through. So, today, what we’re seeing often is project control is not failing due to a lack of data, but really more disconnected, disjointed bits and pieces that are across different systems. Often Excel is one of those key systems that comes into play when we’re talking about Earned Value Management, forecasting, tracking execution of work. So, that’s one of the places where we see duplication of data having to enter it in multiple places to get the analysis and the forecasting out of the data that you’re gathering from the field.

We also see issues surfacing late. So, not having a centralized hub for anyone in all the different parts of a construction or capital project to be able to submit, “Hey, flag something as an issue.” So, we’ll walk through that change management flow in depth on how we see InEight solving that connected data issue, and then really where it all ties together is at least what we’re going to cover today with the focus on the project controls piece is forecasting based on the most accurate and up-to-date data. When you are pulling data from a bunch of disparate systems, that tends to cause lags in stale data being used, month-old data for forecasting. So, I think this is really going to tie nicely together when we get back to that forecasting piece. You’ll see where these inputs will walk through initially feed that forecasting engine so that you are able to see trends, see problems sooner and then make wiser decisions for your project to correct those, whether it’s crew performance or things that are going south on your project so that you can correct them sooner.

Also, not just disparate solutions, but sometimes because of the tools that are in place, we see customers are driven to either over-engineered level of detail where everything is way too granular because you want to have the data going into a system, not in a side Excel spreadsheet. So, in some cases that’s driving you to explode your cost structure. For example, because you’re trying to get very fine granular Earned Value Management, maybe that’s driving you to expand out your cost structure. Or we see the other end of that spectrum is a very summarized level of detail in your cost analysis that’s really not giving you predictive analytics on how the construction project is actually going, where, what disciplines are maybe falling behind. So, what we want to get to is an actionable level of granularity where you have that traceability. You can dig into the details when it’s necessary to find problems, but it’s also not a maintenance nightmare. It’s not an input nightmare to generate this data and have the accurate values that we’re going to rely on from a project controls perspective.

So, all that to be said, we’re going to jump into the first workflow that we wanted to cover is really execution, and this is straight from the field where the rubber meets the road on a construction project. We’ve got a couple bullets here on work packaging, but we’ve got a very robust work package engine that allows the execution teams to be able to work off of constraint-free plans that have taken into account the safety measures, the quality measures. It’s got your productivity built in. So, we want to be able to hand over to a crew a work package that they can go and execute flawlessly with the highest level of productivity, the highest level of safety, quality, all those different factors that that planning upfront gets built into the work package.

And then at that execution level, they should be able to report how they’re installing the work and then get that instantaneous feedback loop because of the connection to your budgeted unit rates that’s going to feed, “Are you performing to a high degree of productivity? Are we falling behind? What’s your gain/loss on a daily level rather than having to wait till month end or at the end of the week to see productivity trends?” So, we’ll jump into that here. What I’m showing on the screen right now, this is our Progress mobile application, and this is down to a daily plan. So, daily plans can feed from work packages. We encourage pre-planning the work so that your crews do have constraint-free work. They know what their targets are for the day, what their goals are for the day, and this is really the result of that pre-planning step is now you’ve got… What you see on the screen right now is a time sheet.

So, this is where you have your budgeted cost items that you’re going to be charging time against, and that’s at potentially a higher level than the work that is going to be installed, but this gives you… Because we’ve got that tie, this is going to tie all the way back to our InEight Control module with those cost items, and it’s going to give you… These are my budgeted install rates so I know what I need to complete based on the hours of my crew that’s working on those items. So, that’s the time sheet tab and then with that on your daily plan, you can see exactly what work needs to be installed. So, the same entry point that I’m entering time, I’m also entering my quantities, and I can view my plan quantities. So, my superintendent, my field engineers, those folks have put the time in to plan out the right work for my crew size, and then I’m going in and seeing what are the different… In this example, piping’s always an easy example to show because it’s pretty clear-cut.

You’ve got cost codes that are maybe at a pipe size for example, and then when I’m a foreman installing the work, I want to know what spools do I need to get installed today, what valves, what instruments, things like that that are more understood by a foreman or someone out in the field. So, that’s what you’re seeing here is some spools of pipe, and then do I need to have them offloaded or staged? Do I need to have them fit-up or fabricated? The different steps in that process can be associated to claiming schemes that get set up in our plan module as well, and then I can… just as easy as checking off the box. Obviously, I know this is from a foreman or whoever is managing your crews, so field-facing person. I’m able to select the items, and then that’s going to feed all the way back into Control from an Earned Value Management perspective. So, we’ll start seeing these when we get to the forecasting piece.

Now, this is just one of the entry points really for direct hire construction, but we’ve also got contract schedule values can come into here. So, you can start tracking subcontracted scopes of work based on how your subcontractors are going to be billing you, how you’re going to be incurring cost against that, or also scope items from InEight Design. So, on an engineering scope, obviously it’s different deliverables, different things that are going to drive Earned Value Management for those type of scopes of work. So, that would feed from InEight Design, and all of this is going to feed the most accurate data into InEight Control. So, field-validated earned value is what we’re looking to gain from this progress measurement here. Next, you’ll see… This is the instantaneous feedback loop. So, because I had my time entered against a cost item that has a budgeted unit rate, and then I entered how much quantity I completed against that, all of those different, we call them, components that roll up to a cost item. I can immediately at the end of the day, once I’ve entered my time, I’ve entered what I completed for the day, I can see my gain/loss.

So, am I in the green where my crew performed better than our budgeted unit rates? Or in this example, you’ve got one where we lost 16 hours, so we weren’t performing our welding up to par with our budgeted unit rates. Maybe we need to shift things around. How many people did we have assigned to that welding operation? Were we overkill on that? So, we can make those adjustments on the fly. Tomorrow we’ll do better rather than having to wait around in arrears to get that feedback loop, and this is going to feed then to everyone as well through reporting. So, on the job site, project-manager level, I’m getting this data daily, the feedback so I can go hone in on what crews are struggling, not just the foreman out in the field also seeing that.

So, next, we’ll jump into the change piece. I mentioned earlier wanting to be able to capture changes wherever they originate is really our goal with InEight Change. So, we take in data from the field directly on that iPad that I was just showing. We take in data from… Maybe it’s a quality form that has the button, “Hey, flag this as an issue.” From InEight Document, if there’s an RFI that results in an issue, we want to be able to flag in any parts that someone’s interacting with the InEight set of tools because they’re managing different scopes of the project. We want them to be able to flag, “Hey, there’s an issue,” so that we can capture all issues and then have that tied to the scope and cost impacts at the source. So, giving that visibility throughout the project from engineering all the way through closeout, any issues that are coming up.

So, we’ll walk through what that looks like. I know this is a tough visual because it’s a small screen I’m sure on your end, but this is that daily planning application. So, just like I had my time sheet tab, I had my quantities, and then I was seeing the productivity piece. This is just viewing it from a desktop version. But you can see on that iPad, I’m able to create an issue directly in the field. I’m a foreman. I don’t know if this is going to have a cost impact. Maybe I don’t know if this has contractual impacts, but I’m able to at least flag it, add associated pictures, input my notes, and where that’s going to land is then within InEight Change so then it can be routed to the appropriate folks on the project to go through the pricing, submit this to your customer or the owner, or maybe there’s downstream impacts if you have subcontractors that might be involved or contractors that could be involved in this.

So, what you see here, this is now… We’ve jumped into InEight Change, and that connection point is… You can see right in the middle of your screen, it shows “created by John Upton via Plan” with a hyperlink. So, that would actually take you back to that daily plan where this issue originated. Now, if I had created this from a document RFI or from a form in Compliance, you’d see that same hyperlink taking you to that source where that form was entered, and it’s going to bring in the details that came with that. So, my issue details, there’s no duplicate data entry. I’m getting all that data directly from the field and landing in one central repository. All of the issues that are identified from any of those parts are coming into our change register and then allowing project controls teams to go through and say, “Okay, let me add that cost and pricing information,” which I’ll pop up next. So, here we’re going to now have that connection to InEight Control.

InEight Control, maybe we should have started with this, but is the hub for all your cost items where your budgeted unit rates are stored, your install rates, your estimated resources. If you pulled everything in from InEight Estimate or from your external source, then that’s coming into any control where we manage our budgets. But when we’re pricing a change, we want to be able to pull those already estimated rates so we make all those cost items available, so you can add and adjust them on each change issue that is identified. You can also pull in if it’s a larger scope, maybe we want to go back to InEight Estimate, can estimate it there with all those resources that you have built in InEight Estimate, templates that you have and then push that in as well.

So, this is that pricing, and then you’ll see where this ends up is then pushing back and updating your control budget through obviously an approval workflow and the necessary approvals if that results in a true budget change. So, now, I think we’ll go to the end… Yeah.

John Upton: 

Go ahead.

Megan Siefker:

I was just going to say where the-

John Upton:

There’s a few questions regarding the daily planning that I think we could answer right here real quick. One question was the plan hours show up as draft for the crew leaders to accept or revise. Is that correct? Is there an option to separate planned hours from actual hours, like we do the quantities? And no is the answer. We show those planned hours in the time sheet for the foreman reference and then update as the execution occurs, but there is on the productivity tab, a planned productivity that’s utilizing the planned hours and the planned quantities. So, hopefully that answers your question, Ben. And then can it be set so the planned quantities are only shown on the overview screen and not filling in hours on the time sheet? So, you can just plan quantities. They won’t show up in the overview sheet, but they would show up on the quantities tab of the daily plan.

Okay. I think those were… And there was another one about using a… They have an in-house system that tracks timekeeping, man-hours, production, equipment utilization, et cetera. Will control or plan still work if we use the house tool? Yes and no. I would say we do have APIs. There was another question about APIs. We do have APIs to pull in man-hours or costs obviously from an external system into Control, but we don’t have an API to fill out a daily time sheet via another solution. You can from a productivity standpoint in claimed quantities. We do have an API or soon to have an API that could pull quantities into Plan, but that’s about the extent of the APIs with regards to the daily planning tool that Megan just showed. But just to keep us on track, the third workflow we wanted to talk about is forecasting, and this is where the rubber meets the road as Megan mentioned, and the way we enable forecasting efficiency through connected project controls with InEight is by tightly coupling actuals, progress, commitments, changes into a continuously updated system-driven forecast rather than your monthly updates, manual forecasting based on data that’s outdated, as Megan mentioned earlier.

So, here, we have a screenshot of our project controls dashboard, and while it does a good job of highlighting and summarizing key metrics, the real value of InEight is at the detailed level. So, I’d like to discuss some of these detailed integrations that we have and show how we get to this more reliable forecast actually in app. So, as I mentioned earlier, you can adjust the sizes of your screen. You may want to make your screen a little bigger for this because there’s a lot of data on this screen, and I did that on purpose. So, I created a custom forecast view. I brought in a bunch of metrics, KPIs like DPI, productivity factors, gain/loss, and some other metrics to help a user analyze the health of their forecast, but I wanted to dive into a few examples of the integrated nature of InEight.

So, the first value I want to highlight is the to-date quantity. So, this is what Megan had on the time sheet for the quantities against the components. This value, it can come from Plan, we can take it from Design for our engineering folks. We even can take it from Contract and the line-item schedule of values if you’re trying to objectively measure your vendor’s scope, but this is a objective claimed value. It’s not an opinion. It’s not a guess. It’s coming from the field. It’s coming from discrete measurable quantities. It ultimately drives our percent complete and due to that, which is driving your earned value, and then it also is a big part of our forecasting. You can’t forecast where you’re going to end if you don’t know where you’re at today. So, we have a lot of out-of-the-box forecast methods that utilize the resultant remaining quantity because we take the remaining quantity times a unit rate, whether it’s your estimated rate, your budget rate, your straight line, what we call average performance rate and add that to your actuals today to get your EAC forecast. But it is probably one of the most important values that’s driving our forecast through InEight.

So, if we look here, we got 107.95 claimed on this cost item 1160, and where does that come from? Well, that comes from Plan. So, here we can see that that one cost item, 1160, is tied to four components in Plan. These are discrete components that have rules of credit and claiming schemes, and this is one of the prime examples when Megan was referencing trying to find the right level of detail, and we see this happen a lot with a lot of customers because we have some customers that have hundreds of thousands of components, but yet they’re all mapped to 3 to 5,000 cost items. If these components are likely broken out by area or segment or discipline. But I don’t need to forecast what each area is going to cost me typically, but I do want to know the earned value and the percent complete against each of those areas to drive my earned value.

So, that’s where this connected system really enables customers to minimize their CBS structure and not get all that additional detail that just takes a cost controller hours and hours to drill through. Put some of that more discrete detail in some of our other integrated products so that your field engineers, your superintendents can manage the quantities, and the cost controller just has to worry about the forecast. So, you can see two of these components, the top two, that first step in the claiming scheme is complete, and they earn 5% of the component quantity. So, if you do the math, it equals 107.95, and that’s what shows up in Control. So, that’s what we talk about, objective claiming and getting as accurate as possible to drive an accurate forecast. That’s how we do it with quantities.

The next value I want to draw your attention to is this issue cost. So, you can see we have $4,000 of issue cost. Megan also referenced that through the daily planning tool that they took a picture. They don’t know if it’s going to be escalated to a Contract change order or not, but they did document it. So, we have this $4,000 on cost item 1161. You can see we’re already 81% complete, but that $4,000 is roughly 10% of our forecast remaining costs for our ETC. So, there definitely deserves to have a discussion. So, the cost controller, since he is an integrated solution, he can see that that value comes from InEight Change. Here, when they created this issue, they linked that WBS 1161. They determined they needed another 10,000 foot of linear pipe. Multiply that by our budgeted unit rate, and that’s where we get the $4,000. So, Change gives you the additional detail of where is it at? Like whose court is the ball in? What’s the likelihood of this actually getting escalated into a potential change order, executed change order?

But having that visibility and control gives the cost controller some ammo to ask the right questions like, “Do I need to include that in my forecast? How likely do we think this is going to get escalated and we’ll actually have to do some work to incur this $4,000 of cost?” And last piece I wanted to discuss is the committed cost. Typically, GCs have a blind spot around subcontractor scope. It’s easy to manage your direct labor down to the minute details, but not always as easy to do that with your vendors. So, with InEight Control, we can see that we have a total committed cost of $29,500 and a remaining cost, which is your open commitment. All of those details are coming from our Contract product.

We can still get them from the ERP, but if we get them from Contract, we get these additional details. So, this is just a slide out in-app in Control, and it’s going to show every line item in Contract that is associated to that specific WBS, in this case 1155. And if there are multiple purchase orders or different contracts utilizing this WBS, you’d see multiple purchase orders and those corresponding line items, and the value here is that you don’t have to go to another product or look at a spreadsheet. I can look right here and see I have four line items. I can see the values, the quantities, the status, even the goods receipt, the invoice receipt. Accruals are visible for that additional detail, and then if you really need to get into going to talk to your contract manager, like what’s the likelihood of a purchase order, a vendor change order, et cetera, there’s hyperlinks on this page to take you directly to Contract and a new browser window that’ll take you to that PO or to the specific page where they did that goods receipt or IR. So, a bunch of additional information around the contract module in-app within Control.

So, we’ve talked about these integrated values, but how do they really affect your forecast? How can we use these integrated values to drive a more informed forecast for our monthly cost reports? So, if we go back to that same example that we talked about with the committed cost, if you look to the far right of the screen, that’s our contract or our forecast method, and in this example, we’re using the contract-forecast method. So, this is going to take the value of any line item that’s associated with that WBS plus any pending vendor change orders, and that’s going to drive your forecast total cost or your EAC forecast, your estimate at complete. So, you can see here that the total commitment matches our forecast total cost. So, there’s no pending change orders and there’s no additional cost being charged outside of this cost item.

And what really brings value is that if I was tracking all of this on a spreadsheet or a different point solution, I don’t have that real-time visibility because as soon as that line item and contract gets updated, my forecast gets updated. I don’t have to make any manual edits. It’s all systematic and automatically updated, which is a big value-add for an integrated system. The next example, if you look towards the left, the percent complete, you can see we’re roughly 4.5, 5% complete. So, I’d be inclined maybe to just forecast my EAC to be exactly what my current budget is because it’s too early in the process to have any trend data to tell me otherwise that I’m going to do better or worse than budget. So, I might just forecast my budget. But if you look towards the middle, there’s a pending budget cost of $10,000. So, this is what’s been graduated from an issue to a potential change order.

So, I have $10,000 outstanding out there, and if I was reasonably assured that that’s going to be approved, I might want to include that in my forecast. So, if you look on the far right again, I created a custom forecast method, which we can do with InEight Control, and this forecast method is taking all of my current budget plus any pending values to drive my forecast total cost. Imagine that 10,000 was 100,000 or 500,000. That’s a big number that you don’t want to miss out on your forecast. You have a big swing, month one to month two, and that’s also something that could be easily overlooked if you didn’t have this integration, and you’re relying on somebody to update spreadsheets or take an Excel dump from one product or point solution and import it into this solution. So, another valuable asset for the integrated solution is those pending costs.

The last workflow that I wanted to talk about on utilizing the forecast information is this committed cost forecast method. So, the committed cost forecast method is going to take any actuals you have plus your open commitment or your remaining commitment, and that’s what’s going to drive your EAC forecast. So, in this example, I can see… And I guess I should say that this committed cost forecast method is typically used for stable vendor scope, mid to late stage with little uncertainty. That’s where we see it typically used the most, but using it here, I’m 48% complete, and I have a lot of questions because I can see my EAC forecast is $31,000, but my purchase order value is only 20. So, that’s going to raise some questions hopefully for your cost controller like, “Are we underclaimed? Are we a lot further along than 48% complete? Or do we have other trades hitting this cost item that shouldn’t be with either direct labor cost or something that’s outside of this purchase order?” All reasonable questions, but it’s brought forward to the cost controller due to the integrations that we offer.

We do offer manual forecasting as well, but if I were just to manually forecast this cost item to be equal to my commitments, I’d be missing out on a significant chunk of money. So, we try to steer people away from the manual forecast because that basically negates a lot of the integration possibilities that we offer, but this is another example of the connected integration and bringing questions to the cost controller so that it’s not like data is lost in the abyss. It’s right there in front of them to make actionable decisions. So, yeah, that was the last workflow example that I wanted to go through. So, to sum that up, with InEight Control, we strive to enable a single continuously updated version of the truth. We don’t want outdated manual periodic updates. We want the system to automatically update your forecast so that you have a proactive financial control of your operation and of your project.

I don’t know, Megan, did you have anything to add on the forecasting piece?

Megan Siefker:

Yeah, I just think that one of the key pieces of our solutions is very heavily quantity-driven, and John mentioned this is not an opinion that quantity that’s being claimed, it’s verifiable. So, the reason we’re giving these layers of granularity that expand from this Control solution where we’re really feeding the data into here so that you can look at it, go through this analysis that John went through, make decisions, dig a little deeper where necessary. You see the pop outs over to jump back into Plan or jump into what are my Contract line items, and the reason we’re giving that layer of granularity is so that you can get to something that is not an opinion-based. It can be verified in the field. It can be verified by a contracts manager. You can go directly to the issue and see what’s causing that, and I think that’s really critical, that actual quantity to date.

Those forecasting methods that John was showing that are automated and continuously updating, they’re going to rely on that quantity that’s been completed, too, because we’re basing it by what’s the quantity remaining and then what’s my performance to date? What’s my install rates to date in some of those forecast methods, too? So, that’s really an important piece because oftentimes that’s a shift in thinking for some of our customers who haven’t been so heavily quantity dependent often because maybe you didn’t have a system where you could get to that level of detail that gave you the confidence in the quantities that you were completing. So, this is a shift in many cases we see during implementations, and it’s going to add huge tremendous value, but it is sometimes a change in the way you’re thinking and looking at project controls to be so quantity dependent, and I think that’s a good thing, but definitely something to be aware of.

John Upton:

Yeah, valid points, and we’re not trying to say that all these forecasters set it and forget it and you never have to come back and monitor it or check it or review it. We’re just saying that you get instant updates, and we do have variables like in the middle there of a forecast cost change column and basically that’s telling you your forecast from this month to last month, how much did it change? And I know this isn’t a forecast presentation, but there’s a lot of functionality in here to really draw attention to forecast changes or influxes up or down, but the point to be made is that due to some of these integrations, you have a much more timely and reliable forecast, I think is the point we’re trying to make here.

So, bringing it all together, we’ve talked about the three different workflows. Forecasting really is driven by field execution. The more accurate your field execution, the more reliable and accurate your forecast is going to be. We’re not relying on assumptions or lagging indicators, and we hear it all the time. Everything you see on LinkedIn or most webinars is we have all this data on all these projects, so much data. It’s just how is it organized, how clean is it, et cetera? But if it’s not clean… Everybody’s probably heard the analogy, “Junk in equals junk out.” So, we are striving to get that objective claiming early in the field, utilize that to drive our most accurate, most timely forecast values, because then your forecasts become much more reliable when you have that timely, reliable, objective data.

Megan Siefker:

Yeah, and from a change perspective, I mentioned capturing changes from everywhere. Changes can land in InEight Change and then maybe it results in, “This is actually not a change that’s going to impact our contract. Maybe it’s something minimal that we’re not going to proceed down the path of a potential change order, contract change order, or down to a vendor change order.” But at least you’re having a place to capture it all so that we can identify where those changes are that are going to impact things and then see that from the project controls lens, I don’t have to go out to each crew and make sure that they’re capturing every change and do that. It’s feeding that data in to the people who need it right at the spot, right when it’s happening so that contractually, we have a 10-day notice window of when a change happens, we’re meeting all those contractual requirements so that we’re getting compensated for all the changes that we could potentially be compensated for.

I mean, I’m sure any of us on a job site can remember a few changes that we let just slip through because you get in the grind of the day-to-day, and we didn’t have a place to just quickly raise our hand and flag it. If I’ve got to go to a different system, submit a different form, fill something out on a side sheet, then take it to my project controller. A lot of times things get lost. So, we’re just giving a central hub and then making sure that information, everything that’s captured there is feeding back into the Control solution, and then the connected data just is driving better decisions. Our goal is you enter it one time, and it feeds to anywhere that needs it on the project. If I’m a contracts manager, and then I’ve got field personnel that are validating the work that’s being performed via contract schedule values, items that are being claimed in the field, that’s going to feed right back up to me when I’m viewing an invoice and seeing, “Okay, is this an accurate invoice that we should be paying?”

That’s one data point that I’ve got that connected data source where I’m not having to then go back out. So, trying to remove things that you’re doing via email to someone today that’s just getting lost in a series of emails, it’s giving me access to all those different bits and pieces of data that are collected throughout the entirety of a project’s lifecycle so that I can make the decisions I need. I can drill into the detail that I need to see. We tried to put in, throughout our solutions, hyperlinks. If it originates from somewhere, give me the hyperlinks so I can go right to the source to see that expanded detail and view. From in Control, you saw… I want to see the actual quantity. I can expand that out. I want to see the individual components that were completed. So, giving that right level of detail so that we can make those informed decisions is really what we’re trying to solve for.

And I think today we highlighted just three of, I would say, some of the most basic workflows in the project controls space, but there are so many other connection points and tie-offs. All of these things might generate documents, for example, and being able to connect directly to InEight Document. So, anywhere there’s a document, we’re going to provide the link to get to InEight Documents. So, it’s all stored in one document repository. Having a form that you can tie off and jump right back into InEight Change, those connection points that we’re always looking to and continue building those connection points obviously as we evolve the products, but really trying to tie off those key ones that hopefully we represented here today.

John Upton:

Good stuff. Yeah. So, before we get into some of the Q&A, we just wanted to make it known obviously that if you guys are still struggling with disconnected spreadsheets or disconnected systems, that’s a platform issue. That’s not a person issue, and it is challenging to get off the spreadsheets. I mean, we still have customers that rely on spreadsheets for certain things. But if that’s your bread and butter, and you’re looking for an opportunity to realize some of the benefits of this integration. We’ve done it for hundreds of capital construction projects across the globe. Megan’s team, they understand the implementation pitfalls. They do all the implementations. They’ve perfected it to a point, and they know how to do it right. So, if you guys have any further questions about some of these before we jump into the Q&A, there’s a little survey box I believe at the bottom right potentially or up in your toolbar that you could complete this post-event survey, letting us know you’d like more information, and we’ll obviously reach out and get you that information.

But just making sure you’re aware that if you do want more information about how InEight and all the products… As Megan mentioned, we covered three integration touchpoints out of probably 30 across our solution. So, if you want any more information on that, please fill out that post-event survey, and we’ll get back to you. I know there are a couple questions in here around some of those integrations. I don’t know. I saw one around-

Megan Siefker:

I’m looking at a question here regarding the process from an estimate is conformed, becomes your formal budget and then obviously recognizing the ability to take that cost breakdown structure, break it down into more detail within InEight Plan that’s eventually going to feed your daily plans. The question was, “Is there a common point where a job decides to move from throwing all the items directly into your cost structure and then you’ve got now a blown-up cost structure to using the Plan feature?” And I would say, “Yes.” What we generally guide customers to is if your cost structure carries a budgeted unit rate, I mean, and this is maybe more specific to direct scopes of work that you’re going to be installing out in the field. But that unit rate, if it’s the same for a number of cost items, those should be able to be combined, and then you use components to break that down further.

You can apply area tags to components, so you’re viewing your percent complete by area or by piece of equipment or whatever you need from a scope definition perspective. You can apply those tags to components and view reporting on that from a percent complete standpoint. But I would say, yeah, you definitely want to get your cost structure to where similar types of work are being performed against the same cost item. That gives you then the ability to run that trend analysis on the forecasting, too. How are we performing our concrete foundations? I don’t want to just see one foundation have that installed and then have to go find a bunch of different cost items to forecast my other foundations because we’re not installing them at the rate we anticipated during estimating time.

So, that’s a pretty typical one, and I would say when are you putting components in Plan is generally when you’re getting to a point where you have IFC drawings. That final takeoff that you’re doing, you’re dumping all that takeoff data in, and then that can also update your forecast takeoff quantities at that point as well. So, you’ve got the most accurate scope that you’re going to actually be installing. Hopefully, that answers the question.

John Upton:

I think another point to add there is the way you break that down, we didn’t really touch on it, but we have this value that we call account codes that is heavily utilized in estimating control, plan progress. It’s how you normalize all your work across the organization, but the way you break it down, obviously that rolls into an account code that’s tied to a cost item, and one of the integrations that we didn’t really touch on for you estimators out there is based on that account code, we send those as-built values and productivity rates, as well as our forecasted rates back to estimate to be used for benchmarking. When they’re bidding a new project, they can see how… Say our project that we’re currently on is very similar to the one that they’re bidding. They can see not only the as-built, so what are our actual unit rates and how do our estimated rates compare, but maybe we’re forecasting to be 30% over budget or my PF’s going to be a 0.5 when it’s all said and done. I can utilize that in my estimate to make informed decisions and make sure I’m not leaving money on the table. So, that was a good question.

There’s also one, the feedback loop on the daily cost, is it only man-hour per unit? And the answer’s no. We do show a cost gain/loss, and that’s through reporting. We have some heavily utilized reports. Crew performance reports probably are the most heavily utilized. So, we do show… and I would call it directionally correct daily cost gain/loss because we don’t have fully burdened rates in our master data, but we do have base and burden. But it doesn’t take into consideration the overtime double time or if you have any premiums associated. It’s doing that standard gain/loss based off of whatever’s loaded against that employee through master data, if that makes sense.

There’s one around which forecasting method best covers it all in terms of ETC or actual or current estimate. I don’t think there’s a silver bullet answer for that one. It depends on the progress of that operation. Are you 5% complete, 50% complete, 95% complete? Is it self-performed work? Is it contracted work? So, I don’t think there’s a standard answer for that, but based on the type of work, the progress that you’ve already completed, we have different forecast methods that are built for that. So, I don’t think there’s a silver bullet answer for that, unfortunately.

Megan Siefker:

Yeah. Another question, can you control what data the end user sees, for example, contractor costs or employee cost? Absolutely. We have a role-based system where permissions are assigned based on your role, and then to the point of you don’t want your customer seeing certain data, often the use of the InEight Controls module is mainly your own internal folks, and then you’re producing owner-facing reports, whether that’s via our reporting APIs or the standard out-of-the-box reports, which you can filter to some extent and customize to some extent, or the dashboards that we have available. So, you’re picking and choosing, “This is the detail that I want to showcase to my owner.” And then making that a standard every month they get this report. It’s selecting that data that you want to show and not what you do not want to expose to them. From the user standpoint, yep, absolutely. If there’s data certain end users should not be seeing, then they would not have the permissions to view that.

John Upton:

See another one, does the actual cost from payment application get connected to forecasting? That depends. So, we have some customers that do not rely on an ERP, and then we have some that do. So, we do have a setting for those customers that do not utilize ERP integrations that we can pull those invoice receipts as actuals into Control, which will then drive your forecast. Otherwise, if you are using an ERP, we would just pull that invoice information directly from the ERP and utilize that in the forecast equations. Unfortunately, Mike, so there’s another question. If I have five bridges all rolled up into one CBS series of items with five separate footings inside the planned activities, not in the CBS, but in Plan, does benchmarking allow me to see the particular data for just one of those bridge footings as opposed to all the bridges rolled up? Through the actual benchmarking feature, no, because that’s by account code. So, they would all be summarized at that CBS level on the account code.

But there are reports that would show that you could utilize to reference. Obviously, it’s not going to be as integrated as the current benchmarking feature, but you could get to that data. It’s just not going to pull up an estimate in your benchmarking column, if I understood that correctly.

Megan Siefker:

Yeah. Another question about smaller-size organizations that are maybe not doing mega projects, more short term, smaller values. How could the tool be used for that? We do have some customers… The tool is flexible in that you can set up your cost structure on a given project to be whatever you need it to be, and we also have the process of partially locking budgets. So, we do have a number of customers who will set up one project as it’s named within InEight Control, but that project, the first level of it is multiple different projects within that and then you build out your hierarchy like that.

So, you’re not having to do the work to develop a whole new project every time, but you build your cost structure to indicate, “Okay, I’m working on this project.” And then you can do forecasting across… Maybe it’s a scope of projects that one person is managing. So, that’s one way that some smaller organizations have used the tool to still get benefit of having that data all come into one place, but not having to go from project to project. If you are doing short-term projects, you might want them all in the same bucket, if you will, in a hierarchy, and that really comes down to how you’re tying to your ERP, too. So, configuring that is something we have done before.

Let me see. Hey, Ben, I think I see a few questions coming in through you, might have to take those ones, got a series here and get to you on those ones, too. I’m trying to read through all these good questions. Everyone’s getting a lot of input in here, so that’s great. Looking at here, so we’ve got a question on sandbagging, a favorite topic of mine from the old days of being a superintendent.

John Upton:

Oh, you used to do that.

Megan Siefker:

No one’s ever sandbagged their progress, right? So, the question is, if crews are sandbagging, we talk about field verifying, if there’s a way to connect QA documents to record that daily progress. I’ll say we definitely have with our Completions module. We can tie plan components to the ITPs that are the forms that need to be completed against those components, and that’s one way to make sure you’re getting the quality documentation with that. But within the claiming steps, we have the ability to assign… And some customers use this for a 5, 10% quality holdback, but you can associate it to a quality step in the claiming scheme, and that helps with when you’re doing things like a schedule update. If I want to update my schedule and finish out activities, I don’t want to have that final 10% holdback. So, I would just look at the construction complete steps. That’s one way some folks have handled that, but while still leaving crews, the ability to keep that 5% hold back to themselves and then claim it up when they’re ready.

So, that’s one thing you can do with those set claiming schemes that you apply to components. Whether you have multiple steps or it’s just standard on all of them, you have a little bit of a holdback. But generally, our goal is to eliminate the sandbagging and expose that so that you can actually do financial planning during forecasting to say, “Hey, we have these areas where we have a great opportunity and let’s capitalize on that.” I think traditionally sandbagging was a way to hide areas so that you could come back to them where needed, and hopefully we’re getting to a point where you actually get to capture that opportunity and take those profits by exposing it early and still also forecasting correctly for maybe the areas that you are not doing as well in.

So, pulling those forecasts down into contingency buckets or some different schools of thought on that, too.

John Upton:

Got another one. How do you verify actual quantities performed in the field and the frequency of the reports? So, we don’t have anything that actually verifies the quantities. I mean, we make them objectionable so that if I had a, say, install underground pipe, the foreman… You might have an excavation. You might have a base layer. You have installing the pipe. You have backfill, and if you just said you had 100 linear feet of pipe, and the foreman did the excavation, it’s hard to say, “Well, how much of that linear feet did I actually do? I just excavated for the pipe.” So, within those claiming schemes, that’s where we get discrete, and you can have a quantity of excavation in cubic yards. You could have a quantity for laying the base at maybe square footage unit of measure. Then obviously, you have installation of pipe at linear footage, and then the backfill at cubic yards.

So, the foreman has much more discrete and understandable quantities that he can claim so that it’s not as, “I think we’re 20% complete.” It’s much more objective. So, that’s how we help with that, but yeah, it’s up to the foreman, the field engineer, the quantity surveyor to go validate the actual installed quantities. But yes, we do have reports. We like to see people do them daily. That’s the most proactive, but weekly is probably… For some of our customers that do have the quantity surveyors that go and validate exact quantities, I might say that’s probably more weekly. But for the self-performed guys that I’m a field engineer, and I’m doing that pipe, I know how many yards I excavated, and I will be able to claim that via the claiming schemes to get a real quantity back to that cost item to help drive my forecast.

Can InEight be used for companies who are an owner, developer, and GC as well? Yes, we have plenty of owner/customers today, as well as GCs, obviously. So, yeah, I mean, we have customers that are owners. We have customers that do the EPCM work on behalf of the owner. We have the general contractors. We have engineer firms. We didn’t really get into the engineering side, but basically everything you do in Plan, we have another product called Design that basically mimics exactly that. You have scope items with claiming schemes on drawings, and that discrete objective claiming for that type of work as well. All of that still progress comes back to control via the actual quantities. So, yes is the short answer to that question.

Megan Siefker:

Yeah, and I think, too, there’s some different connected flows that become more pertinent on the owner/GC side, some of the contract stuff that we didn’t highlight as much today and maybe less of the plan field execution module.

John Upton:

Correct. Yuri, I see your question about views and some frustration you have. So, maybe we’ll take that one offline, get a better understanding of what you’re seeing. I know a lot of products are incorporating views. I know Control has the one where you can share it across multiple projects of the organization. There is something on the long-term roadmap to set those up more at the organizational level, but feel free to reach out to me with anything specific that you’re seeing. There was a question about scheduling and schedule risk analysis. Yes, we do have a tool for that. InEight Schedule is a combo of both. It does the risk analysis, as well as offers the CPM scheduling functionality. That’s another integration that we didn’t touch on, the schedule integration.

We’re actively enhancing the way our Schedule product integrates with the platform. Right now, we started with Estimate, so there’s a bidirectional integration between InEight Schedule and Estimate, and next on the docket is Control, and we will continue to invest in those integrations. But yes, we do have… InEight Schedule is the tool that you are looking for, and it does both. It does the CPM scheduling and risk analysis.

Megan Siefker:

I know we’re almost at time. There were a couple of questions in here, too, just related to integrations, even to external solutions such as your ERP, specifically to the Contracts module, getting that data in, which is definitely critical to feed data. We don’t claim to be the source of truth for transactional data that you would find in your ERP and that data that you were seeing in Control that is very important for forecasting. All of our integrations information is published for the public on our knowledge library. So, maybe just a little plug before we have to wrap here. That’s also available. It’s just learn.ineight.com, and then if you go to Platform, there’s an entire resources section with all of our integrations documentation. So, that’ll show things like how do you get components into Plan? Even we have an inbound integration to create those. Some folks do it directly from their engineering system of record to create all those components.

That’s just one thing that I thought of off the top of my head, but we have a ton of integration points to feed the data in from the source because we want to not just eliminate duplicate entry in our own tools, but if you are storing it, and you have a source of truth already externally, that’s the nice part of our modular solution that we can feed that data in in many cases where it needs to land.

John Upton:

And we are at time. There was one question, how do we reach out? Again, if you fill out that survey and say that, “We would like more information,” somebody on our team will reach out to you and give you the information that you need to evaluate the commercial platforms that you’re looking through to see what’s the best fit, and that’s all we got.

Megan Siefker:

Yeah, and we’ll try to get to all these questions, too, that we were not able to get to, so we’ll make sure we follow up with you individually. Thanks, everyone.

John Upton:

Thank you very much.