Lessons in Innovation from Kiewit’s Work on South Fork Wind

Scott Seltz:

Hello and welcome to this webinar. Lessons in Innovation from Kiewit’s Work on South Fork Wind. This event is brought to you by Engineering News-Record and sponsored by InEight. Hi, I am Scott Seltz, publisher of ENR and your moderator for today’s webinar, and thanks for joining us. In this webinar, you’ll discover innovative techniques behind South Fork Wind, the first US commercial scale offshore wind farm. Leading today’s discussion, we’ll hear from Brad Barth, chief product officer at InEight. From Kiewit we’re also excited to welcome Matthew Beemer, senior vice president of power delivery procurement and Jeri Guthrie, project controls manager. We’ll learn more about them shortly. I’ll be rejoining our presenters at the end to field your questions that come throughout the webinar so please don’t forget to submit them in the Q&A section of the webinar console. And now I’ll hand things over to Brad Barth to kick off today’s conversation. Brad.

Brad Barth:

Thank you so much Scott. Appreciate the opportunity to be here. Really looking forward to this. Welcome everyone. Today we are going to shine the spotlight on a really interesting project, super complex project and learn about the great work that Kiewit did to deliver that project. We’ll learn a lot more about the projects as we go along. That will really be the star of the show or at least one of the stars of the show. And we’ll get into a lot of the details about the project itself and how it was accomplished. So really looking forward to that and getting into the details of that.

As Scott said, I’m Brad Barth, chief product officer for InEight. Before we introduce the other two stars of the show, Matt and Jeri, let’s just give you a little bit of background on InEight for those that may not know about InEight yet. InEight is a provider of integrated project control solutions and software that are used by engineers, contractors, owners, construction managers. And really InEight’s claim to fame is we’ve brought together under one umbrella into a common platform, the common functions of project controls, whether it be estimating, scheduling, cost management, work management, document control of those types of things. About 16 different business processes that we integrate together onto a common platform. So we’ll hear a little bit about how Kiewit used that platform on this terrific project as we go along here today. So let’s go ahead and introduce our two guests from Kiewit. And if I can ask each of you to just give a little bit of a background on yourself and your role within Kiewit. Matt, why don’t we start with you?

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah, good afternoon everyone. My name is Matt Beemer. I’m with Kiewit, senior Vice president of Procurement, specifically for the power delivery market. Been with Kiewit for coming up on seven years now. Been in the market a little over 10 years as well and based in our Kansas city office here.

Jeri Guthrie:

All right. I’m Jeri Guthrie. I’m currently a project controls manager in our power delivery group also. I’ve been with Kiewit for actually 16 years now. Ran all over the gambit on the business groups. Went through accounting, project controls for one tour, procurement for quite a while, came back to project controls. Realized that’s where my passion lies. So yeah. Just mainly managing all project controls for our Midwest projects in the power delivery group.

Brad Barth:

You both, and again, thank you for taking the time to be here. I’ve got a ton of questions for you all. Hopefully we can get through most of them. But just like a kid in the candy store on this project, just a lot of cool stuff here. So can’t wait to share this with the audience. Speaking of the audience, before we get into those details, let’s do a quick poll just so we know a little more who the audience is out there and the roles of you all that are watching the presentation today. So we’ll go ahead and let you all fill out that poll and answer that question. It probably won’t take you too long to do that, but maybe just a few quick facts on this project as you guys are waiting for those poll results to come in.

So first of all, I need to congratulate Jeri and Matt. This project … And we didn’t know this was going to happen, but just great timing. Just a day or two ago that project, the South Fourth Wind Project was awarded best project in the energy sector and project of the year through the E&R Best Project award. So congratulations to you both. Great timing as we get into this.

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah. I appreciate it. That was news to me.

Brad Barth:

Yeah. It was fantastic to see that and just a great accomplishment for both of you and your company. Let’s jump into the survey results there and see what we got. Pretty much the whole spectrum there across construction, project delivery. Not as many on the field engineering side and superintendents. Those people are probably busy doing work right now anyway. But great to have all of you out there watching this.

So a couple other interesting things on the project itself. You’ll see some stats on the screen, on the slides as we go through those and get into our Q&A here. Super impressive. One thing that really stood out to me, as complex as this project was in all of the logistics and the offshore component of this rotating staff out and the team out every two weeks in and out, just a lot of unique aspects of this project. No reportable incidents or lost time right after … I think it was 2000 plus work hours. So again, congratulations on job well done and making sure everybody gets home safe on the project.

So let’s get into … And again, I’ll throw out some facts in the project as we go along here, just as we go through the Q&A. But let’s get to the first question. So Matt, I’m going to start with you. And for this project … And I can imagine just the logistics with the onshore component, the offshore component, the connection of that, you’ve got … What was it, 75 nautical mile cable connecting the onshore of the offshore component. Lots of engineered equipment coming I would assume from probably various parts of the globe. And the procurement approach on this project must have been unique and challenging. And so maybe we can just start with from your role on this project looking after procurement, what was the overall strategy that you took particularly as it related to some of this engineered equipment and long lead time type stuff?

Matt  Beemer:

Well. Yeah, Brad, with this being the first offshore wind plant in the US, we’ve really relied on our European suppliers. They’ve been doing it for a long time over there. They know how it’s done. They make this stuff on a regular basis. Especially with the engineered pieces of equipment, the lead time risk and mitigating that was the huge push up front even in the estimate phase. So we partnered with a key supplier to go ahead and obtain the majority of the major engineered equipment such as the GIS, UAT, power transformers, protection and cape controls and shunt reactors. So partnering with that key supplier up front was crucial to us. That way we could go ahead, try to mitigate that lead time as best as we could with them. They knew it was coming. Before we even won the job we were treating them as a partner. The communication piece of it was huge.

So keeping them up to date on schedule so we could get our slots locked in. And then really taking over the logistics of it too. That was a big part of it. So instead of relying on a third party, we handled that all in house. We found that that was key to mitigating supply chain issues. Especially since most of this equipment was coming from Europe, so transit across the sea there. So keeping that communication open with our key supplier, that was our biggest push from the very beginning.

Brad Barth:

The timing of this project … So it was mainly 2022 and 2023 was the timeframe for … Completed in 2023. So on the heels of the pandemic and still coming out of a lot of logistical challenges, supply chain challenges. And it sounds like you guys really mitigated those risks. All about planning so well done there.

Jeri, let’s turn to you. A question. I know your role looks across many, many projects and within Kiewit. Certainly you guys are doing a lot of projects that are complex and large. And so when you think about this project and other projects at Kiewit that are at scale like that, I’m curious about how you guys manage … One of the challenges is managing quantities and as you go from design into construction, you’re making assumptions early on around what the quantities are going to be, but then things change I’m sure. Changed along the way. So maybe you can talk to that a little bit about just how do you manage that change and how do you adapt as design happens and you’re going through those quantity changes?

Jeri Guthrie:

Yeah. Definitely. So at Kiewit we utilize a cross-company standard. We call them account codes that are different scopes and equipment. Everything that we purchased or that would make up our proposal to an owner. We use standard codes across the company. So really having a standard process helps a lot with how we do project controls. So we start with building out our full proposal in InEight Estimate at the standard account code levels and you can go down further as needed and how you want to break up your project in different construction areas or whatever it makes sense for the project we can break it down as much as needed in detail. And during the estimate we’ll use the initial design quantities to build out our full estimate value in InEight Estimate. And then when we win the project, we move it in. We usually start with that file, move it into InEight Control. Tie out to what our final agreement value is with the owner. And then that’s locked. We called out our original budget. We don’t touch it. Can’t change, won’t change the whole project.

And then as the project goes on, as designed furthers, we can update what we call current estimate quantities and utilizing the same unit rates that will show us what our … So then we can see our new quantities compared to what we originally estimated. And then we can also track when we get change orders with the owner of which quantities are approved, we track that as our current budget. So we do a lot of layers, but it goes a long way in tracking where you started and where you’re going and you can see where quantities grew and in our forecasting we see where our unit rates grew or went down. So it’s really great and you can track it as to detailed of a level as you need to for the project, but you always tie back to the high level standard account codes as well.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. And great to hear how you’re using the InEight solution. Certainly we designed it to go to that lowest level of granularity, which we view as that component level quantity. So that’s great that you’re tracking that all the way through the process from design into construction and tracking all those changes. Our mission is we want expectations to equal outcomes and certainly expectations change as you go through engineering and design and keeping up with those changes is obviously a critical part of delivery. So it sounds like you guys have done a great job with that.

Let’s turn back to Matt. I got a couple of questions I’ll throw back at you, Matt. Again, when I think about this project, just the more I learned about it’s just amazing all the different bits and pieces that came together to make the project reality. When you think about … You talked about some of the long lead time approach that you took for those engineered items. Is there anything that stands out or any specialized equipment maybe that that was either super challenging or that sticks in your mind as something that … Maybe some challenges that you overcame on this particular project? Anything that stands out?

Matt  Beemer:

I wish I could say no, but yes, there were some. So particularly those specialized electrical equipment pieces. I spoke about the GIS, UAT shunt reactors, those were our most critical, high value, high risk electrical pieces there. Partnering with our provider there certainly helped. And then this was my first offshore project I was a part of. So electrical davit cranes. That was another piece. I never purchased those at the time. One that was interesting to me was the incinerator toilets. That was a new one for me as well. So going out for those, finding a supplier for that. And then working with our Kiewit offshore team as well. So all the purchasing engineering was done up in our Kansas City office, but we partnered with our KOS, Kiewit offshore yard down in Ingleside, Texas. So they were already equipped with the cranes capable of lifting such the massive topside unit that we had there. You can see in some of the pictures that that’s the yard there. So they were pretty much set up there. But working with them to make sure we had everything down in the yard when we needed it was key. And then safety equipment. So you’re going to have to have special safety equipment for the offshore platform such as chutes for quick exits and stuff like that.

But tying it back to InEight, working with our InEight functions such as the procurement status reports, that was key in tracking that award process and essentially that report starts at A and goes all the way to Z. So at the start of the project we work backwards essentially working with our suppliers, knowing from the estimate, hey, this has a 50-week, a hundred-week lead time. Working backwards from there knowing here’s when our P6 schedule says we need to have it on site to complete it. Here’s how long it’s going to take from award and then how long do we need to award it? Six, eight weeks.

So working your way back. Tracking that on the PSR, having weekly meetings with everyone in the KOS yard. Our engineering team, our procurement team to ensure everyone, not just procurement’s staying on track. We’re getting the engineered deliverables to our bidders on time to procurement so we can send out those RFPs. Ultimately get back to bids on time. So my procurement team working with the bidders there. And then ultimately getting the terms and awarding that. And then for delivery specifically, so once we award it, we utilize a delivery look ahead report in InEight. Essentially we’re putting in every single delivery milestone we have across the whole project and tracking that just like the PSR on a weekly basis. We’re bringing that up in the same meeting. Once it hits about 30 to 60 days out, we’re following up with our vendors with our freight forwarders, making sure that on-time delivery is going to happen. If not, how do we mitigate that risk? Do we need to look in the LDs and go those routes?

Brad Barth:

That’s really interesting stuff. You’ve really piqued my interest now on incinerator toilets so I want to learn more about incinerator toilets. Maybe that’s a different webinar. Yeah. Probably you can see it on the slide there but the substation, the offshore component of this was actually fabbed down off the coast of Texas right at Kiewit offshore and then barged up to its final home up off the coast of New York. So a whole other set of logistics and services to procure and worry about there in addition to just the actual construction and engineering components.

So one of the other things, Matt, I’m curious in your role on this project’s looking after procurement, obviously a lot of touch points with procurement to things like scheduling, work planning, even forecasting, cost management, things like that. What’s your general approach on … How do you guys integrate procurement with other processes that make up project controls?

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah. So we’re working in tandem, hand in hand. If we can co-locate, that’s optimum. In this scenario, half the team was in Kansas City, half the team was in Ingleside. Southern Texas there. It had its challenges with that, but we worked through it. Having a system in place that we could rely on that any time of the day you could go and run a report and see where we’re at, that was key. So myself, I’m working with the project manager and the scheduler such as Jeri and getting that P6 schedule from them and then integrating that into our procurement plan, what I talked about earlier, the procurement status report or what we call the PSR. Getting that in place. Getting it in sync. Working with that scheduler. If anything changes, we need to reflect those changes on the PSR.

And then Jeri mentioned it earlier with the account codes, well we also integrate that into what we call our buyout log and essentially that original budget that Jeri talked about, that doesn’t change, we’re looking at that and forecasting a cost based on what we’re seeing from the bidders. And then once we award the actual contract, that’s our carried cost. So cost first budget there and then it’s a living breathing contract. We’re having change orders. Whether it be from the owner design changes, what have you. So we’re integrating those costs into that report as well so we can see and manage the life cycle of the cost first budget there. So essentially working with the PM business scheduler. Everyone’s working together. Especially with procurement, we house all those reports and manage all those for the project team.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. And it sounds like you’re taking advantage of that capability in the InEight software. You might have for procurement related stuff, whether it’s subcontract supply stuff, you’ve got an estimate for that. Now you’re going to go through a buyout process, you make a commitment, turn it into a contract, so you’re tracking those stages along the way until it gets locked into that original budget. And then obviously dealing with changes after that. So having visibility to all of those stages I’m sure is super helpful and avoids questions, disputes, you name it because you’ve got that audit trail there.

Matt  Beemer:

Exactly. And being an EPC company, we bid a lot of lump sum projects. So here’s our lump sum. It’s not going to change unless the owner directs a change, which we can talk about cost adjustments. But Kiewit really prides itself on doing the work we said within the schedule, we said at the cost we said it’s going to take.

If we don’t manage those costs efficiently upfront, we’re not in for a good time. And if we do have hiccups along the way, we can use that historical data on future projects, learn where our shortcomings were, mitigate those risks in the future. So having that data that we can look back on five, six, seven, eight years. It’s a little different for this offshore project, it was the first of its kind, but we have similar projects, we can compare it to. Similar piece of equipment in the realm help mitigate those risks.

Brad Barth:

That’s really interesting and that’s certainly something that we see as a trend. I don’t know if you guys have seen it as well. How do we evolve into more of data-driven industry so that we’re not only the time and the money we invest in delivering a particular project and the data we capture because we have to for that project. Well, it sounds like you guys are doing this, but let’s get some value out of that data. If we track it the right way, it could be predictive for us on the next project and the next project and help us get new folks on board more quickly because they can take advantage of that data as part of their collective experience as well. Great to see you guys are doing that.

And maybe that’s a good segue over back to you Jeri. When we think about data, and obviously in your role looking at project controls data is a key element of that. We’re getting to more and more real-time data, particularly with these systems like InEight where there’s a collection component, field component to the data coming in that’s fueling that system. So the turnaround time is becoming a lot faster. Where it used to be people were putting data maybe in spreadsheets or something like that, and then maybe once a week that data gets surfaced and now you’ve got a report that you can look at for the last week or maybe even the last month. Now it’s almost real time. Is that what you’re seeing? Is that where Kiewit’s gotten to in terms of being able to get to that near real time data? And how are you leveraging that particularly on these large scale projects?

Jeri Guthrie:

Yeah. We have really gotten to the point where our guys are out there. They’re entering their time and earning their quantities daily, and that’s feeding into reports that we have built that we can look at daily. We’re doing full schedule updates once a week. Those guys are out there looking at even more detailed schedules pretty much daily. You talked about the component level that we can use in InEight, they actually can develop work plans using those existing components to assign work to their crews. They can go in and charge their time and then they can claim and you can see how they performed against the plan.

One of the biggest ways that I have seen this real time data have impact is especially on large scale jobs where you’re doing the same work in a couple different areas. You can see if a crew is really highly performing in one area real time, whereas maybe another crew is struggling and you can intervene before it really starts becoming a bigger problem and see what the differences between the crews, what one crew’s doing, what issues they’re having, and come up with a mitigation plan a lot faster than what you would’ve in the past where it goes on and on and on until it slams you and you’re like, oh no. You can see it real time happening. So that really helps.

And then another thing with Kiewit, we resource load our schedules with the budgets that we have and the forecast in our updated quantities from design. We use the unit rates to turn it into hours, resource with our schedules. We look at that. We update weekly and they can see how many full-time equivalents or crew they’re going to need for different disciplines and get ahead of, “Oh man, we’ve got this spike coming up in the work. How can we hire? Is it going to be a longterm spike? What do we need to do to tackle that?” So it’s really great in just real-time decision makings and avoiding accidentally waiting too long. You can see it and mitigate faster.

Brad Barth:

Yeah. Things move faster now. The expectation is that things move faster now in this digital world that we live in and sounds like you’re really taking advantage of that. One of the things you touched on, one of the things I’ve heard Kiewit talk about is this concept of best cost ever, which is great message to the owners that you work with. Obviously controlling costs and continuously striving to get to lower costs. But the heart of that best cost ever, as I understand it, is you’ve really got crews competing with each other within Kiewit. Not only on a particular project, but across projects. Every day you guys can go in and look at back to those account codes you were talking about. Those standardized scopes of work. Let’s go look at concrete foundations or slabs or excavation, whatever it is, and look at who’s doing that the best, who’s having the best cost ever, and you’ve got a competition going. Is that right?

Jeri Guthrie:

Yeah. You’re right. And project control sends that out at least once a month, but they can go view it real time. It’s out there for everybody to look at real time and see if they want to beat another project out. Yeah. Across all the projects, see what the other projects are performing at and where they’re in not only competition, but if they’re struggling somewhere, they can see a project that’s knocking out of the park and not always just on their project, but maybe another project is knocking something out of the park, they can reach out to them. So yeah. We do track that best cost ever. And I think it’s been really good and it’s good that its real time and it’s updated as they go along.

Brad Barth:

Yeah. That’s great. And so Matt, I wanted to ask you about two main components. You had the offshore component, and the onshore component. How did you coordinate those I guess? What was the communication plan? Were they two separate things that were going on simultaneously? Were they sequential? How did you guys approach that?

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah. We treated them as two separate projects completely. The offshore and the onshore. So with the offshore team that I worked with primarily, we were in two separate places, so communication is paramount. So when we weren’t able to be in person … We did travel quite a bit to be in person as much as we could, but Teams meetings were huge with the camera on. That was the key there. With InEight, it made it easier with invoice approvals, change order approvals. Just being an automated process. Everyone knows the process. You get an automated email saying, “Hey, this invoice is in your queue.” Then you have me annoying everyone if it’s in their queue too long every week. Hey Mr. PM, you’ve had something in your queue for five days, is there a reason why you haven’t approved this change order yet or invoice? So having that accountability where anyone could see it any time, that was huge because we weren’t in person. I couldn’t walk over someone’s desk and have a conversation. So those weekly meetings and standardized reports, which held everyone accountable, whether they liked it or not, that was a huge pivotal part of the project.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. Keep things moving quickly. It sounds like you guys are quite skilled at that. Maybe touch on, Matt, just a little bit … You touched on the approval process, particularly for things like payments, change orders. I suspect a lot of the folks in the audience might be … As they’re looking at systems, there’s often the discussion around for things like contract-related workflows, procurement-related workflows. Do we do those in our ERP or finance or accounting system or do we do those in our project system like InEight? What’s Kiewit’s take on that? And maybe, Matt, you go first and then Jeri, maybe if there’s anything you wanted to add from your project controls role on that. But when you think about the people that are involved in that process, whether it’s sign off on initial contract or approving payments on a regular basis, at Kiewit, what are we doing in InEight relative to that function?

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah. Anything that is on a contract, we are handling within InEight. So what we’ll do is have a procurement kickoff meeting at the very onset of the project and determine what our workflows are going to be. So for anything engineering equipment, typically we’ll have at least the engineering manager or the project manager, whoever the responsible engineer is on that approval workflow. And then anyone else the project deems necessary, it could be as little as three people, it could be five or six people depending on their needs and their expectations. But all that is handled via InEight. So for instance, a contract, we’ll route that through InEight. It’ll have a red line version of the contract. We put a PDF final version in there as well. All the relevant backup as far as if there’s any drawings or technical specifications, insurance, all that is in supporting docs already so it’s a one-stop shop.

For instance, the PM could go in if it’s their turn to approve, see everything, pull it up, download on their desktop. They could even look at it just in a web view if they want a quick glance at something. And then they can leave notes, comments on it. That all gets funneled back to whoever started that workflow. So for me, for instance, that would come back and they could either approve or reject it or if it’s quick change sometimes, hey, quick IM, fix this and I’ll approve it. All that is handled via InEight. Same with the invoices. So we’ll develop our workflow. Each invoice is uploaded into InEight, then it’s tracked against a line item, which goes back to what Jeri was talking with the account code. So we tie those two account codes so we know how much money we have in that certain bucket. And then the PM, before it ever gets to them, we should have enough money in that bucket. But if the PM sees, hey, we’re getting close to that bucket, especially if you’re talking about a concrete supplier or aggregate where you may have overruns there, we can try to assess that. “Hey, what’s going on? Do we need to increase the budget there? Do we need to have a conversation with the supplier or the field to know what’s going on?”

But all that’s handled within InEight. Automated process. You can see who it’s with at any time by running a report. And the rejections get tracked too, so if you had a contract rejected, it’s going to track how many times it was rejected, for what reasons. Same with approvals as well.

Brad Barth:

Got it. So it sounds like most of that work is happening by the project team inside of InEight, but then I’m guessing there’s some touchpoints back to the ERP system. Maybe a final purchase order then gets integrated over to the ERP system or a payment gets updated or that sort of thing. Is that correct?

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah, that’s correct. Once we execute the contract within InEight, it’ll talk to our ERP system and actually make the internal PO. So we will pay against that internally through our AP department, but the vendor never sees any of that. It’s background. I can get in there, Jeri can get in there and making sure payments are actually funneling through and the projects can get in there if they want. A lot of those systems are a little clunkier than InEight. InEight’s pretty smooth to use so they can get in there and see if it’s synced or not. It’s pretty much the level they go to and then they rely on either their business team or their procurement team to ensure that those payments are actually funneling out through our systems.

Brad Barth:

Makes sense. Makes sense. Sounds like you got the best of both worlds there. Jeri, anything you want to add to that from your purview? It sounds like Matt took us through how it happened on South Fork, but throughout Kiewit, is that the norm?

Jeri Guthrie:

Yeah. I would say that’s the norm for sure. And then from a project controls perspective, our time gets entered into ERP, but it pulls to InEight the spent at the account code level, at the level that the project’s tracking at and the quantities are already in InEight and their earning quantities and we have approvals set up too for their superintendents. They’re reviewing their time, the spent and they’re reviewing the earned and approving it in InEight and being able to compare it.

Brad Barth:

Excellent. Yeah. Thanks for that detail on that topic. Really interesting stuff. And then, Matt, you alluded to workflows and the different roles of people. And again on this project, people, some offshore, some onshore, some back at corporate or in the district. Just the workflows that you manage in the system, whether it’s for review or approvals. When you think back to the South Fork project, anything that stands out, any particular workflow that was particularly challenging that you were able to get your arms around it easily using the technology?

Matt  Beemer:

There’s nothing that really comes to mind as far as challenging because everyone utilizes the system and they’ve been utilizing it for years at this point, so everyone’s trained up on it. So I would say there was challenges with particular contracts or invoices maybe we didn’t agree with that went through the approval or ultimately got rejected or we had to have comments. But the approval workflow itself is so streamlined at this point and everyone knows the process, who to reach out to. Like I’ve been beating with a dead horse, communication’s huge. The project team was really good about communication from the bottom up, so that wasn’t an issue. Just having that streamlined one-stop shop, everyone could rely on that, knew where the invoices were at all times. So I wouldn’t say there was significant challenges in that aspect. It was just your one-off contract or maybe a invoice you disagreed with.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. That’s great. And yeah, looking at some of the stats on that slide, just again, the complexity of this project. 2100 punch lists. We’ve been talking about procurement primarily and project controls. Another key aspect of the InEight solution that I know Kiewit takes advantage of is the quality aspect of it. So 8,000 tags. Just some amazing stats on this particular project. Maybe one of those complexities that we haven’t really touched on yet is you talked about some of your international partners, primarily European as I understand it, Matt. Maybe for those in the audience that are maybe getting into a project that does involve that same sort of international partnerships or procurement, supply chains that go beyond one country … First of all, am I correct in assuming you’re bringing in stuff for this project probably from all over the world? Is that a correct assumption?

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah, primarily Europe is where we got our key of electrical equipment.

Brad Barth:

Any particular challenges or logistical issues? As you’re dealing with the international deliveries versus the domestic deliveries, anything stand out for you on that?

Matt  Beemer:

Yeah, it was 2022, so we’re on the backstages of COVID there, so there were still fears there. The Suez Canal was having issues as well, so it was a crazy time for supply chain logistics. So what we decided to do internally is handle all the logistics ourselves. Instead of having our suppliers hire their third-party freight forwarder, we handled that all in-house, so we had the oversight over everything. We could handle the contracts, know where it was at all times. If there was an issue, we were the first to know about it, we could correct it. We could let the owner know if there was significant delay. Essentially, we didn’t let that pass through a middleman. We took ownership of that. I think that was huge. We did bear a little more risk because of that, of taking title of those pieces of equipment earlier than we normally would if we’re doing DDP or DAP shipping terms. But doing X-Works from closest port we felt was worth the risk for those logistics and it paid off for us. We had a great experience with it. The owner really appreciated that. So yeah, it was worth the risk in our point of view.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. Good stuff there. Jeri, when you think about this being the first offshore … Really the first offshore at scale anyway, utility scale wind project in the United States, and it’s the first offshore wind farm for Kiewit, as I understand it. The work you guys have done on this project, the benchmarks you’ve created capturing data on this project, how do you apply that forward? Is this a market that Kiewit really sees as growing and will you have the opportunity to leverage the lessons learned, if you will, from this project into future wind projects? What’s your view on that?

Jeri Guthrie:

Yeah, definitely. This is a market that Kiewit does anticipate growing, and we definitely want to keep going after the projects. With the way that Kiewit tracks our costs at the standard account code level across the company and at the detailed level on the projects, we’ll definitely be able to leverage all of the lessons that we learned on South Fork with just across the board we could see where we spent more money than we thought on certain equipment maybe and why that happened. We could see where we didn’t perform at the rates that we thought we would and what was the impact there and how can we apply it on the next projects. We can see where our quantities overran. We can see if it was captured in a change order and if not, most likely, maybe do some efficiencies on our side and how we can mitigate that and we can see it at the account code level. We can see it at the lowest level that the project is tracked at. So absolutely, there’s a lot of information we can gain just out of looking and comparing what happened in our control file with the current budget and like we were talking about earlier in discussing with the individuals on the project, certain situations, and definitely utilize all that for the next one that we hopefully get.

Brad Barth:

That makes sense. And if I was going to bet, I would bet that Kiewit does a great job of capturing that data. When the project’s done, the data’s not done. You use that data in so many other ways to help you with risk mitigation on future projects, with planning on future projects and other things. So yeah, nicely done there.

I know we want to save some time here for questions and answers, but maybe just one last question for you, Jeri. Certainly Kiewit’s been using the InEight technology for a while now, and then as you get into this renewables and sustainable energy sector, do you see good translation there in terms of the technology transitioning from whether it’s a road project or a bridge project or a power plant or renewables type project like this one? Is the technology general enough that it can span across all of those industries from your perspective?

Jeri Guthrie:

Oh yeah, definitely. I can’t say that I have been intimately involved with every district, but I have talked to other individuals and project controls even in procurement when I was there and really the way we operate is very similar. How we track costs and how we look at costs. It’s just how they’re bucketized, honestly, that can be different. But since we know if we have to do grading … We were going to have to do grading on a lot of different types of projects. We can see across all projects how we perform at grading, and it’s not a different code for a certain market, but it’s adaptable. We can add account codes as we want to track to different detail at a company level. If we’re performing more of a scope of work that we weren’t performing before and we weren’t really tracking, we add it. So yeah, it’s super adaptable to all the work that Kiewit performs.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. And that’s certainly a source of pride for InEight and Kiewit’s usage of InEight because Kiewit is … You do big complex projects like the South Fork project, you do small projects, you do all sectors, whether it’s buildings or power plants or highways, dams, whatever. So great to hear of your usage of the technology and how it applied to this super complex and now award-winning project, the South Fork project. So again, congratulations to you both on a job well done. I know we want to leave some time for Q&A here, so we’ll see what questions our audience has. So Scott, I will throw it back to you to take a look at those questions and throw them at our two guests here.

Scott Seltz:

Thank you, Brad. And Jeri and Matt, this has been a very great conversation. Before we have you address a lot of good questions that came throughout the webinar, I want to remind our viewers we would love their feedback, so if they would take a few moments to complete our webinar survey either now or when they exit after the presentation, we’d greatly appreciate it because it helps us improve our program. But hey, let’s get to the questions. Right from the top. First one. Aside from the successful completion of the asset, were there any significant accomplishments made on the project that stood out to you?

Matt  Beemer:

For me particularly, I just thought being on the forefront of this new type of project that was coming to the US, specifically a clean, green solution to energy consumption was a huge accomplishment of mine personally, and I know Kiewit was very proud to be on the forefront of that new market. So just supporting that clean energy and I think being the first one to get that done in the US, that’s a huge thing for us and we’re really proud to be a part of it.

Scott Seltz:

Jeri, anything to add?

Jeri Guthrie:

No, I second what Matt said. It was a good answer.

Scott Seltz:

Okay, great. Another viewer is asking, you mentioned contracts and workflows and noted that an internal PO went into your ERP. Where are your POs for your external vendors and where does that workflow occur for that? In InEight or ERP?

Matt  Beemer:

For our external vendors, they’re all contracts based, so we will have a PO number generated from InEight and we’ll put that on our contracts. Then we’ll go ahead and send the final contract for signature for both parties. So that’s essentially how we treat the PO. The internal document is a different document number that we pay against, but that’s not an actual what you would think of as a typical PO. It’s just the contract that’s coming out at InEight that we’re generating as a procurement group, and that’ll all come via InEight.

Scott Seltz:

Thank you. Another viewer is asking, with the real time tracking of quantities and you see an overrun on a quantity and you do a change order, does it also give you the ability to see that that’s going to affect other line item quantities and update those all at once?

Jeri Guthrie:

Yes, definitely. We do quantity updates somewhat regularly on certain projects and when we want to capture it as a change order, it really helps that we’ve already been tracking our quantities and what we believe they’re going to be in the current estimate, and we track all the changes, so we break it down in detail where all our changes are. We put that on the change order. So yeah, definitely.

Scott Seltz:

Great. Another viewer is asking was the energy group or the marine group from Kiewit that took lead on this project?

Matt  Beemer:

It was the KLS group actually that took lead on it and they partnered with our energy group, which is our power delivery group.

Scott Seltz:

Thank you. Another viewer is asking, and this question’s for Jeri, have you found that reviewing performance data on a daily basis is accurate or is there more focus on a weekly review?

Jeri Guthrie:

I would say that right now we do have more focus on a weekly review just because we do complete full updates weekly, but on daily time sheets, you can see how a person performed daily when you assign them their work plan. You can see how they’re doing against their work plan. But definitely there’s a little bit more focus right now weekly.

Scott Seltz:

Thank you. Another viewer is asking, when you say partnered with a key supplier, was this a contractual partnership or something less formal than that?

Matt  Beemer:

It was a partnership from the onset of the estimate, which we didn’t have any specific contract at that time. It was, if you will, a handshake agreement where they gave us some lead time assurity and some price assurity at the time. And once we got the job from our client, then we went and got under contracts terms. So our philosophy is we are not going to go ahead and purchase anything unless we have a contract in hand. So that’s how we treated our suppliers as well. So once we actually got the project, that’s when we actually signed them up. But the intention was once we had that partnership, it’s some we’ve been using for years and years. So there was trust there, a good relationship. So that’s how we started it out, but it evolved into an actual contract.

Scott Seltz:

So a related question. The viewer’s asking if you want to share who was your key supplier on this project?

Matt  Beemer:

I can’t share that. I’m sorry.

Scott Seltz:

Okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.

Matt  Beemer:

No worries.

Scott Seltz:

Okay. Thank you, Matt. Another viewer is asking, a slide that indicated there were 2,100 punch lists, were these consolidated into a single project punch list sortable by metadata for overall project management? Were all stakeholders provided access to InEight systems?

Jeri Guthrie:

I can field that one. I have a little bit of exposure to quality in a roundabout way. I’ll answer to the best of my knowledge. I don’t know exactly how South Fork did it, but I know how we’re rolling into doing it right now. Within InEight, we have InEight compliance, and I’m pretty sure it was the compliance module where they’re developing their punch lists and somewhat standardized punch lists that they can start with and they can manipulate on a project level and it’s all housed in a project in InEight. But we also have the templates that they can start with overall. And then stakeholders will have access, I would say, to where they’re going to be working. So not everybody’s going to be able to work in our control files where basically our accountants, our business group is handling the budget and all that stuff, but where they need to be in, they have access to.

Scott Seltz:

Great. We have time for a couple more questions. This viewer is asking, what is the level of integration with ERP like SAP or similar?

Matt  Beemer:

Jeri, I think that might be more up your alley.

Jeri Guthrie:

The integration with SAP and ERP, we have our business group. I know specifically for taking cost out of the ERP and putting it into InEight, when we need to do that, we have basically, it’s a syncing function. Our business group runs it on a regular basis, a schedule. They have schedule that they do it, and it’s literally just pushing a button and everything syncs up. So I don’t know. That’s a great explanation, but I don’t know if-

Brad Barth:

Well, maybe I’ll add a little bit just for the person asked the question. I didn’t mention at the beginning when we’re talking about InEight, but if you spotted it over on the left from the InEight platform was a lot of other systems, design systems, ERP systems, financial systems, things like that. So the InEight platform does have a lot of integrations available to other third-party products like SAP and other financial systems so I know Kiewit does a great job taking advantage of those, but that is something that is inherent in the platform, is that ability to integrate with other systems as well.

Scott Seltz:

Thank you. A viewers asking, are you open to new suppliers for the product that you already have a supplier working for several years?

Matt  Beemer:

So if I understand the question correctly, are we open to new suppliers in general? And yes, of course, we’re always looking for new partners, new opportunities. If someone has some key insights to the market that are ahead of the market than other people are, then we want to get ahead of that as well. So if you’re not adapting to the market and the change is there, then you’re going to fall flat. So yes. Short answer, yeah, we’re always open for new opportunities and explore those, and we do that frequently.

Scott Seltz:

Great. This viewer is asking, how did the team mitigate risks associated with supply chain disruption such as material shortages or transportation delays?

Matt  Beemer:

We have contractual language that helps us quite a bit. Particular liquidated damages so we can hold our supplier up to liquidated damages capped at a certain amount. That helps. So stringent enforcement, sure. Clauses in there. And that goes both ways, right? We have that with our client as well. Russia-Ukraine War started during this project, so that was a big force majeure claim from several of our suppliers, especially the steel market. That impacted them quite a bit. So having the back to back flowdowns is what we call them, contractual terms we have with our owner and flowing those down to our suppliers, that’s key to mitigating the risk there. Also, we have a category management team that works just to study the market, how it’s evolving, the risks that are coming up. So we’re talking to them on a monthly basis. They’re sending out monthly updates to all of our procurement team and key individuals that need to know that, so we can stay ahead of that. Even if it’s not happened yet, we’re getting updates there that, hey, this is a potential risk. So we can go out to our suppliers and just be frank with them. Ask them, “Hey, are you seeing this yet? If not, how are you preparing for this potential risk that may evolve?”

Scott Seltz:

Thank you. Well, unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for questions today. Please join me once again in thanking Brad Barth, Matthew Beemer, and Jeri Guthrie for their presentations as well as our sponsor, InEight. If you have any additional questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to click the email us button on your console and we’ll share those with our presenters so they can respond to you directly. If you didn’t have a chance to fill it out earlier, you will be redirected to our post event survey and we look forward to hearing from you about how we can make our programs work better for you. Please visit enr.com/webinars for the archive of this presentation to share with your colleagues as well as information on our upcoming events. We hope you found today’s presentation to be a great investment of your time. Thanks again for joining us and have a great day.