The Preconstruction Advantage: Estimating for Constructability on Complex Projects

Dominic Cozzetto:

All right, there we go. Welcome, everybody. Today we’ll be talking about actually my favorite thing, preconstruction. So we have a couple experts with us today in estimating. We’re going to be talking about mostly estimating for constructability on complex projects, maybe some new complex projects that we’ve never seen before, and how we actually assess risk and go about that. So couple quick housekeeping notes before we get started. This is an ON24 experience that you’re in right now, so your screen can be completely customized. You can move the windows around, you can make them bigger, drag them around, do whatever you want to with them. There are engagement tools inside there for you to interact with. There’s a toolbar on the top of your screen. Feel free to click through that, see what everything does. Also, I’d really like to point out the Q&A box, so make sure to submit any questions that you have throughout the webinar, and we’ll try to get to some of those at the end.

I’m Dominic Cozzetto. I am a Product Director at InEight, and we’re actually going to launch a survey right now, so if you could fill out that poll for us, that’d be great. With me today is Brett Poulos. He’s a director of preconstruction at Burns & Mc, and Bryan Myers, he’s a VP of preconstruction at Brasfield & Gorrie. Brett, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Brett Poulos:

Sure. So my name’s Brett Poulos. I’m the national director of preconstruction and estimating here at Burns & Mc. We do design and build everything from oil and gas, and chemical facilities to power plants and data centers, food manufacturing, transmission distribution. Essentially, if there’s a complexity to it, or if it’s complex in nature, we design and build it. So fully integrated EPC design build firm. Got about 140 estimators across the US, Mexico, Canada, and the UK.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Great. Thank you, sir. Thanks for joining us today. Bryan, also, can you introduce yourself, please?

Bryan Myers:

Yeah. Good afternoon. Bryan Myers with Brasfield & Gorrie, regional preconstruction director for B&G, based in Birmingham, Alabama. Been with Brasfield & Gorrie for… it’s my 18th year. Brasfield & Gorrie is privately-held, we’ll do about $10 billion worth of construction volume this year across six major market sectors, commercial, healthcare, mission-critical, industrial, government, and heavy civil. We largely use InEight products, InEight estimate in our heavy civil and industrial markets. Typically, most of our work is in the Southeast, but we do go all over the country chasing clients, and the right opportunities. So happy to be on today.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Perfect. Thanks. Look forward to it. Yeah, so I am Dominic Cozzetto. I’m the director of product of the estimating product at InEight. And if you haven’t heard of InEight… Jump the slides real quick, there we go… It is a modular integrated platform that is purpose-built for capital construction. It’s not just a generic project management tool. Currently, we have over 850 companies that use our products to manage over a trillion dollars on their products this year alone. So as you can see from the slide, we kind of do everything.

So we’re going to be talking project controls and preconstruction. So the estimating tool here as well for pricing, scheduling, also just everything that connects together with reports and dashboarding as well. And because of the integrated platform we wanted to talk to you about… Go to the next slide here. Honestly, pricing unfamiliar scope. So, Brett, we’re going to start off with you. We keep on seeing more complex, bigger projects come out. What gives you the confidence to put a number on work that you don’t have any direct project history with? And how do you mitigate the risk of that unknown scope?

Brett Poulos:

Sure. So I probably have more of a business planning and risk mitigation answer for this one, as opposed to a technical answer. I could probably feel both sides of it, but number one, I try not to get in that situation. So if we’re identifying a new project type to pursue in a particular business line or market, I’m typically in lockstep with that business unit to plan accordingly, and I’d strategically hire that skillset into our team. We’re super strategic in what we do, because we want to ensure our clients are successful in doing so, but that mitigation ensures… Or it really comes with ensuring that you have the right expertise and familiarity with the market and those project nuances. There are absolutely areas that we venture into that are either new and emerging technologies that are being implemented, or processes that are being implemented on projects.

And I’m not talking software, I mean more of the engineered equipment side. It’s a first of kind type environment. And typically, we’re just getting the right people in the room to understand the nuances of that, that’s kind of a cross section of both field, the engineering and design side, as well as the constructability, construction and preconstruction experts to understand what it is we’re building. We’ll try to look at benchmarks on past projects that are similar, and then really do a deeper dive on what’s the nuance, or what’s the difference on this scope, or a piece of equipment that is different or entire project type. Same thing if you were entering a new market, new geography that has a new geotech, or new permitting requirements, it’s really understanding the market, and ensuring that you understand those nuances of that project type, and then just do a baseline, and factor off of the historicals that you do have.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Great. Great. Thank you. Bryan, same question.

Bryan Myers:

Yeah, I would say no two jobs are the same. So on every single project you chase, you’re going to have some amount of… We’ve never done this before. Obviously the jobs that you’re going to be most comfortable with is you have the smallest amount of unknown, or items that you’re not as familiar with organizationally, or on your team, and so really, the thing that we will do is really work to lock in on the items we do know something about. So if it’s a complex structure, there are going to be big chunks of it that we understand production, if we can get the quantities that are in consistent formats, and using repeatable processes to identify the things that we do know, and then ultimately whittle down to the things that are really the game changers, or unique about a particular product, or project, or product type.

And then obviously the larger of… those are going to be in a bucket or a log that we’re going to spend more energy on, and leverage the experience that we have, leverage partners in the market to try to hone in and reduce the number of things that we don’t know about. And then if we still have things we’re unsure about, that’s where that contingency line starts to come into play of, what is our sensitivity for the things that we just have not done before? What could happen? But obviously, we’re looking to drive those down to a small list as possible. We’ll work with our clients and our partners to try to assess where should the risk for that live. If you want it to live on our side of the docket, it might have a price tag. If we have a shared risk, we’ll look for ways to make that equitable in the deal. So really, it’s about just identifying the known, reducing the amount of unknown to a manageable level, and then really making a business decision about how to deal with those unknown items for something we haven’t seen before.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. Perfect. And do you usually see a common place where that risk is kind of hiding in these unfamiliar scopes, Bryan? Is it in maybe some scope, or quantities, or is there even a way to generalize that at all?

Bryan Myers:

I think one of the things that we find is that, because we do go to the detail, I mean, we have a lot of engineers, detail-oriented people, is we go and find the detail, and then we have good systems for how to go to pull that out for each scope. Sometimes you have to then back up and you have to look at, “Well, how do those things interplay with one another?” I would say the risk that often hides in plain sight for us is the overlap of work types, and the impact on the schedule, because either… Usually end dates are pretty important for our clients.

And so if you miss on how the schedule and the sequence ties to your cost and your cost activities, and don’t plan accordingly for the resources needed to make that run smoothly, you can really start to stack your schedule up, and really cause yourself to get in a hole that’s really difficult to execute out of. So really, for us, risk is usually around our schedule, and our ability to go execute for the units that we set out, and then what controls can we put in place to manage that systematically or just understanding that that is a usual, a typical risk on any complex job.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. I always cringe when someone said, “Well, we can just throw more people at it when that’s never really the solution, right? So perfect answer. Brett, from your side, where do you see those risks hiding?

Brett Poulos:

Sure. So we really take the approach of bottoms up estimating whether we’re self-performing the scope or not. So we’re looking at, same thing Bryan said, we’re looking at quantities, we’re looking at productivity factors. If you’ve never installed it before, having a comparison of what our productivity would be on this piece of equipment or whatever it is that is new. You don’t know what you don’t know, but what you need to do is do the due diligence to understand the nuances of that scope or that piece of equipment. So it’s really bringing in field expertise. So do you have the superintendent, the foreman, the craft labor expertise on your team or a resource that can be an added value to your team to understand that scope of work? Sit down with the design team, make sure everyone’s married up from both the technical design side as well as the constructability side.

But that’s typically the way we would approach it. I would say the number one thing is really understanding, do we fully understand and appreciate what it’s going to take to install this, whatever it may be, whatever the system is or new technology or piece of equipment. And then as it says on the screen here too, what contingency, what level of confidence do you have that you can hit those rates based on historical data? And then do you need to factor some additional contingency or productivity to be able to accomplish that? And then if you meet or don’t meet that productivity factor, you’ve got a benchmark on the next one to understand where your baseline is for future projects.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, I think one thing you said there that can’t be overstated is you bring in field experience. I remember sitting through a bid review with two teams. It was a giant ammonia plant and the mechanical estimator for me had built mines, power plants, everything in the field. So he just took some equipment, crewed it out, thought this is how I’m going to build it. When our district manager said, “Where’d you get these unit rates?” He said, “Well, they don’t exist. We haven’t built this before, but here’s the size of the crew and this is how long I think it’ll take me to do it because it’s very similar to a clarifier I put on a mine one.”

So just having that second check of, “Hey, we’re not only just having benchmarking against this, but actual crew experience is just something that you always need to be having an influx of inside your estimating department, I think.” No, perfect answer guys. Great. Speaking of benchmarking, we’ll go on to the next slide here. And, Bryan, we’ll start with you on this one. How do you benchmark for a new construction approach? For example, like a prefab MEP or modular systems, different sequencing that are kind of against your historical cost data before you committed in a bid? So maybe go ahead.

Bryan Myers:

Yeah. I was just saying, I think the biggest thing is one, you need to know what data you have, how is it organized, what is that data telling you you did? And then when you take that and you think about, well, what are the impacts? What drove those specific benchmarks, even if they aren’t exactly what the exact product is. And you look at the environmental constraints, the structure that you’re going to go build this project in, what are going to be the drivers that are going to be different than the conditions on which your benchmark data was collected? So you do need to have, even if you don’t have perfect apples to apples data, having data with a story and an understanding behind it is really helpful because then again, like I mentioned earlier, being able to narrow down like, “Okay, well, what are the areas that we are changing in this scenario and how can we address that?” Either it’s faster or it’s slower or it’s got some different means and methods that we need to implement because of a different condition.

And so you just try to narrow down the number of variables that you’ve got to think about. One of the things that we do a lot when we’re unsure is we’ll price it multiple ways. We’ll think about it given one scenario in the estimate, we’ll price it in parallel in the same estimate and run it all the way out and then we’ll just suspend one and keep one on and we’ll see what the impact looks like. Then you compare that to your benchmarks and you really see where you want to land based on your risk tolerance, the sensitivity of that work relative to the overall project. I think our approach is really just to leverage data where you have it, know what that data is telling you, and then you take the specialty knowledge that you have within your organization, within your team, field resources, folks that have built things similar and you try to work through what the impacts would be both from either a more productive or less productive mindset.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Brett, what about you? How do you guys kind of adjust for that?

Brett Poulos:

Sure. So one, I really like the question because I think every general contractor construction firm is facing this today as we’re looking at how do we approach these projects, how do we take a prefabricated approach or how do we modularize these systems in a more controlled environment just as labor’s constrained, it’s a necessity of the market today. So the way we kind of look at it is when you change the environment, you’re really changing the risk profile as well. So when you change those or when those conditions change that your basis of estimate was predicated on, you have to think about what was the basis on those past projects when you factor weather or if you’ve got bus time or you’ve got guys at a lay down yard or a parking lot and you’ve got non-productive costs of transportation back and forth, all of those things that you would factor in toward traditional field project site, you would potentially be able to take those out into a fabricated controlled environment.

So it’s not really an apples to apples comparison because the conditions change. However, you can go back and do an audit on what your past basis was and understand what those conditions that drove up your productivity or drove down your productivity, whatever it may be. So if you factor those productivity hits for those non-productive direct costs or indirect costs, however you looked at it, you would essentially just remove those productivity hits, re-baseline your new factor because those new conditions or existing conditions no longer exist in the new environment. So with enough data on those changed approaches, you can establish new cost history to estimate with and track against in the future. But again, kind of like the response I had on the prior question, it’s bringing in the people who really understand how that can be built, what your constraints are in that new environment for a new approach, whatever it may be, and getting those field insights to help bolster your estimating team.

Dominic Cozzetto:

So you did say bring in the people, not bring in the AI agents, right? I just wanted to make sure it was clear there for that experience.

Brett Poulos:

And to compound on that one, I really see an evolution, not to go down a rabbit hole here, but I see an evolution in the way we staff our teams just globally, the whole construction market. As people get more ingrained and utilize AI more, you really want teams who can challenge the outputs of AI as you continue to utilize AI and the people who can challenge that the best are the people who have installed it in the field. I see an evolution where there will be a lot more craft experience, folks that came off their tools that are entering the estimating realm and bolstering our teams. We currently have it today. I think we have over 17 craft professionals of our 140 people on our teams. So there’s a huge amount of value in that field insights, not only as an augment to your team, but actually embedding them in your team as well to challenge AI outputs.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. So I was going to ask you next, what does it take to actually trust the benchmark enough to change your plan, but I might actually readjust that from your… How do you actually trust your plan enough to go against the benchmarks, Brett?

Brett Poulos:

Yeah. Again, it’s trust but verify. So if you have the data that facts your decision on paper, call in those experts, call in your field teams, let them vet through and understand what the assumptions were on paper. Ask the former craft professional that’s on your estimating team, call your former foreman or superintendent, stack that data against your field professionals or with your field professionals, not really against them. Your field team or your trusted trade partners, if you’re not self-performing the work, agree with the data that’s on paper, then really your next step is probably having a safety and risk discussion around those new processes to understand what are the environmental conditions that we now need to think about that are not necessarily on the job site that can be accounted for as well before you green light that new approach.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Right, right. Great stuff. Bryan, what about you? How do you do that balance between changing your plan or going against the benchmark depending on which ones which?

Bryan Myers:

Yeah, I mean, I think this is a pretty common discussion we have on pretty much every bid review where our pre-con team will bring their estimate to the table with data that says, “This is what the data says. This came out of the field.” And then you’re sitting across from business leaders and superintendents saying, “Well, hold on. Did you think about X, Y, Z?” And like Brett, having that experience on your team from the preconstruction side is really important because you don’t want to be blind to the things that are different on every job, but it’s having the ability organizationally as a team to understand that the data that you’ve got has a story behind it and every job is a little bit different or significantly different.

And so having good data with a good story is important. And then yeah, oftentimes we kind of look at the data and we’re like, “Yeah, I know what this says. I know we have situations where two or three times in a row it went like this, but this job is just wholly different. We’ve got escalation we’re dealing with from the geopolitical situation and the global economy and what the impacts are on lead times and availability and prices and just where the labor trends are. Where are people? What can I get them for? And is the best labor in the area where I’m trying to build this job or are we going to have to train all new people and will that affect what the data says?”

So all of those are conversations that you really have to have on really every project. You need the data to give you a starting point and then you really have to think through the nuance and the specifics of when is this job happening? Where is it happening? What are the specific impacts that we really need to talk about, plan for, anticipate, communicate and work into our plan? So again, it happens. That conversation is an every job kind of conversation.

Brett Poulos:

Yeah, I was going to dog pile what Bryan said there too. I think a big factor that you have to think about, especially as craft labor’s constrained across the national footprint is what does that crew makeup look like on this job versus the last job? Are you more heavily weighted in apprentices? Is it the same type of workforce or does that workforce require more training? Are you factoring some of that on the job training into your productivity where you would otherwise have higher production rates? So it’s really a nuanced approach that you need to think about that’s project specific to Bryan’s point that no project is the same and no market is the same and no craft makeup is potentially the same in this market today either.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, you talk labor constraints, which are very real, and I was in the middle of the ethanol boom when I started estimating and building things. So you have to talk about material constraints, tariff constraints. There wasn’t enough stainless steel to build the ethanol plants that we had bid a year before. So there is a risk in that new technology world that you have to take into account. I don’t know, how much are you okay putting yourself out there for that risk reward type thing there? Not just for the material, but for labor of course now as well. All right, great. The next one I’m going to go to, actually Brett only on this one, and I’ve talked to Brett and his team a lot about how they’re using the estimate system and assemblies mostly. So, Brett, how does your team reuse assemblies, cost data, lesson learned from past jobs instead of rebuilding estimates from scratch every single time?

Brett Poulos:

We use InEight estimate really differently between business lines. I know Dominic knows this, but one of our business units has really pushed InEight estimates to its outer limits with cost item assemblies, in some cases beyond its limits for short periods of time until a new patch or hot fix comes in to pave the way for new boundaries, which I think is great because we’re finding that there’s an extreme amount of value in those cost item assemblies and they’re being built out in an extremely robust way with this particular business line. And that team operates almost exclusively with those templatized project types.

I think they’ve got 70 to 80 detailed cost item assemblies within the InEight system. So what used to take just a few days to produce or did take three or four days to produce an estimate now really takes less than a day utilizing those cost item assemblies. So I will say that that business line is really the exception and not the rule, but it’s really moved the needle for that particular business line. And those assemblies are really useful when projects are relatively repetitive and have less dynamic variables. You can really supercharge your estimating capabilities with assemblies when you have projects that are relatively repetitive.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, it’s been really fun to see your team push that and even get our testers in to do desk ride alongs with some of your estimators just to see the entire process because it’s very innovative what they’re doing over there. So really fun to see. Bryan, I’m not going to let you off the hook on this. So tell us about a time when your estimate assumptions might have been wrong. It’s always you learn better from the failures and successes is what I was told at some point in my life, but what did the project teach you? How does it show up in your estimates now?

Bryan Myers:

Yeah. Well, I think what I’d find as an estimator, you have to be okay with being wrong all the time. That’s why it’s called an estimate. You either too slow or you’re too fast, right? It’s hard to be dead on every time. So usually the ones where we make money, we don’t tend to get that call to tell us how good we did, usually just the times where we screwed up. But I mean, there is an element of every single project, you got to learn from where you were too aggressive and it didn’t go well or where you were too conservative and therefore the job made money. And hopefully over time, we’re right where we want to be on the good side of the conservative piece from a performance side, but we always have to be learning and having that closed feedback loop with our projects because if you’re too conservative too often, you’re not going to have as many opportunities with clients because you’re not going to be as competitive.

And if you’re too aggressive, then you’re going to have profitability concerns and that’s not going to be good either. So that constant feedback loop, data is a great way to start the conversation as far as telling you the story, but there’s always a story behind the story that the data’s telling you, whether we needed a different approach on whether it was equipment selection or maybe the factors we talked about earlier with quality of labor and their ability to meet the production metrics that we laid out in the estimate, our ability to get the materials on site at the right time, at the right price, all those factors are important. So I mean, I would say every job is an opportunity to be told you were wrong. And really the thing that we do the most is try to take those lessons learned, understand what the data tells us, apply them in the next estimate.

I tell people all the time on projects, if you don’t tell me what’s wrong from a project side, you just know that your next job is going to have that same issue. So building that trust of the closed loop, it’s not anything personal, it’s really just about getting it correct as often as we can within appropriate risk tolerance and range of sensitivity. But yeah, we have conversations on every job, not every job becomes a loser, but there are certainly items within every job that everybody’s like, “Wow, if we’d just got this right, how much better off would we have been?” So it’s important to have those conversations even though they may not always be convenient, but getting that closed feedback loop with project teams is really, really important.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. Do you also encouraged that, “Hey, tell us where we nailed it too,” because that’s not something that people usually offer up on their own.

Bryan Myers:

That’s right. Every time somebody says that they found a bus, we always try to look for the bright spots, right?

Dominic Cozzetto:

Right, right. It’s always the estimator’s fault if something went wrong on the field and always a good plan and execution if something went right.

Bryan Myers:

That’s right.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Brett, did you want to pile on anything there?

Brett Poulos:

I was going to say it’s never how right you are. It’s how wrong were you?

Bryan Myers:

That’s right.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. Good stuff. Bryan, how do you do that at Brasfield & Gorrie though? We call them postmortems where I’m from, but kind of a job critique or…

Bryan Myers:

We try to do it a couple times throughout a job. So obviously you’re going to have an estimate turnover meeting where hopefully, and we would’ve had folks involved on the operational side, on the field side, involved with buying into the plan on the front end. And usually they’re going to be bringing lessons learned from their last job and say, “Hey, don’t forget about this or that,” or any examples they’ve got from their history. And then we’re going to try to set up a check-in meeting at least around 25% into the job. Usually you’ve made your commitments to subs and suppliers and the job is at least underway, so you’ve got at least some data on the trajectory of the job bought out. And then we’re certainly going to have hopefully one more, maybe a mid-job to where we really get a sense on production data and means and methods so that we can take those lessons learned to the next estimate as soon as we really can get them validated.

And then obviously at the end of the job, we’re going to sit down and go through where are your big sensitivity areas? Where did we really miss the mark? Where do we need to change the plan midway through? And were those things that we could have anticipated on the front end or were those things that changed as the program or the project evolved? And you always have those things, right? So just trying to figure out how you don’t overload the system with meetings. And then you also, as a preconstruction team, our responsibility for our leads is to go in and checking the data that we have as it’s coming in. And you can get a good sense of, on a weekly basis, the trajectory of those kinds of conversations.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Perfect, Bryan. Thank you. Brett, I’ll throw that one back over to you. What kind of outline what that looks like for you and your company?

Brett Poulos:

Sure. So it’s very, very similar process. So we have a handoff meeting and it’s really integrated because we’re an integrated design build company. We’ve got our construction execution teams that are bought in through the preconstruction phase. But as that project progresses, depending on whether we’re self-performing or we’re subcontracting, a lot of our historical data on project actual. So we’re tracking projects through our standardized code of account structure that’s standardized across the firm to get pulse checks on how we’re doing on those projects from a productivity or a quantity standpoint that feeds into our historical cost database.

And so as those projects progress and that package or that scope is closed out, we’re not waiting until that project is done a year from now or 18 months from now or whatever the timeline is. We’re taking that actionable data, pulling it out, refeeding our estimating team. There’s a vetting process that’s done between our project controls and our estimating teams to scrub that data to ensure there’s not something that’s outlier, we were running nights or whatever it may be that’s kind of skewed data that we wouldn’t want future projects to be based upon. But that integrated process is integral in using the projects as a benchmark, not just from estimate to estimate, but project actuals to estimate is the real value.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Perfect. Very nice. All right. We’ll go to one of my last slides here and we’ll start with Bryan this time. Bryan, what separates a this is buildable job from this is buildable within the budget schedule and safety limits of a project?

Bryan Myers:

Experience and expertise is really… I mean, everything is buildable, right? If you have unlimited budget, don’t care about safety, don’t care about quality, anything can be done. But I think companies and organizations that bring a level of expertise and know what the end product’s going to look like at the end are best equipped with that experience to bring that to bear faster in the process. And I’ll equate it to any estimate that we look at. If a job comes in and it’s a job, it’s a product type that we have a lot of experience in, we can tell just very quickly whether where we’re going to be in the market based on our competition, what the factors are that are going to impact the different environmental things.

We’ll be able to very quickly look at our escalation numbers and the main risk factors in the past. And we can get pretty close, honestly, without doing a whole lot of work to like, “Okay, can we answer this question about can we hit the owner’s budget for the schedule and do it safely with very little effort?” Now, if we get a job that maybe we don’t have quite as much experience in, we’re really going to have to do some legwork to again, get down to that granular level, understand how many of the pieces we do have confidence in before we get to the point where we’re ready to say, “Yeah, we can do it for this budget and schedule and quality and safety expectations if we’re less experienced in that particular project and product type.”

So again, I think this really comes down to expertise and experience level in a project to be able to do that and make that decision faster earlier in the timeline, further to the left. And then obviously you’re getting those situations where you don’t have as much experience and it’s just going to take a little more work to get to a place where you can actually articulate and have a good grasp of what you’re trying to deliver.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. I mean, I worked for an estimating manager that had 40 years experience at some point and the first thing he would do is look at, “Hey, you bid a power plant. Here’s my dollars per kilowatt.” Nope, not even close. You missed something or yeah, what do you say? “This dog will hunt. This dog will hunt,” was his main thing that he would say. And I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right 90% of the time, which did nothing for feeding his ego and how much you like him. Brett, what about you? We’ll pile you on this one.

Brett Poulos:

Yeah. So I like what Bryan said on almost everything is buildable. Whether or not you’re going to build it that way due to safety concerns is a totally different question and approach. But buildable within limits means that we can build it at the price that we committed to in the window that we promised the client and send everyone home safe. So from the pre-con side, that’s really the difference between a design that works on paper and a plan that works on site is kind of the approach or perspective, I guess I take. So our job in preconstruction estimating is to test the idea against all three of those limits, both budget schedule and safety before the owner ever gets a number. Once you’ve committed obviously to a schedule, to a budget, to your constructability plan or execution plan, whatever it may be, your project’s absorbing the cost of any gap that you miss there.

So having the discipline to account for all of those things and also to be able to guide the design, which I think is the value of integrated EPC or integrated design build, because the earlier you can provide those inputs to the design team, the less costly it’s going to be. Obviously the factors of going through and doing redesign or the design’s fully baked and now we’ve got to completely revise the way we’re going to construct it because it’s over budget, whatever it may be, that integrated injection of design and construction is really the value for owners. But the better your data is, the earlier you can make that call with confidence. If your estimate, your schedule and the risk all live in separate environments or separate teams and it’s not integrated together, constructability is ultimately just judged in silos and it can’t really be factored that way.

It really needs to be a combined approach to the entire project, which I’m sure everyone on the call is very aware of. But I think it really matters most on complex projects. If you’re doing commercial buildings, it may not be as big of a factor because there’s a lot of cost history and the repetitive nature of those types of buildings, a little bit easier to do factored estimates on. Once you start getting into really complex, hairy, nasty projects, that ingrained constructability in the design process is really where the value of preconstruction signs or where it resides. But then also that’s where those small assumptions can really compound over time. So again, the earlier you can make that judgment call based on the data that you have, the better off you are for success and the more successful you can make your client.

Dominic Cozzetto:

So that segues in really nice, this next question. I call it my cute question this, who’s in the room when you’re making those assumption and those calls, Brett?

Brett Poulos:

Everybody should have a seat at the table, especially when it’s something that’s complex in nature like that. If you’re building a constructability plan and you haven’t talked to safety about a crane pick or the way you’re going to set a piece of equipment or whatever it may be, you haven’t talked to the superintendent about what your productivity needs to look like or what the labor market looks like. If you’ve got a labor strategist or labor surveyor on your team to understand the nuances of that labor market and what incentives or what per diems you’re going to need to pay, all of those things that would potentially factor. And again, kind of like the question before of what does the crew makeup look like in this area? All of that data compounds. And if you’re not thinking about all those different variables, it’s a shortsighted decision. So everybody’s got a seat at the table on that one. It’s not a death by committee call, but you need to have representation to where you have well-informed decisions off the data that you have.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, I agree. Bryan, anything to add to that? I think you kind of nailed it, but…

Bryan Myers:

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, I think just buy in cross-functionally across the folks that are going to be responsible, pre-con lead, operations and business leader, field leadership. The best jobs are the jobs where before you go to construction, everybody in the team is bought in on the plan and obviously all the factors that Brett laid out and all the folks involved are part of that process. The more complex it is, the more you got to dig in and get buy-in across the group because there will always be questions. There will be unanswered things that they’re just like, “Okay, we’ve got to make a call and we’ve provided the best level of information we can.” And ultimately you look at the risk profile, but you have everybody understanding what that risk is and then you make a decision as a team and you move forward.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Perfect. Perfect. All right. One more question before we get to the Q&A section. We’ll start off with Brett. If you were starting fresh with a new estimate team tomorrow, what’s the one practice you’d implement first to start building confidence in these unfamiliar bids?

Brett Poulos:

Structured data and standardization. I think that’s paramount. You’ve got to start somewhere if you’ve got a new team in this scenario. Consistency and common language I think are paramount when it comes to basing decisions off of data. So I would say the basics, the 101s blocking and tackling is think about what your team needs five years from now, not just today to complete this project, because those projects five years from now are going to be more successful off the decisions you make today. So I would say it starts with structured data and standardization with those teams, but maybe a cop out of an answer.

Dominic Cozzetto:

My favorite answer is, I mean, I call them account codes, you call them chart of accounts. If you want to see me at a AEC conference and go down a rabbit hole, come and start talking about that and we’ll grab some adult beverages and speak for way too many hours on that one. But no, great answer. I like it the best, but, Bryan, what do you have for this one?

Bryan Myers:

Yeah, great answer there. I definitely wouldn’t take away from that. The only thing I would say though is the fundamentals. As a contractor, if we can’t count or calculate the amount of things that have to be built on a project from a preconstruction perspective, it doesn’t matter how much other process we implement. I tell young estimators when they start that are like, “Hey, what is my role here? Why is what I do important?” I say, “Look, if you’ve got a structure that’s supposed to have 10 cubic yards in it and you only count eight, it doesn’t matter how good my superintendent is, how good my estimator is. If I plug eight, we will lose money. I can’t overcome that with my experience and my skill. We have to be accurate.”

And same thing, if we count 12 and there’s only 10, we might not get the job. We will have wasted a lot of time. And so being accurate in the fundamentals of just what is there for us to do as a baseline, lock that in, standardization and process and drilling that in is really important as well. But that’s where I always start is we better be able to count how much stuff is on a job if we’re going to be right.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah. I think that goes into the field too. I got pounded in my head the first 10 years of my career, know your scope, know your scope, know your scope. And that’s basically where it starts is the proper quantification of the estimate. So yeah, great answer. Great answer. All right. I have a few really fun questions that came in, so we’ll jump over to that. There’s a few that just shot in here too. One of them for Bryan, how do you efficiently handle the feedback loop? So when you’re getting that feedback back from the field, where are you documenting that maybe? How are you making sure that gets handled correctly?

Bryan Myers:

That’s a good question. So I love to say it is the most efficient ever. I mean, our systems set up such that, like I’ll talk about good structured data and a system by which from your actuals can feed back into the benchmarking tool or your tool for capturing it and comparing and being able for your estimators to be able to see what’s actually happening from a production standpoint systematically is really important. That’s the most efficient way. But I do think you do have to find those times to sit down and back up and say the why are we getting the results that we’re getting either on the good side or the bad side.

And that isn’t efficient and that takes time and that takes discipline because everybody’s like, nobody wants to go back in time. They want to just look at what’s ahead. And so you have to drag people into a conversation about, “Okay, this is what I’m seeing. Help me understand from a preconstruction standpoint, from an operation standpoint, why this data is showing what it is. Is it a means and methods difference? Is it a quality of labor? Is it a quality of supervision and project management? And then what would that tell us about how we need to handle the jobs that we’re currently pricing and how it affects future jobs?”

Dominic Cozzetto:

Perfect. Thank you, sir. Brett, this one’s a really good question, one that I’d like to talk about a bunch. How do you deal with knowledge transfer? So if these experienced people retire, we can keep their knowledge. I like to call this tribal knowledge. It’s something that I’ve been preaching about for a long time, but how do you deal with that, Brett?

Brett Poulos:

So this is, I think, where AI really shines. So everybody wants to utilize AI and tap into AI and how do we incorporate it into estimating is a common question I get all the time. We have our potential retirees announce their retirement dates. And so we have several who are retiring here come January of next year. And one of the things I’ve encouraged our teams to do is to sit down and have, let’s say he’s an electrical estimator or mechanical estimator, have those discipline estimators sit down with him and ask questions.

And transcribe those meetings and incorporate that transcription into an AI agent to where you can go back and say, “What would Bill or what would David do in this scenario based on all of the context of these one-on-one meetings we’ve had or project reviews or his OneNote files, what would be the approach for this?” So I think that’s a phenomenal way to incorporate AI usage is basically have Dave the agent from your mechanical estimating expert, whatever it may be, and how would Dave approach this? Or what are some things that Dave has jotted down in the past about this particular circumstances or circumstances like it? I think it’s a phenomenal use case for AI usage.

Dominic Cozzetto:

That’s awesome. I haven’t thought about that much either, but it is a great answer there. All right. There’s a lot of good questions. We’re not going to get to these all. I’m going to take one and leave it as a teaser, and then we’re going to get everybody out of here to unfortunately get back to probably real work. But I had a question come in that’s, “What’s your approach to translating a detailed estimate to a budget level of detail that can be dragged by finance and project controls?” I would lump onto that and say, “How do you also keep that detail to be accurately tracked by your field installation crews?” I’m actually going to be giving a long talk on this in our InEight community early next year. So keep a lookout for that. It’s one of the hardest things to do and we’re actually building new features in our software to help accommodate that transition of very detailed to financial level summary and also keeping the very detailed for the percent complete accuracy and for scheduling accuracy as well.

So be on the lookout for that. Other than that, I’ll give my little InEight spiel. So if you’re still reconciling data across disconnected spreadsheets and systems, it’s not a people issue, that’s a platform limitation. So stop managing that project controls and pieces and connect them InEight. We’ve addressed this challenge for hundreds of capital construction teams. We understand the industry, the common implementation pitfalls, and we understand how to get it right. So we’ll bring that experience to support your evaluation. If you want to continue a conversation with me or anybody on my team, please connect with us by completing the post event survey. It’ll be on the right side of your screen and we’ll be in touch. Also visit us at ineight.com. And I think the link for that is in the resources section here as well. So, Brett, Bryan, awesome conversation. Really appreciate you guys taking the time out of your day to help us out here. So other than that, thank you very much. Have a great day.

Brett Poulos:

Thanks, Dominic.

Bryan Myers:

Yeah, appreciate it.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Thanks.