Governance, Risk, and Accountability: The Role of Modern Document Control in Capital Project Performance

Lance Stephenson:

Today we’ll be discussing “Governance, Risk, and Accountability: The Role of Modern Document Control in Capital Project Performance”. This webinar is sponsored and presented by InEight.

We have a couple of speakers from InEight today. Our first presenter today is Jason Lancelot. He’s a senior manager of industry solutions with InEight. He focuses on helping clients achieve their digital goals for project execution by enhancing team collaboration across construction and operations and maintenance phases. His work supports organizations as they move toward digital transformation across the entire lifecycle. He brings broad experience, industry experience, having worked with both consultants and asset owners across multiple sectors, including water, mining, and transport. This diverse background gives him a well-rounded perspective on the challenges and opportunities organizations face when implementing digital solutions. Originally trained as a designer, Jason progressed into design management before transitioning into engineering software environment. Today, his key areas of expertise include design drafting, design management, and digital engineering.

Our second presenter today is Andrew Harris. Andrew’s the senior vice president at InEight, leading the company’s growth and customer engagement strategy across the Asia-Pacific region. Since joining InEight in 2018 as vice president of sales for APAC, Andrew has played a pivotal role in driving the company’s regional success, strengthening customer relationships, advancing strategic partnerships, and championing InEight’s commitment to delivering outstanding customer outcomes. He brings a wealth of experience in client-focused ICT and managed services, having delivered high value solutions to some of the region’s most prominent cloud-based technology organizations. Prior to joining InEight, Andrew served as the general manager of sales at Blue Apache and as national sales manager at Southern Cross Computer Systems. We held high-performing national sales and service teams across commercial state and federal sectors. Andrew holds an MBA from Swineberg University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

And so without further ado, I want to turn over the session to today’s presenters.

Jason Lancelot:

Thanks very much for that, Lance. Yeah, great intro.

Hi, everyone. It’s really good to be here today talking about modern document control. And I must say that since I started my career some 40 years ago, it’s changed quite drastically. But I think before we get into it, what I’d like to do is get a bit of an idea of who’s on the webinar. So what we wanted to do is run a quick poll if we could. The poll’s really going to be about your organization, whether you’re an owner or a consultant or a contractor. We just want to see what roles that you’ve got within those organizations. So if you can answer that, that would be absolutely fantastic.

Whilst everybody’s doing all of that, I’ll give a bit of a background about InEight and where we come from and what we do. Look, we are a global provider of integrated project control solutions and generally for the complex critical infrastructure projects and asset operations as well. So we operate in a lot of different industries. So it’s really heavily in the mining industry, energy, roads, railwater, and oil and gas as well. Our roots really go back more than three decades now. So we’ve been around for quite a while and it’s built on proven industry solutions such as Hard Dollar, which I think a lot of people in the US will be familiar with. That was one of the first computerized construction and estimating systems. And the other key one for us was TeamBinder, which is a document control platform. And that was originally developed in Melbourne. That was in Australia.

About 2014 was when we effectively began our journey under what’s effectively the single InEight banner. And our solutions now are uniquely shaped by real world experience. We’ve been developed, tested, and refined directly within live project and asset environments. And now we’ve got a connected platform that we built over those years. It now includes, as you can see on the screen on the slide, the estimating side of things, scheduling, getting into the project controls, and then obviously the information management piece, which is what we’re going to be talking about quite a bit today.

The close connection that we’ve got with the operations and maintenance side of things enables us to support that full asset lifecycle. So it’s not just the project lifecycle, it’s the full asset lifecycle because that’s the key thing for the guys out in the field. And that’s really going from early estimating and project delivery goes through construction, and then into that operational readiness, the handover of information, and then the ongoing performance of whatever that asset is. So by providing that single source of truth across the scope, cost, and schedule, and risk as well, we help those owners and contractors and operators improve that predictability, and it helps them reduce the risk and then make better decisions, really, long after that construction is complete. And once we get into that, as I say, that asset management piece.

Hopefully, looking at some of the… Actually, the poll results have just come through. Quite interesting. It looks like we’ve got a really good mix. We’re completely split between contractors, owners and engineers. That’s great. Not too many architects on the call, which probably isn’t too surprising, but certainly the contractors, owners and engineers, we’ve got quite a few of those, and quite a few project managers and schedulers there, business leadership and management. So that’s really good. So hopefully the information that you get today is certainly going to help that group of people. Document control affects everybody at the end of the day. So it’d be great to see what you guys can get out of that.

Getting into the presentation, some of the key takeaways I’m hoping that you’re going to get from really around how modern document control can help you with the governance on projects. That’s one of the key things. And that’s really about making sure you got the right information, making sure it’s been created by the right people, gets approved at the right time, and that it’s being able to be used by that right audience as well. And then you want to be able to retain that information as a defensible project record. That really helps you make sure that decisions can be trusted, they can be explained, and then they can be audited if you need to do that down the track.

Also, thinking about how modern document control can help mitigate the risk and enforce accountability in organizations, teams, and people as well. We do that, really, by embedding governance into how information’s created, how it’s approved, how people use it, and how it then gets changed, because obviously the information’s changing whilst you’re working on the project. And we do that rather than just relying on any policies or people’s memories because, as I say, you need that governance and that auditability. So we’ll be going through quite heavily around why you need that traceable and complete audit trail for all those actions on your projects, what can happen effectively if you don’t. That’s probably one of the key things for everybody, and especially from the aspects of litigation and disputes as well.

Then we’ll go through around what the controlled information and the searchable data that you need to have, because you really need those controls and guiderails around how you structure your metadata because that’s how you’re going to find information. So metadata is key once you start looking at document control. And then wide secure and verifiable access is important as well into the system because you’ve got a lot of IT security protocols that go with them. You need to make sure that the right people have got the right access and that every action’s recorded as well.

And also, the other thing that I want to do today is give you a bit of a view as to why document control isn’t just for construction, which is what a lot of people think. It’s a lot more than that, and you should be able to use it and you can use it from planning, all the way into operations as well.

Andrew Harris:

Thanks, Jason. One of the biggest things that I’d love everyone to be thinking about is around the productivity improvement. I know a number of you probably expected to see Wes Horwood on the call today. Wes, unfortunately, has taken ill and is off work, so I’ve stepped in for him. The outcomes that I’m excited about for this session, but just the industry in general, is that project information management, I think, is a bit of an unsung hero within the market. And thinking about for the cost engineers on the call, how does managing data on the project make it more successful? Improving efficiency, minimizing rework, delivering real field-based productivity elements by ensuring that everyone has access to the right information at the right time. And through that claims process, I think it cannot be underestimated how important it is to have the right documentation to be able to work through that process, whether it’s the client side, knowing what’s been done, or whether it’s the contractor side, trying to make sure that the progress and the cash flow of the project is continuing to move quickly.

But let’s get into the full content, Jason.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah. Quick look at the agenda for today. So just quickly jumping through this, we’re going to go through document control and information management and what those both are. And we’ll have a look at a disconnected environment, so really how a lot of people are using document control at the moment, and that’s the thing that I see time and time again. I will go through an asset lifecycle as well and show you where document control can be used across those different phases, which is what I was talking about earlier. Who should care about document control and why they should care about it. So we’ll go through a bit of that, and then we’ll round it out with some important considerations for people that will give you some takeaways as to what to think about with document control. And we’ll go through a bit of a summary and then hopefully we’ll have some time for Q&A at the end. As Lance called out, if we run out of time for Q&A, we can certainly come back to you with some answers to the questions that get asked as we’re going through.

Thinking about document control, the first thing I’d like people to do is almost change the way of thinking. So rather than thinking about document control or document management, think of it more as information management. The reason I say that is because we’re dealing with information and data nowadays on a project, right? It’s not just documents. In the old days, it was documents is a lot more now. We’ll get into a bit more detail on that later. Nowadays, modern document control plays more of a direct measurable role in capital project performance and asset management. It really acts as that, I suppose, that information backbone for the asset lifecycle. Then, when you’re working on complex projects and when you’re managing the critical infrastructure and assets, whether it’s design, engineering, construction, ops and maintenance, whatever it may be, performance is tightly coupled to how well that information is created, controlled, shared, and they’re actually trusted. So it shows you how important it is to have that document control as a key part of the actual business.

Andrew Harris:

This is actually something that Wes would’ve spoken to directly. One of the things that really speaks to me on this slide is in the industry, this would be considered a fairly basic project, a 60 by 40 meter, what would we put that as 180 by 120 foot roughly platform and a 200 megawatt hour battery, but nearly 4,000 documents associated with that package of work. So what Wes in this instance was really looking for was an environment where he can manage that volume of information, but not just the documents, the correspondence that’s back and forth with the supply chain, both internal and external. And Jason, I saw there’s a question in the chat around SharePoint, but we’ll come to that once we get to your next slide.

But if you think about scale, that’s such a small project. And then you think about scale where you have projects that… We have a client where they have over a million pieces of correspondence on a major program, hundreds of thousands of documents, and in some cases, thousands of users accessing that environment across a major program of work. So being able to centralize that, being able to ensure that that is highly governed, it’s traceable, and that people can actually access the right information at the right time is so powerful.

I think what it also provides, so document control or information management as a discipline, and this isn’t just about InEight, this is about enterprise systems of this style, it is really flexible. Typically, when a project starts or an asset is being developed, new teams come together. There’s a new combination of delivery partners. There’s a new group. There’s a new scope. And so having a centralized collaborative information management system really enables those teams to assimilate quickly and mobilize with the right information. So I think that concept of it being an information management environment rather than just managing finite documents is a really, really great shift that people can take to embrace the opportunity.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah, thanks for that, Andrew, because yeah, you’re right. There’s a hell of a lot of documents in some of the big projects that we see going around the traps. It’s surprising sometimes to how much information’s in there.

Look, the other thing about information management, document control, in my experience over the last, I’d probably say the last 10, 15 years really, from a document control standpoint, is people seem to get confused about what document control really is. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding in industry, and it stops document control getting the attention that I believe it deserves. And Andrew, we were talking about that this morning as well. I think it’s because of the mixed definitions about what it is. So I thought I’d talk about that first.

Effectively, there’s different types of what I would generically term as information management. You’ve got unstructured data, you’ve got structured data, and then you’ve got controlled data. So there’s three different types there straightaway. What you see a lot of the time, and I see this time and again with clients that we are talking to is that people will try and use one solution to try and fix all of the problems with all the different types of data and information that’s on the project. A classic example, I think, Andrew, you said somebody was asking about SharePoint. That’s a classic example where people try to use SharePoint to do document management, document control, records management, and the whole thing. So I thought I’d try and talk about a few different things here. I’ve tried to break it up into four sections, I suppose.

The first section really is that data management piece. And the data management is usually at an enterprise level for a business. It’s around the facts and figures from within different sources that hold various pieces of information. And it’s usually around company business intelligence rather than what we would class as typical document type information. The sort of data that goes in here helps different businesses with decision-making, helps them with operations and compliance for their business. This is generally classified as both structured and unstructured. So you can have your spreadsheets in there. It might be emails, images, tech, documents, whatever it may be. And this is where your SQL servers come in, your databases, data warehouses, Snowflake, that sort of thing. So that’s really where the data management piece sits. It’s very specific.

You’ve then got what we class as the records management. The records management piece is generally around more corporate level documents, and they use our compliance and retention policies that are linked to them, historical documents that might be required as evidence for something that’s actually happened. And we find certainly in the APAC region, because me and Andrew are both in Australia, that most of the government organizations need this sort of thing for their compliance. So they don’t even have a choice. They have to have this.

We then move into the document management side of things. And this is getting a bit closer to what we’re talking about with document control, but it is one level back. Document management is really around documents that are needed almost by distribution, so distributing this information to the team. Often used in the operational space, people need to find this information with a quick search. This is where your SharePoint comes in. This is where your end files comes in. This is where things like Documentum come in. It’s really around that document management where you just need to find the information.

But the next stage, which is almost the top of this tree, the way they look at it is then your document control. The difference between that is it’s almost going to that next level of document management because it now starts including your permissions, your revision control, your tracking, your workflows, all that sort of thing. And that’s only thinking about the document side of it. So we’ll get into a bit more detail about everything else in a second. But even just from a document point of view, there’s quite a big difference between that, document management and records management. These tend to get used in the project space, but they do now also apply for operations. It might be sustaining capital, it could be maintenance upgrades, whatever it may be. And it’s really around, on a capital project, just making sure that the right people have got the right information at the right time and that it’s at the right stage of approval. So that’s talking about those issue for construction, as built, whatever it may be. So it’s taking all of that information to that level.

Andrew Harris:

Yeah. And I think, Jason, what it also gives, it removes ambiguity and gives a lot of clarity and easy access. I think one of the, I guess, just conversations that people have with us quite a lot is a work in progress environment versus a published state. And I think, certainly, our vision and what we see a lot of our customers very successfully do is have a project information management system such as ours, and they have that connected to SharePoint. So they’re doing their work in progress, their development, their collaboration internally on SharePoint.

Once that becomes an approved document for distribution externally with the supply chain or coming out into what we would call the published environment, that is where a system like an enterprise project information management platform really comes into its own. And that’s not just a contract or a Word document, et cetera. That could be drawings that come out of your authoring tool. It could be plans, PDFs, et cetera. But it’s really getting that mindset where all of these systems work together to create a project information management ecosystem, and they are purposely designed to do different things.

So definition within your own business around document management and where it sits is a really, really important part of gaining a great advantage out of tools such as these.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah. And it shows that there is still a place for those working progress systems. It’s not everything done in a document management system or document control system. There are places where those other systems need to kick in.

Thinking about document control almost as a function. Historically, it was always seen as a clerical thing. So we always had the document controllers. It was clerical. It was filing drawings. It was numbering of documents. It was managing transmittals, that sort of thing. Now, I think modern document controls are a little bit different. So it’s now seen more of a… I call it a strategic project controls discipline now. That influences quite a few things on your project. So it’s going to start influencing cost. It influences schedule, quality, safety, risk. And one of the big things nowadays is the exposure to claims and litigation. This is the system that the lawyers are going to go back to if there’s any disputes down the track on your project. It could be five years after your project was completed. And we’ll talk about some of that later on as well, but it’s really key for those lawyers to be able to get to that information.

In the capital project space as well, information errors generally eventuate into physical rework. I’ve seen that so many times when I’ve been out on site, and it becomes expensive, slows down the project, and often, it’s generally irreversible. And what I mean by that is that when something’s gone wrong out on site and the construction team have had to go build something and they’ve built it maybe to the wrong revision or they didn’t have the drawing, so they decided they had to go and build it because they didn’t have time, they have to deal with that then. If you think about it, how many times… I mean, we’ve got quite a few engineering people on the call today. How often have you built things with incorrect drawings or old revisions? I’ve seen it so many times. But what exactly is document control? So really for me, it’s the process of collecting, organizing, storing, and controlling the information so it remains accurate, accessible, and then it’s then able to be useful throughout an assets lifecycle. That’s really what it’s about.

The other thing to bear in mind here is it’s not just documents, right? We’re managing information. So if you look at some of this that’s come up on the screen now, we’ve got documents there. We’ve got drawings. We’ve now got 3D models that we never used to have many years ago. You’ve got mail correspondence. So making sure that all the emails that are taking place on a project are all within the system so you can get a record of it. Transmittals and submittals for that official correspondence effectively to various people on the project. You’ve got your forms and your checklists. Most of that’s digital now for a lot of people. We do still have people doing it in paper, but they’re starting to move to that digital environment. All of that’s being stored within the document control system. You’ve got your inspections, your RFIs. Packages, could be information packs that are going out to site. It could be tendering that’s happening on a project. You hand over packages at the end, so you still have to hand over something to the client at the end. It used to be big boxes of paperwork. Now you’re able to get archives of the information from your document control system and hand that over. Photo, site images, all of that sort of thing is coming through now as part of document control.

So this is the key thing for people to realize it’s not just documents. Now there’s a lot more information that’s going in there.

Thinking about the way that I see a lot of people still working, and this is how people work definitely 10 years ago, surprisingly enough, you do still find it now.

Andrew Harris:

A lot.

Jason Lancelot:

Yes, I agree.

Andrew Harris:

Yeah. So anyone who’s on the call who’s like, “Oh, that’s me,” or, “That’s us,” you’re not alone. It’s still very prevalent across all industries.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s on a project or whether it’s in ops and maintenance, this sort of thing still goes on.

Looking at the screen, looking at the slide, what’s wrong with it? Effectively for me, all the information’s disconnected for a start. There’s no governance around it. If you want to find information, the chances of finding the right information with these systems is pretty low. You’re going to really be struggling. A lot of drawings and documents are still stored as hard copy, usually on site or in the offices. And when I think of some of the, I said the utilities sites that I’ve been to in the past, when you get out on site and you want to get the latest drawing, you generally go to the site hub, you pick out the drawing that’s in the cabinet. It’s got God knows how many different stains on it because it’s been out in the field all the time. There’s oil all over it and everything, but it’s also generally a redlined copy. That’s actually more up-to-date than half the drawings that they have in the system. So that’s a bit scary and that still happens now, certainly with a lot of the older information.

You also have a lot of information that’s on people’s desktops or on the laptop. What’ll generally happen is people will download the information, save it on their local so that they’ve then got their version of the latest, but it isn’t necessarily the latest. The other issue there is they’ll generally send it out to people. So when somebody goes to them and says, “Oh, where’s the ladies drawing for this?” they look on their own laptop and send them that one. That could be two revisions too late by now.

We also have a lot of the latest information theoretically being on SharePoint or network drives as well. The issue there, even though at least you’ve got the central point, the issue there is that it’s uncontrolled, it’s unmanaged. It could be copied. It could be moved around different folders and you never know whether you’ve got the right one again.

Emails for me is probably worse ones on a project because trying to find any email correspondence when somebody has left is practically impossible. Mailboxes get deleted. You then go back to try and find an email and you can’t find it. And then on top of that, people use the emails to transfer information around between different people as well. So it’s an absolute nightmare.

Andrew Harris:

Yeah. You just stole a little bit of my thunder, Jason, around the mailboxes being deleted.

One of the things that I like to talk about with our customers is imagine that you won the lottery and you go off on a permanent vacation and in six months’ time, you need to find that correspondence, that approval. And to Jason’s point, IT’s deleted it after 90 days because that’s global policy, never to be seen again. And it’s things like that.

I think about the malleability of approval workflows on projects and someone who wants to be able to go to their kids’ sports day or to take a loved one to a medical appointment where they are the sole one in the approval chain and currently can’t delegate it because they’re not in the office. So modern systems give the overall community a much greater opportunity to be flexible.

And customers, there are people in the industry that like to work in that old way that Jason showed because it works in the gray. What modern document control and where we are going in the future is going to be about more accountability, more transparency, better access to information, more suggestive ways to use it. And really, it’s about unlocking the efficiency across the whole team.

I don’t want to read out every one of these for you because you can read it faster than I can talk, but I expect most people on this session will have experienced some of, or if not all of that due to missing information, missing correspondence, working on the wrong level of information, whether that be an email or an actual drawing that’s being used to build something out on site. Having the opportunity to actually gain control of your information, improve your communication with your supply chain on the project, whether that be internal or external, is absolutely paramount. So the real impact of not having a robust document control and information management environment is really, it increases your costs, it blows out the schedule. You end up with decreased margins and it can have reputational damage.

We have a client who built their business case for modern systems on actually a heavy reduction in lawyers’ fees because they would gain greater access to information to substantiate claims and defend pieces of work that they’ve done, which is a fantastic realization of the benefit of modern systems.

And Jason touched on a little bit earlier around moving the idea of document control to either side of the construction window. We know that that window has a high investment and a high activity rate, and that’s why it gets a lot of focus and it’s an important part. But having information being built from project inception through to really into operations and handover is really stretching the opportunity that we have within modern information management.

So Jason, I think it’d be good to take the audience through that in a little bit more detail and see how that information builds throughout the lifecycle of the asset.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah, we can do that. Really, I suppose this comes down to, I suppose, what’s the answer to that uncontrolled data? So for me, it’s information management and configured connected system. You want a solution that acts as a digital thread, so you can see that on the screen there, the digital thread terminology has been used quite a while, but it’s having that information all throughout that entire life cycle. There’s a lot of data in here. Once you start looking at the document control side of things, it supports the measurement of progress and performance. It’s going to help validate reporting metrics across the project and it’s going to improve that forecasting and it’ll substantiate milestone payment claims as well with the information and the metadata that you’ve got in there.

But when we kick off on a project, you’ve got that pre-planning and design and engineering. So that’s where you start off. And most capital projects at this stage are really schedule-driven and any delays tend to occur, not because the work can’t be done, but it’s generally because you’ve got people waiting for information. So it’s not the guys out on site, it’s the information actually getting to them that’s the issue.

Now, with modern document control system, they help improve this in a few different ways. They’re enforcing real-time version control. So you’ve got no ambiguity over which is the latest drawing. It’s automating the review and approval workflows. So it takes away the old days of where we start to print drawings out and mark up on them, do the old check prints. It also provides immediate visibility to the document status as well. So you know whether it’s issue for review. You know whether it’s issued for construction as well.

Andrew, from your point of view, what have you seen with some of the clients that we work with from the outcomes that they get when they start using document control in this area?

Andrew Harris:

Look, they are actually getting a huge amount of benefit because as they move into operations, they make the information readily available to each team. So if you think about as those teams change throughout the asset lifecycle, they’re handing over the currency of the live status of the data. And that data is currency kind of mindset. It’s really making that transition between phases of the project lifecycle and into operations a lot easier, a lot easier because you’re getting common language. You’re getting common data sets. There is a question around metadata. You’re getting common metadata field. So you can actually follow the flow of data throughout the project lifecycle. So there’s efficiency gains at every step of the way. And then, once in operations, it was historically common practice to just archive a piece of the data and put it in a records management system or a database somewhere and it never got seen again.

Now, a lot of our customers are using that for live access to the most current documentation, and it’s proving extremely valuable and flexible.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah. I think we’re getting much fewer stoppages as well. We’re getting less RFIs and you’re getting that faster handover as well between those different disciplines and contracts.

Andrew Harris:

I do have a real quick story around where a customer had a document control solution and their… Systems are not a fail-safe for people’s actions. They actually are there to help people. And I’m just keeping an eye on the time, Jay, so we make sure that we get through to the end. But we had a customer who has a document control system. Their client had told them that they’d installed the wrong piece of equipment at a site. And the site was out in far outback Australia. It was a sizable piece of equipment. And so the customer decided to charter a small plane and go out and inspect it for themselves. Sure enough, the wrong piece of equipment had been installed. If they had have actually checked the system before they went and did all of that, they would’ve found that the spec was given to them by the client. So they installed what was given to them. The client obviously changed their mind down the track, hadn’t been recorded, and then the contractor in that instance bore the cost of going out and trying to substantiate what had been done.

So I think for everyone on the call, the system is a tool that is going to help you execute. If you choose not to use the tools, then that’s where you also get into trouble. So if it’s not in the system and you’re not using the system, then it’s really hard to derive value. So I’d encourage everyone to lean into the opportunity that is leveraging enterprise platforms.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that talks quite a bit to the construction piece, which was that next phase. And it’s really… I mean, once you get into construction, this is where it’s getting into more the cost rather than just the schedule. This is where any of those errors, the cost of an error in this stage is way higher than it is earlier on in that design phase. So you’ve just got to make sure you have the right information once you get here. So that example you just gave there, Andrew, is typical of what can happen once you get to that construction phase.

Once you get past the construction phase, you’re really getting into commissioning. This is really where your quality and that technical integrity of the information is coming through. And generally, any fail user that you have here is because there’s been some misalignment on the information that came through at some point in the process. Again, it’s generally not poor workmanship, it’s using that misalignment.

Then the final stage that you have is obviously once we get into… We’re going up to the operation stage now. So it’s really that… As well as the digital continuity across the entire life cycle. So whether you’re looking at building a digital twin where you’ve got some documents connected to your 3D models and you’ve been able to view that out on site and get your IoT data, or whether you’re then moving into operations, at the end of the day, the modern document control extends beyond that project completion. A project never really finishes, is what our viewers started saying now, even once you go into operations. So it’s having that continuity all the way through.

So in short, really, what’s happening here within this whole process, the modern document control’s helping you protect your schedule. It’s controlling the cost. It’s preserving your quality. It’s obviously reducing your risk. You’re strengthening that governance and then it’s enabling that lifecycle value for you way past once you’ve completed the project. It’s become really a core project performance system now, which is quite a bit different than what it used to be.

Andrew Harris:

I’ll give you a time check, Jason. We’ve got 20 minutes left in today’s session.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah. I think we’ll try and get through these pretty quickly.

When we think about who cares about document control, the answer really is everybody. You can see on the screen, this is everybody who’s part of a project or going into operations. Everyone’s going to benefit from it. The nature of the work that they actually do, they need the right information all the time. Now, with the engineers and the EPCs, you’ve got document controllers who are always looking for the information. You’ve got engineers and project leaders who are taking part in design reviews all the time, and they need to be able to find the information. They need to be able to do the reviews properly, need to have that audit trail of those reviews as well.

Then, with the contractors, subcontractors, they need to find the right information. You can’t have those guys getting old information. It has to be the up-to-date information to make sure that they’re building the right thing. So that’s the key for them. These guys are processing RFIs and non-conformances all the time. They continue to filling in forms and checklists for the work that they’re actually doing out on site. They need to be sure that everything’s been approved and signed off by the client as well.

Then, when you get to that asset owner stage, again, it’s really the asset’s been built. They now need the information onsite. They need the mobile capability. So this is where some of your mobile functionality comes in as well. So if you think that when somebody’s managing an asset, let’s say you’re at a water treatment plan, let’s say a pump breaks down at three o’clock in the morning, it’s raining, how do you find the information to be able to do the work that you need to do? That’s where you need to be able to get that latest information at the right time, and that’s the key to it.

Andrew Harris:

Yeah. Fantastic, Jason. I think a lot of these are I think fairly self-explanatory, so we won’t go into, because there’s the struggles that everyone experiences day-to-day, but I think some of those scenarios are how many times have people gone to do a drawing review, and due to time constraints, they’ve found that something isn’t ready, or they’ve just grabbed the last thing that they think is the latest revision. I think it’s that ability to ensure that you’ve got ready access to the latest approved information, and that bit is traceable. You need to be able to really understand who approved it, how did it get out, what was the requirement, and also the commentary that goes with it, because there’s a lot of back and forth on projects, and being able to capture that contextual element around why decisions are made is a really important aspect.

I think that minimizing rework, I think is one of the greatest probably hidden benefits of being able to access that system. It’s becoming less and less, but it’s still common in industry where you may end up picking up the wrong information. You may not have read the information the right way and gone out to deliver the work. That not only is it direct cost on having to rebuild whatever it is that you’ve accidentally done incorrectly, but it also has long-term potential impacts as well.

A customer of ours at one time, a water utility had actually installed the potable and the non-potable water pipes the wrong way around because they had old drawings. So if you think about the impact that that could be, it was spotted before the plant went into operations, but that would’ve had reputational damage, legal problems, and enormous cost in remedying the situation.

So there’s always those live examples that I think you could all pick up where those things have taken place and accessing, and particularly the mobile aspect of a information management system. Readily accessible information to teams on site is so, so powerful.

This one we touched on a little bit before, and Jason’s mentioned this a couple of times, auditability and easy access to information and being able to search for that access from a global search perspective. I think there’s a question in the chat around searchability. This is so paramount. Legal costs are huge on projects. Being able to minimize that through readily accessible access to the information to the people who maybe made those decisions because it’s stamped within a system, it really impacts the speed with which claims can progress and those sorts of things as well. It also minimizes legal costs in searching time. As we all know, a few thousand dollars a day or if not more on legal costs while you’re looking for information is a huge impose to the bottom line of a project. So being able to speed that up through readily accessible information is extremely valuable and directly contributed to the success of the project.

We’ve touched on traceable decisions, and managing change on a project is paramount. Having those approved, having those validated, and then having that evidence that people can actually step through that once decisions are made means the project actually moves a lot faster. Through review and approval processes and change management, we’ve had some customers on very large scale projects save up to 2,000 minutes a month on just time because they were able to streamline and automate a number of their approval processes and their change management through the flexibility within the system. So I think it’s an important part that as all of these four groups come together, there is direct bottom line impact on not only the time, but the cost of the project.

Jason Lancelot:

Yes. I think, again, in the interest of time, I’m not going to go through all of these in detail, but these are really some of those important considerations when you’re looking at your document control.

Obviously, once you start getting into document control and the environments that we have now, a lot of people now started moving to more of a SaaS environment, right? Okay. So because it’s cloud-based, that means everybody can access the system all the time. And it’s all about collaboration. So because of that, you’ve got to make sure that your security and access control are all set up completely and properly. With the role-based access control, you’ve got your obviously multifactor authentications for people getting in, but making sure that all those permissions are actually right and set up properly on your actual project because at the end of the day, any documents are going to contain sensitive customer financial or intellectual property. So you just want to make sure the right people can get to that information.

Version control is really given and change management. Andrew’s already just talked about that, but having that version history that you can reflect back on, make sure you’ve got those approval workflows that you can track. And again, it just makes sure that people are working from the correct approved versions.

Metadata is obviously key one to get the right metadata in there. You need to have it structured. You want to have tagging and classifications for your metadata. You want to be able to do full text searches, things like that to be able to find the information that you want, because that’s what’s going to really improve that productivity. It’s going to support your compliance discovery requests. So it’s really helping people get that correct information.

And with your workflows, automating your workflows, your review cycles, having your review teams in place, notifications, policy-guided workflows. So whatever your business needs to have from the workflow point of view, how are you going to set that up and how you’re going to configure the system for that? Because that’s-

Andrew Harris:

I think on workflows, Jason, it’s the ability to modify workflows within the backend of a system as well at an administrator level for unique situations or for different projects. So having flexibility in the workflow is also a really important part.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah, that’s true. And it reduces all those manual errors then as well, and it ensures that your documents are remaining current. And so that’s pretty key on that workflow side. And again, everybody’s going to get a copy of the PDF anyway, so we don’t need to go through everything. What I might do is I’ll just jump onto the next slide because there is quite a bit around recording these days. So Andrew, can you just explain some of the stuff that you’ve seen on the report?

Andrew Harris:

I think especially, for project managers and engineers, et cetera, I think that the reporting aspect is potentially underutilized in a lot of cases. Being able to see on a dashboard the performance of your own supply chain, if you’re a contractor, who’s holding up things up on the client side as well if you’re trying to progress a change, the visibility of this type of information really helps drive high accountability on the supply chain. It does help understand trends.

We’ve got a lot of clients that use this for a trend analysis type of approach. So they look for either predictive aspects of what’s going to happen, or they look at where there are consistent challenges, and then it gives them an opportunity to go in and investigate. So bringing the information up to, really, a portfolio level, whether it’s through APIs and into enterprise reporting, or whether it’s in a system itself is hugely valuable. And it’s what executives are looking for. It is what portfolio and program managers are looking for. And it is certainly an area where if you can see performance of your project on a dashboard, it then gives you the opportunity to dig into the detail as you see transforming, so an accelerating part of information management. We talk a lot about cost curves and that sort of thing inside cost reporting, but certainly around some of these areas, there are substantial gains to be made.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah. Thanks for that, Andrew. As Andrew knows, I can talk quickly, so I’m going to whizz through this little summary very quickly.

Really, our document control system, you want it to be collaborative. We talked about that quite a bit. You want that collaborative environment so that everyone’s working together, everyone’s looking at the latest information, but you still have to have that right level of separation between the different organizations. You don’t want everybody accessing all the information. So that’s where your role-based permissions are going to kick in.

Metadata is key. I say that to everybody. Think about how you want to search for information. That’s what you want as metadata information so that you can find things. It needs to be accessible, secure, and verifiable.

When you’re configuring a system, think about more than the documents, not just the documents, you want to think about all the data on the project. So whether that’s your mails, your forms, transmittals, whatever it may be.

For those reviews and approvals, you want those fully auditable workflows. That’s what’s going to cover you when you have any potential litigation down the track. Andrew talked a little bit about those workflows and the approvals as well.

From the point of view of distributing information, use transmittals. So not just using email all the time. Transmittals is going to give you a bit more control. It’s going to decide where it goes and what people can actually access. So that’s another one of those key pieces that you really want to think about once you’re looking at a document control system.

Really, that rounds us out. We went probably just about five minutes over what we wanted to. Lance, I’m not sure what questions we’ve got, what questions we’ll have time to answer, but I’ll hand over to you.

Lance Stephenson:

Yeah, no, thank you for that. A lot of people, when they look at document control, they probably think it’s just something that needs to be done. And respectfully, we have to make sure that things are in order for us to establish how we manage the project.

Going back to one of your comments around drawings, I did a study a few years ago on the amount of rework that we do based on incorrect drawings. There’s so many times that I’ve seen when I was a foreman out in the field where we didn’t get the new drawing in time, of course, and we installed something, and then guess what? We had to go back and do some rework. And document control is a key part that it plays in developing that for us.

A couple of questions. Of course, people are looking at the one that seems to have the most uptick, seems to be almost the simplest to understand. It says, why InEight? If you have a Microsoft SharePoint site, maybe people are looking for more grounding in establishing this. And so what’s your thoughts on this?

Jason Lancelot:

As Andrew said… I’ll take this one if you want, Andrew, you can add more if you want. But we tend to find from a SharePoint point of view, that’s where people will work doing their work in progress. Let’s say you’ve got a new document that you’re creating. People build that up in SharePoint, everyone’s working on it. And then once you want to get that effectively into a published controlled environment. That’s the key. In SharePoint, it’s just not controlled. It’s an uncontrolled document really, because people can move it around and copy it. It’s not really set up very well. Once you get to the stage that you want to have that almost approved, or you want to be able to use that on the project and share with the rest of the project team, that’s where you start moving out of SharePoint into a document control system.

You’ll find that some people will actually integrate the two together so that from SharePoint, once it hits a certain status or whatever it may be in SharePoint, it then automatically moves into the document control environment for other people to use, because the other side of SharePoint is you generally don’t want to invite all different consultants and contractors into your SharePoint environment. So you want to be able to have that as your own work in progress. It’s similar to the drafting and design guys working in the authoring tools. You don’t invite other people into there. It’s collaborative for you as a business, but not for everybody else. So that, for me, is the big difference.

Lance Stephenson:

Yeah, no, most definitely. And SharePoint, I’ve seen a lot of circumstances. I remember when… I’m going to age myself a bit, but of course everything seemed to be done in Excel. And then I started learning how to use SQL and Microsoft Access and started to make my own standalone little applications there. And so it still was a standalone. So you still end up with the same approach with SharePoint. It can be considered a standalone approach, which might not be conducive to a collaborative environment. So no, I appreciate that.

The other question that… Can you please describe how all these various documents from the red line field drawings markup to the text message, et cetera, how does it get into maybe the InEight system? Maybe a little bit of understanding a document flow.

Jason Lancelot:

Yeah, it’s really so… Without going into too much detail, because we could be here for way too long. Effectively, the way that we do it with InEight is we’ll have various different upload rules that decides who can upload information into the system first off. We then have reviews and approvals that happen within the system. So that’s when you’re starting off with the drawing or the document. It then goes through those reviews and approvals, and it starts going through the various different statuses until the asset or piece of equipment is built.

Once it’s then built, you have almost the next stage. So you might be, let’s say at revision zero, it’s gone IFC, you’ve built the piece of equipment, whatever it may be. The guys then need to go out on site. They need to do the red line markups or whatever it may be to then get it to that as-built stage.

So what you can do is you can do a couple of different ways. You can do it within the system. So again, if you’ve got a mobile capability, which we do have, you can be out on site using the mobile phone to actually, or a device, whatever it may be, to do those markups because this is now what the as-built needs to be. So you’ll do those markups online. The other way you can do it is obviously if you need to print them out, you can print them out and then mark them up, but you want to get it electronic because you eventually want to have that as a system of record that came from site. And so once you have that information, that then goes back into the system almost as a new revision. It can then get reviewed and approved by the engineering team, get signed off, and then it becomes an as-built.

So let’s say it really works the same way as any revisions that are happening during the project. It’s just that you’re having that proof of the red line. That’s the main thing, and it still needs to get approved by the engineering team. So that’s usually the way that it works within InEight.

Lance Stephenson:

I’m assuming then there’s a connectivity back to the owner or the client who can update their drawing set, well, not even their models per se, their BIM models and things like this to help them with asset management moving forward, right?

Jason Lancelot:

That’s exactly right. Because once you get into… That’s one of the big changes, I think, with document control, where it used to just be for construction and it used to finish. I think Andrew mentioned, we do still have the capability to do an archive at the end that goes to the client, but the problem there is that when the client starts managing that asset, they’re constantly doing changes. I mean, there was a project manager that one of our clients who said to me, “A project never finishes.” There’s always updates happening. There’s always changes. There’s sustaining capital upgrades, maintenance upgrades, whatever it is. And you still need a document control system to manage that sort of information because again, you’re doing the same thing. You’re now going to Rev1 or Rev2, whatever it may be. And on top of that, you want to make sure that the people on site can access that information. And again, using the document control system is the easiest way to do that.

Lance Stephenson:

Yeah, no, and I appreciate that. Well, we’re one minute away and we get shut down fairly quickly. So I just wanted to thank both of you for this. Some people might not find it the most intriguing document, but it’s a fundamental topic that we need to discuss, and we need to make sure that it’s at the forefront. So on behalf of AACE, we want to thank InEight and both of you guys for today’s webinar.

Just a reminder, this event is CEU-eligible and attendings will receive a certificate of attendance in a post email from the AAEC team.

I want to just thank you guys for helping us this and for joining us and hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day.

Jason Lancelot:

Thanks very much, Lance.

Andrew Harris:

Thanks Lance, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. It was a great session. Thank you.

Jason Lancelot:

Thanks.

Lance Stephenson:

Thank you.