InEight Innovations: See the Latest Integrated Platform Enhancements

Brad:

Welcome everybody. Appreciate you joining us today. We’ve got a really great session here. We do this quarterly here at InEight and we’re excited to show you our latest innovations and things that we’re bringing to our integrated project controls platform. We have a lot of enhancements going on, a lot of work going into our integrated project controls platform. Here, we’re going to show you some of the key things that we’ve curated for you to show for you, give you some demo, and talk about some of these great enhancements we’re doing. Thank you for being here.

My name is Brad Barth, chief product officer for InEight to work as part of our product leadership team here at InEight. I have a chance to work with our great product teams as well as a lot of interaction with prospective customers and customers of InEight to get that feedback and understand what’s the market looking for. We’re always looking to add new things to our platform and constantly getting great ideas from our customers and from the market. Again, thanks for joining us.

We’re going to tag team this for you here today. So I’m going to cover about half of it and I’m fortunate to be joined by Ali Ammar, who is a senior solution engineer for InEight. Ali is going to take the other half of this session here. He’s going to do the fun part. He’s going to get into some live demonstration. Ali, why don’t you to tell the folks a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get going into the content.

Ali:

Thanks, Brad. Hi everyone. My name is Ali Ammar. I’m senior solution engineer with InEight. I’ve been in the project management technology for 15 years, implementing solutions for construction, transport, and energy industry. Today, I’m excited to introduce you an innovative planning capability, a particular section of InEight’s schedule known as short interval planning.

At InEight, we have a focused interest in improving planning and scheduling practices to provide project certainty by planning smarter, so looking forward to showing you some of our latest innovations today with Brad. Over to you, Brad.

Brad:

All right. Appreciate it, Ali. Stand by and we’ll jump back to you here in about 20 minutes or so.

Ali:

Sounds great.

Brad:

Great. All right. Like I said, we’re going to have a combination. We’re going to do some slides and some overview on some of the new things that are coming up, but we’ll definitely get into some live demonstration as well, particularly some of the things where it really helps to see things running live and in action, I think, to get a good feel for it. Feel free to put questions into the system here. We’ll definitely leave time at the end to jump back to questions. Feel free as we’re going along. If there’s anything that you’re wondering about, just put those into the questions box.

And like I said, we’re always looking for feedback. We’re always looking for how we can improve and continually make our platform an even better fit for folks like yourself. Let’s jump into the content.

Like I said, at InEight, we’re constantly developing in all parts of our portfolio. Before we jump into some of the enhancements that we want to profile, why don’t we just level set on what is an InEight and what is this vision that we’re working on here at InEight and what’s that integrated project controls platform. I think probably no surprise to most of the folks on the call, if not all of you, that the essence of project controls is scope, cost, schedule, and that’s essentially the driving force of InEight’s vision.

We wanted to bring together those three elements of project controls and particularly in a way that… one of the things that we see, we’ve got a lot of construction experience inside of InEight and obviously a lot of feedback from customers along the way. And one of the things that we hear constantly is that, “Hey, we’re using five, 10, 20, 30 different systems to cover those areas: scope, cost, and schedule.” That creates all kinds of challenges in terms of how do we get data tied together across scope, cost, and schedule? How do we create reports and dashboards that make any sense? How do we do benchmarking? How do we get better from every project.

That’s really first and foremost in our vision is let’s bring the functionality that organizations need that are involved project controls, whether you’re on the owner side, engineer side, contractor side. Let’s provide the functionality that you need in each of those areas, but more importantly, let’s tie them together. Let’s integrate so that the roles that you have, whether they’re estimators, cost analysts, planners, schedulers, work planners, procurement, all the different roles that come into play in project controls can participate in an ever evolving set of data for a project or program. And as that data evolves, the next person, the next role, can leverage the benefit of that work that came before him or her.

Most importantly, being able to track that work across scope, cost, and schedule, across all those roles, but most importantly as we go from expectations to outcomes. By that I mean, on the expectation side, let’s cover the planning and/or all those things, scope cost, and schedule have as planned versions, as designed versions, if you will, but they go through versions as the project moves along. Ultimately, all the way over into the outcome side where we have the as-built versions of all of those things.

At the end of the program, we want to understand how did our expectations match up with those outcomes? Did we achieve the goals that we wanted in all three of those areas? Obviously, there’s a very tight dependency across all three of those. If we’re going to do our best around delivering the scope that was envisioned, we got to make sure that we’re doing that at the right cost and the right schedule. If we change any of those, the others likely change as well. We’re looking at how do we manage those dependencies and change all the way through the outcome stage of the project.

How do we do that? That’s obviously a pretty high level there in terms of InEight’s vision. The way we do that is through a modular approach in our integrated project controls platform. It is a cloud platform, so it’s quite manageable in terms of the deployment and it’s easy to get started. And because it’s modular, you’ve got a lot of flexibility on where do you start. Then as you add things, you know that as you add those other things, that they are coming out of the box fully integrated and filling in just pieces of the puzzle. You don’t have to do the whole puzzle at the beginning. Those eight modules, which is kind of where the name InEight play on the word InEight and the eight modules really comes into play there that you can see at the top. But a little bit more detail under those modules, you can see some of what we call the business process functions or business process areas that are covered by the InEight solution.

Hopefully, as you’re sitting there watching this now and you look at those functions that are listed of those bullet points, you recognize hopefully some of the things that you do today and, again, know that these things are all connected within the InEight solution. So you might start with two or three of them, but as you add others, they’re connected and ready to go.

Now, last thing we’ll talk about before we jump into the major enhancements in this quarter is the dashboards. Everybody wants good reports, good dashboards, how do we share information easily, how do we communicate, status of the project, key metrics, KPIs, trends, all of that kind of stuff that we need to track internally if we’re running the project, but we probably also need to share information externally with other stakeholders and partners on these projects.

That’s another big part of the InEight vision is built-in, embedded Power BI dashboard so the data coming out of those different business process areas flows into dashboards and we call it self-service dashboards because you as the user of the solution, we spend a lot of time building this such that you can create your own dashboards. You don’t have to have a consultant do it. You don’t have to have an IT event and spend months waiting to get your dashboard created. If you can create charts in Microsoft Excel or if you’ve ever used Microsoft Power BI, you’re going to jump right into this and be able to create your own dashboards right out of the box. So really excited about that part of it.

Now, for this quarter, let’s look at the innovations that we’re focused on that we’re going to take you through here. I’m going to hit the highlights of each one of these. Like I said, we pulled out or surfaced five of them. If we had more time, we could probably do 20 of these but we pulled out the top five that we really want to focus on. Those are short interval planning, subcontractor management. We’ve got a great all new mobile app for our document control capability. We’ve got some new things going on in change order management. Then I’m going to demo for you some of the things we’ve done just in the platform itself and some of the new navigation and look and feel and customization capabilities that we’ve baked into the platform.

Like I said, I’m going to hit these at a high level and then we will come back and Ali will jump in and do some demos of our short interval planning and that new document mobile app. If you’re really tuned in to see those things, stay tuned here and Ali is going to jump in and show you those things live here in just a bit.

Now, short interval planning is where we want to start. Now, before I jump into this a little bit, we’ve got a poll for you. We’re going to do a couple of these. We really just want to get a little bit of feedback from you as the attendees today. When we talk about short interval planning, our goal was really to replace the ways that the non-digital approaches that short interval planning often happens. Now, it might be a whiteboard or grease board in the job site trailer. It might be an Excel spreadsheet. It might be moving sticky notes around. We’ve got a digital version of that and the beauty of that is it’s tied into the CPM schedule and other things taking advantage of the digital approach.

But before we jump into this, let’s do our poll. We’re just curious, are you using any sort of tool or automated software today to do that short interval planning? Let’s see if we can get this poll started here. It looks like our poll is not coming up for us. That’s okay. We’ll see if we can do our last poll and then we’ll take questions on that. That’s fine. No problem.

But yeah, so if you look at the short interval planning planning that we’re going to go through here just a second, think about how that happens today in your organization, think about ways that might evolve from a live presence thing to a digital approach which drives this collaboration across all the parties. You don’t have to be sitting there in front of that whiteboard. We’ve got a nice collaborative approach we can apply to that and think of it as the last mile planning. CPM schedule higher level as we get down to that last mile planning. What are we going to do tomorrow? What are our crews going to do? What are subcontractors going to do coordinating all of that access and work on out at the job site. That’s what we’re talking about. When we say short interval planning, we think we’ve got a unique approach to that. And like I said, Ali is going to jump in here in a bit and show you what that looks like.

Subcontractor management. This is the next big area that we want to focus on today. Lots of capabilities inside the InEight suite for subcontractor management. Whether you’re on the subcontractor side or on the general contractor side, managing subcontractors, there’s stuff here for both. Some of the bigger things that we’ve done recently are around really tying in contractor management or to the contract management. As we’re managing that contract that defines the scope of work, payment milestones, terms and conditions of that contract with the subcontractor is most likely going to have some definition around how does that subcontractor get paid? What drives payment?

In this new release, we’ve got that tied into our field management system so you got the contract, but now we can also go manage the work so as that work is happening, that’s driving our subcontractors requests for payment, we can track that work or the subcontractors can do it inside the tool and measure that progress. And the goal of that is to eliminate disputes, eliminate, questions and just speed up the payment time which is good for everybody. The beauty of this, and this will show you the next few slides, is this subcontractor management cuts across lots of different areas of project controls. Let’s take a little look at a spin through what we’re talking about.

What I’ve got up now is what we call the control module. We’re looking at our budget. If you look over on the left, you can see a breakdown, a hierarchy of basically our scope for this project. How have we broken that down in terms of we’re going to track this stuff from a budget perspective, from a forecast, from an as-built cost perspective. What I’ve done here is I’ve marked this up just to show you the integrated nature of the InEight solution.

The premise here is that we’ve got some work that we’re going to subcontract, some earth work. This excavation and spoils removal. During the estimating stage, if you used an InEight estimate, you probably took advantage of our ability to compare subcontractor quotes in order to say, “Hey, these are the numbers that we think are representative. We haven’t issued a contract yet, but these are the numbers we’re going to use that are shown there by that arrow.” Then what we’re going to do then is as we proceed along with the projects been awarded, now we’re in the execution and so we need to start going through our buyout process, creating contracts, managing that work.

If we go to the next slide here, now we’re into contract management. Using InEight contract, now we can create the subcontract itself using templates, using standard terms and conditions, pulling in scope, creating payment milestones, schedule of values, all that type of information can be set up in the contract. Once that contract gets executed, now we’ve got a commitment. Our original budget numbers over on the left, well, now we’ve got actual numbers that we are under contract with a subcontractor for showing over on the right.

At this point, as shown in the green numbers, we’re going to come in a little bit under budget. You see the nature of this, the contract itself comes back and affects the budget or can affect the budget and can affect our forecast.

Moving along then, as we go into progress, now the subcontractor’s doing that work. Work’s happening out at the job site. You can see based on our percent completes and earn values, InEight’s field execution management capabilities can be used, again, by the subcontractor or by the general contractor to progress that work. The line items and the schedule of values that define that contract, we can progress those. Those automatically drive our percent completes, which automatically drive our earn values.

Then along the way, we might run into an issue. At the job site, we run into some issues, something unexpected, let’s say maybe some additional scope, and so then you can use InEight contract to go through the entire change management process. That may end up resulting in a change to that contract, which then, again, comes right back into our forecast. Once we’ve updated the contract, we don’t have to remember to go back into the budget and forecast to make those changes. It’s all tied together.

Then through that, as we get into pay requests, obviously, our subcontractors want to get paid. As that work happens, that can be calculated based on those schedule of values as that work is being progressed. We can be calculating what’s the amount essentially that justifies that pay request based on the percent complete and those payment milestones. We’re doing things that you all do every day. It’s just the solutions making it a lot easier and eliminating that, “Hey, we got to do the contract stuff over here, the budget over here, the progress over here.” Inside of InEight, it’s all tied together.

Then all the way through that process, InEight document control capability is serving as a common repository for all of the information that gets generated along the way. So not just the contract document itself, but correspondence between subcontractor and general contractor, photos, documents, plans, specs, all of that stuff can be managed inside of InEight documents, so it’s right there for reference as we’re going along.

Lots of things going on in the world of subcontractor management. That’s a key area for us at InEight as we continue to build out across the portfolio, a lot of capabilities to make that a contractor-subcontractor collaboration be as smooth and easy as possible.

I mentioned our document mobile app. This is the next one that we want to focus on. I’m really excited about this one, obviously, in today’s world, more important than ever to be able to access information wherever you are. You might not be on your laptop, you might be on a tablet, let’s say, as shown here. So we want to make it easy, simple to access the information that you need, whether it’s, again, plans, specs, drawings, contracts, work plans, any of the information, whether it’s kind of structured data, unstructured data, model views, PDFs, JPEGs, whatever it is, all of that can be stored inside of InEight document, put it right at your fingertips so that as you are perhaps walking around at the job site, open up that tablet, access the information that you need to see right there at your fingertips. Even take photos with your device at the site and load those up into the system as well, again, rather than going from, let’s say, a phone or a device into a holding area, and then ultimately into your document management system. We can do that directly with the new InEight mobile app.

So this is another area where Ali is going to jump in and show us a little bit of that here in just a bit, so stay tuned for that.

Change order management. I mentioned a little bit on change order management in the context of subcontractors. If we’ve got changes happening that might affect the contract, but InEight’s change management capability and change order management really covers the gamut of any type of change that comes up. And those changes can start as an issue and then they take on a life of their own. They might go to a potential change order. Maybe we’re going to do some research on it or have some conversations about the issue before it turns into a potential change order.

When it does turn into a change order, we’re probably going to need to do a proposal in order to justify that change. And that’s where some of the enhancements we’ve done in this quarter really come into play. Essentially, what you can do now is you can use the built-in cost estimating, essentially, capabilities that are baked into our contract management of change management capability, I should say. You can now go in and do just a quick and dirty estimate, put in some numbers, plug numbers, if you will, or even do more of a bottoms up estimate. Let’s use resources, let’s use other types of information to drive that change order.

As you can see on these next couple of screens, what we’re showing here is we’ve got a potential change here around some fencing. Maybe we hadn’t planned on fencing in a certain area. Now, we’re saying that we’ve got to have that. So we’ve got to come up with a number for that. This is where, again, you can do a cost breakdown down at the line item level to let the system do all the math, do all the calculations. You can have standard markups, standard margins per the contract or per your operational procedures to automatically make sure that, hey, the right fee or the right markup is being applied.

So you can do that at the cost item level or high level, even break down into more of a resource based approach. You could get down into, hey, not only do we need this fencing, it’s going to come in with a certain price that we want to pull in. We just need to give it a quantity, but, hey, it’s going to take some of our time. Maybe it’s project manager time, maybe time of our own, labor force is going to be involved in that as well, so we need to put in some hours for those folks.

Total of all that stuff comes up here, $27,000, in this case, supplies the right markup and gives us a number. The beauty of all this is we can create that proposal really easily and then generate a report that we can hand off to the owner in order to justify, hey, here’s the change that’s required and here’s what that’s going to cost in order to do that. And take that all the way through the approval process. Once it’s approved, just like we talked about before, that comes back and updates our budget updates, our forecast. If that work is relevant to a subcontract, we can automatically issue a new update to that subcontract as well.

The last one I’m going to profile for you here is some of our platform enhancements. I’m going to do this live for you. I’m going to jump over. Bear with me here while I share my desktop. We will do entire screen. So here, what we are looking at is the opening screen. When you log into the InEight solution, it knows who you are, it knows your role, and the nice thing about this is you can customize this landing page. So some of the things that we’ve done in this quarter’s release really go to the customization and navigation.

Inside of InEight, once you’re in, you can jump into any of those functional areas that we were talking about at the beginning. I can list my favorite projects up here in the top-left. Maybe I’m going to jump into this Renegade project. From there, I can jump into any of the modules, the capabilities inside of the InEight solution that I want to jump into all at my fingertips.

All of our team members can be working inside this solution, putting in data, leveraging the data that others have put in as we progress this project, so all right there at our fingertips.

But the main thing I wanted to show you in addition to that navigation is this landing page. You can customize this landing page. What we’re seeing here is lots of what we call them widgets, basically, where you can go in and, hey, maybe I want to look at weather, maybe I want to see a map of where my projects are located, all the way down to… you can drill in and see traffic conditions right around the job site, photos coming in, charts, graphs, trends. You think of the wealth of data that’s inside the InEight solution from a scope, cost, and schedule perspective, we can put KPIs, charts, scraps that we really care about, we want to see, hey, show me if there’s issues related to some of our subcontractors or vendors looking at changes and cost over time. I can go on and set up here’s a view of issues, so hat’s happening with our issue count? Is it going up? Is it going down?

And we’re looking across projects here. Maybe you’re involved in five different projects or 50 different projects, so we’re looking across all of those. We can look at things at a program level. That might be information rolling up from, say, five projects into an overall program. And then even to the point of, “Hey, are there things that need my approval that are part of workflows that I need to review?” Maybe it’s one of those change orders we were talking about. Somebody’s got to approve that tasks or are there certain things that are waiting for me to do? My favorite dashboards may be down at the bottom there.

Lots of widgets. Some of those, you may have noticed here, this one is actually webcams. InEight doesn’t make webcams, but we work with a partner that does, a company called EarthCam. And this is a great example of the open nature of the InEight platform because our partners out there, they do other things. Can have their content showing up on this landing page. Here you see this is actually a webcam at EarthCam’s headquarters. It’s nighttime there. It’s a live view. If you look really close, you can see the fountain moving there. Again, imagine you’ve got webcams at your job site so you can have those popping right up on your landing page here so you can see a live view of what’s going on at those job sites and it’s all customizable.

We can go in and move things around, turn things on and off, choose from the inventory of widgets over on the left. Maybe we don’t want the weather, just turn that off, maybe we want this one over here. Very easy to control this, save these different views of these landing pages by name, and have an audience-appropriate view as soon as you log into the system.

Let’s go ahead and I’m going to stop sharing here and come back to our PowerPoint. At this point, now that I’ve highlighted the five major enhancements that we wanted to focus on for this quarter, let’s get into a little more detail and show you some live action here on short of planning and the new document mobile app. With that, I am going to turn it over to you, Ali, and you can take it from here.

Ali:

Sounds great, Brad. Can you hear me?

Brad:

I can hear you great. Yep.

Ali:

Perfect. Let’s get into it. As you can see, we are talking about one of a particular capabilities of InEight Schedule. This is called short interval planning or as a short form SIP. You might have heard of different planning approaches in the industry, like look-ahead scheduling or lean scheduling. This is precisely what we have digitized and developed as short interval planning.

Now just to begin with what it is, it is actually nothing but a planning tactic used to handle the dynamic nature of work on the field as it is happening. Traditionally, what happens and what we are used to is a weekly planning meeting is typically held to plan the upcoming work and typically this includes foreman, the project manager, different crews. You basically decide in these weekly meetings what work needs to happen, what are the crews that are required to perform this type of work, and are those crews even available.

You’re basically in these weekly meetings, you’re discussing, am I constrained by something? When can we start the work? And you’re having all these discussions in greater detail as you get closer to executing the work or performing the work. Typically, these meetings are held on site with a construction foreman or crews, and where these plans are laid out on a whiteboard as you can see on the screen or a planner would pull up in Excel and start to plan that level of detail.

But if you think about it, this traditional approach that happens often on a weekly basis, it is a separate and a disconnected process really used to manage a lot of work that’s happening on the field, and it introduces a great risk of losing key information and execution steps or execution discussions that are happening during those meetings.

I’ll move over to the next slide, that why did we actually build this, because we understood from our customers that one of the pain points that we often hear from our customers is that there’s often a disconnect between our master schedule and these weekly lookahead schedules that the planners are planning. And there is a very valid reason to manage both of these scheduling types because we definitely need our critical bot method schedule. This is where your planners and project managers are basically working within the confines of what is contracted. Basically, you end up developing a contracted scope of work with your activities, with your durations, dependencies, and you call it a baseline schedule. We fully understand that and InEight schedule can use for CPM scheduling as well.

However, equally important is our innovation that we have developed as short internal planning, as an effective way to manage the evolving and dynamic nature of the work that’s happening on the field. This brings about this great capability to bring out the best for both types of stakeholders. As you can appreciate that on any given project, you have two different types of stakeholder groups.

One is your project controls team or your project controls managers, planners, schedulers, who are focused on managing the overall scope and schedule of the project with your durations and deliverables. And then you have your frontline field execution team. These are your superintendents, foreman, crews that are actually delivering the work on the field.

Now, it’s important to understand that both of these roles greatly benefit from this granular nature of planning and you need that agility on the field so that as more information becomes evident, you can progressively plan and reschedule the work happening on the field. And just because of this very reason, the fluid nature that is quite difficult to maintain in a CPM schedule, and it introduces unnecessary complexity, therefore, weakly lookahead scheduling requires more often iterative approach or an agile approach. And this allows for more detailed step by step planning and we’ve developed this at InEight.

Let’s talk some of the solution benefits and capabilities of why we have developed this so to speak. As you can see on the right side, this shows basically our traditional CPM above the line. Below the line, you’re seeing short interval planning steps. SIP basically gives you the flexibility to break down those functional silos based on field conditions and resources and it ultimately increases efficiency on the field and that’s what project managers and field planners need today, then they apply this SIP approach.

Now, at InEight, we’ve taken this lookahead scheduling and really aligned it with CPM in a single digital environment. This innovation really provides best for both allowing the planners and field personnel to be aligned and all of this scheduling and lookahead information is managed in a collaborative environment. Multiple users can work on it and I’m going to show you shortly that they can be assigned at different levels of the work breakdown structure. This really gives our customers the opportunity for more proactive reporting and increased visibility on project milestones.

At this point, let me share my screen and show you what we have developed. I’m just going to quickly share my screen. And if you can confirm that you can see my screen, Brad, that’ll be great. I’ve just launched InEight schedule.

Brad:

Got it.

Ali:

Perfect. With that, what you’re actually seeing on the screen is basically a view where most of your project controls team is working on. This is InEight’s schedule. It’s a web based application where multiple users can plan their work and where a lead planner is basically managing this schedule. What you’re looking at is a single project called Building and Site Facilities. It’s essentially showing you your WBS hierarchy. For example, pre-construction, procurement, construction as your work breakdown structure levels or your planning packages. This is where your planners are basically planning this schedule, managing the critical path, and performing different traditional operations.

The great thing about InEight schedule is we can bring this right in from other planning applications such as Primavera or Microsoft project. We can bring in that data, or you could use InEight schedule to plan from scratch using our benchmarking historical data and really get more smarter in planning using those template based approach.

This is all well and good, but what we’ve innovated now in addition to your typical traditional CPMs scheduling is giving you the flexibility to delegate different parts of your project to your field crews or to your field engineers. As you can see, there are different team members that you can assign at any level of the schedule. You can assign those different users to actually progressively detailed as the work is happening on the field or as you’re doing your lookahead planning. And this is really great because these users get the flexibility to actually drill into what we call as short interval planning.

I’m just going to go into short interval planning now. And what that does is it pulls up information. You can see it has brought over all the details from your CPM schedule. It has brought over your project, your timeline. You can see the timeline on the top. It has brought over your work breakdown structure. Within your work breakdown structure, you can see a list of your activities as well. I’m just going to drill down into construction phase and within construction, I’m going to drill down into early site works.

What you can start to see is the CPM schedule itself, the timeline itself. However, at this level of detail, you can start to plan your lookahead. Typically, you would do this exercise on a traditional whiteboard, but what we’ve now introduced here is giving you the flexibly to actually plan those sticky notes or those post-it notes that you’re doing right within the digital environment. We are looking here at one of the activities called mobilization, for example, and this mobilization activity is detailed into what we call as SIP steps or short interval planning steps.

You can see right here temporary parking, minor equipment, major equipment, facilities. These are your individual short interval steps or the work that needs to be done in a particular timeframe or in a particular to be. And all this is within the context of your CPM schedule. Those blue color and red color activities that you’re seeing, these are your activities themselves that are pulled directly from your CPM. You’re able to now further plan more granula and you have the agility to actually move around your crews or schedule your work as long as you are within the boundaries of the activities, it’s all well and good.

You can see right here, we have an activity shown in red. This shows that you have a critical activity there that’s actually happening today. We’ve got good visibility to filter down just today’s work that we need to plan for the next week, let’s say. The great thing is you could see the weather conditions, how it’s looking like today based on the project location that you’re working within. You can pull up the weather right away and see if you’re okay to plan the work for today or tomorrow. You can see really quickly we have chances of rain tomorrow and it’s going to be heavy rain tomorrow in Melbourne.

Right away, you get this great information where you can start to plan your activity. Just with a click of a button, you’re able to add step, check your weather conditions. Let’s call this step as Northside Fencing. We are going to do some fencing work, so I’m just going to add quickly a step called Northside Fencing. And you can see these now five digital magnets or five post-it type notes coming in. You could plan the duration for this step to be, let’s say, eight days, and it’s going to add more right away as I enter. You can manually click and close off that or add more duration to it as the work requires to be done.

All this is within the context of activity scheduled without changing or making any disruption to your CPM schedule. And that’s really great because as the field users or as the field engineers, you want to be working within the field, or you might even subcontract part of your scope to different subcontractors to actually come into this collaborative work environment to plan their resources and to plan the work. And that’s really great that we’ve brought in all within the context of your schedule itself.

Now, let’s decorate the step with some resources. As you can see on this step itself, I could go ahead and click on add a resource. Now, you can see there is a step over here. You can see the duration or the dates for that step to be executed. Right away, you can see what crews you have available or you have available for your project that you can use or you can utilize. At the same time, either you can pull up a crew based on their workload or you can create a new crew, like I’m just going to call, in this case, fencing crew. I’m just going to use a unit of measurement. You can have cubic meters, you can have man hours, this is all based on how you want to utilize that crew.

I can say that I probably need 160 labor hours of a fencing crew and right away you can see, right when I type 160, the system has evenly distributed those 160 man hours of that crew across the entire duration of that step. And this is really great because now you can front load, back load as you see fit for those resources and you have the flexibility to plan here. If you want a front load your activities, I can say that initially I might start with a bigger team or more workforce. Then later on, I might go ahead and prorate that information or spread that information across that step.

Right away, you have that flexibility where you can enter all this information, I can assign it or give it a quick color to quickly colorcode this crew so that I can see that information. Right away, what you can now see is that you’ve assigned those 160 labor hours to this crew itself. Similarly, you can go onto some of the annotations and we can show some of these annotations that we have in the system. At the same time if, for example, I’m starting work on this step, you have the capability of commenting here. We can say that weather conditions are looking good to commence the activity. And you can save those comments that typically would happen on a weekly meeting or on the site. You can capture all this information right away within the system.

Now, coming over to some of the annotations within the system, you can see how you have spread those resources across your timeline. You can turn those units on and you can also see your resources or see your crews in different colors. I can turn that on as well. Right away, what you can see as you’re looking through a weekly lookahead or two-week lookahead plan, you can see how you’ve planned those steps in detail and I’m just going to quickly expand one more activity, which is maybe excavation works just so that you can see across the board how you’re planning your resources all within the context of the CPM schedule.

This is really a great innovation we have brought in here. One more annotations I’d like to quickly show is a CPM breach. This actually means if your field personnel or if your site or pretendant have planned something that is breaching your schedule itself, you can turn that on for a lead planner. This is very critical to actually turn this on and they get highlighted those activities that are outside the boundaries of either you’re starting them early, or you’re pushing them beyond the activity durations itself. You can quickly see some of those CPM breaches and either fix them or allow them to happen depending upon the criticality of the work that is planned.

Really quickly, this presents a great visibility and insight into some of the very popular whiteboard that we often use. What we have done is digitize all that in the one solution and brought those capabilities to you. One more capability I’d like to show you real quick is the ability to group information by planner, or as you can appreciate, there are different crews that are working on the field. These may be your subcontractors, these may be your own internal crews, and once you group it by planner, what you can see in the system is that I have Brad working on one activity or one task over here.

Let me just turn the units off real quick. And I have Brad working on one activity, then I have two other staff, Matthew and Nate, all of them assigned to a similar activity. They share the responsibility between one of the works that is happening. It’s called electrical roughing as one of the activities. And I’m just going to expand it all and see how Brad is planning to deliver this work. What you can see is there is a lot of float there.

The activity is critical, but you’ve got room to play with. Brad may think that he’s got room that he might bring in his crew later on, and you’ve got all that room so you can move in your steps that you need to perform. But the reality maybe quite different and we’ve tried to highlight that within the system itself. What you can see is that there is another crew actually working on that same activity, and when you click on that, you get highlighted that Matt is coming in later after Brad’s crew would do the job and prep for starts.

There’s another crew, Matt’s crew, who’s actually delivering the work. The same goes for Matt. He may want to start the work a bit earlier if his crew is available, but he can right away see that there is some work happening by a proceeding contractor or by a proceeding subcontractor. Similar for Matt, that after he pulls the wire and does all of that work, then there is another crew coming in which is Nate’s crew and doing another type of work on that same activity. He’s installing electrical boxes.

All of these three crews are sharing that responsibility, but this provides really good visibility that if you’re positioned to work on a set of activities, you can actually see the cross crew dependencies across that timeframe and really visualize that information. This cross crew coordination is really great and it’s going to be excited about this because it’s going to solve a lot of problems, especially when it re relates to coordination delays or claims arising from the field. This is really exciting and of it that, Brad, any final words you want to mention around schedule before we jump onto showing the document mobile app?

Brad:

Fantastic job, Ali. This is a really exciting stuff. It’s great to see how that last mile planning or that really detailed daily planning is tied in with the CPM schedule so you know when you’re making those changes on the fly and dealing with all kinds of conditions at the job site or at the work face and making decisions that you can see right then, hey, have we messed up our CPM schedule of if we do this, and if so, hey, there’s those other discussions we’ve got to have. We know that right on the spot. Tying that planning all the way through now like we do from CPM schedule to work packages to daily plans, short level plans, all the way down to that last bit, there’s really, really impressive. Nice job showing that. I guess speaking of schedules and making sure we don’t breach our schedule, let’s jump over do a quick view of the InEight mobile app, and let’s make sure we leave some time here for questions. So I want you to do a quick run through on that.

Ali:

Sounds great. Let me just quickly share my screen and let me know once you can share my iPad, let’s say.

Brad:

We got it.

Ali:

Sure. Just one quick second. I think it’s not displaying quite properly. Apologies for that.  Okay. All right.

With our document mobile app, this is really great and exciting capabilities that we have launched. This document mobile app will be available for iOS and Android users, so it’ll be available on the Appstore for both iOS and Android users. This is a new mobile app that we’ve created and really taking the user experience to a mobile enabled and a modern way to look at and browse through your project correspondence and your documentation.

Like Brad mentioned, with access to all your project correspondence and documents across multiple projects, and being able to pull up this information at your fingertips. I could favorite some of the projects and jump right into one of the projects that I favorited. The great thing with this application is that you might be with this mobile device walking around your job site to pull up information and all the relevant documentation related to your drawings, your workflows, for example, RFIs or some submittals. And the communication as you might want to do it on the project site.

With that, I’m just going to jump into my document register, and you can quickly… The great thing we’ve brought in is also an offline capability. You can actually, before going to the site, you can see that data has been just downloaded and all my offline data, or all my offline document drawings are actually now visible within my mobile app. That green indicator actually shows you that there is a download in progress, and it allows the users to actually work on the latest revisions right away.

You have this offline mode where you can actually go into a document and look into everything related to that document. We can actually go into the details, see what revision it is, see what discipline of the document it is, verify all the information, if we are working on the right copy, see any cross references to this document. There may be pieces of correspondence that relates to that document, or there may be job site photos that relate to that document. Really having that mobile capability to quickly just drill down, check that piece of correspondence that has been sent on that document, this really brings that user experience to a whole new level. Meanwhile also having some additional capability, not just to browse through correspondence, but actually to get into the document itself and to do some annotations and markup on the document itself. Really great mobile capability where I can see some markup has been done, I can go into the markup, review the comments against that drawing or a document, see what information has been highlighted to me by, it could be by a subcontractor or by the head contractor. You can check out any of the comments and have all those mobile capabilities doing some of the markup information and everything gets saved within the system itself by maintaining that full audit trail or history for all your documentation.

As the work is happening, you’re carrying this mobile device rather than huge lot of drawings on the go and you can link corespondents right to your documentation. And a big part of designing this capability was giving users the flexibility to raise any corrective actions on the field, or really write array document, any issues that you’re observing while giving you the flexibility to capture any photos, all that as you observe. Really a nice capability by taking all that web-based user experience into a mobile application. Yeah, really excited for that and with that, I guess that’s pretty much it what we wanted to cover for today on the document mobile app.

Brad:

That was perfect. Appreciate that, Ali. Great one through there and seeing what that new functionality looks like both in the short interval planning and the InEight document mobile app. Really great to see it live in action. Perfect. Let’s go ahead and before we take some time for questions and answers, let’s do a poll real quick. We wanted to go ahead and ask a poll question here for us.

Which enhancement are you most excited about? Of those five enhancements that we profiled, short interval planning, subcontractor management, new document, mobile app, change order management, and then those platform enhancements where we looked at the customizable landing page, go ahead and give us your vote on that, and we’ll see how everybody’s looking at this here.

We’ll give it just a little bit of time here to go ahead and make your vote. And I’m hearing from our moderator that we might be having some challenge with our polling question again here, so let’s give it just a sec and see if we get our results. InEight doesn’t make this polling questions survey stuff here, so don’t blame us for this, although it’s probably operator error.

Well, I tell you what, if we do get our survey results come up, I will share them with the group. Short of that, let’s go ahead and take some questions.

Ali:

Sounds great.

Brad:

I did see some questions come in. Are you ready to answer some questions, Ali? I think most of these are probably headed your way.

Ali:

Sounds good.

Brad:

Okay. We got this question similar to this on the last time we showed short interval planning. First question is, is short interval planning a separate application or is it part of the InEight CPM Schedule application?

Ali:

Yeah, definitely. This is part of InEight CPM Scheduling application, which we call as InEight schedule and short interval planning is a capability within our InEight Schedule application. It’s very much now becoming the norm or the foundation for construction projects as a planning approach, because we often see in the industry that lean construction and agile project management methodologies, they all came about due to the challenges that a CPM schedule is more like a waterfall approach or a waterfall method.

Really bringing that in context of CPM, what we have is giving you the flexibility to plan in both manners in a short internal planning manner, and really aligning that with CPM. And the goal is to provide you with a better planning methodology to manage the entire scope and tie it back to your project milestones so that your flow of execution is not disrupted. Really giving that flexibility, we brought both of these into one application. So SIP is part of InEight schedule.

Brad:

And just for everybody’s knowledge, InEight schedule so now it has CPM scheduling and full on risk assessment, it has the collaborative scheduling approach where you can collaborate with all your subject matter experts to get their input on your schedules and risks, and now short interval planning as well, right, Ali? All of that stuff in one bucket, one module where, again, even just in that particular area, people might be using three, four different softwares from different vendors to do just those things. We bring it all together into one. I love this question. This one actually ties together two of the topics that we covered here today. The question is, can we invite our subcontractors, we were talking earlier about subcontract management, can we invite our subcontractors to use short interval planning to plan their work and resources?

Ali:

For sure, for sure. And this is the way or the approach we’d encourage lead planners to take on is explore by bringing in your subcontractors into the same application, giving them access for their work packages. It really adds a lot of context and reduces a lot of complexity that you’re asking them for Excel exports or asking them for Primavera or Microsoft project files. And then as a lead, if you face these challenges, you’re trying to put all that together, make sense of it so why not just use one application where you’re inviting a subcontractor to plan their work as they see fit all within context of the milestones that you’ve agreed upon. This is really exciting and great, and I’m looking forward for our customers to actually take on that approach and start utilizing that.

Brad:

All right. Excellent. Yeah. And that’s the beauty of the digital approach. All the different stakeholders, collaborators, partners on these projects, and there are many on these large complex projects. And all work together, all share information, and just work so seamlessly together. Yeah. Great answer to that one. I think, again, since we are talking about schedules, we’d be remiss if we went over schedule, we might be a one minute over as is here. Let’s go ahead and wrap it up. I want to thank everybody that joined us today. I hope you got something good out of this presentation and learned something new. We’ve had up on the screen here different ways to get in touch with InEight and learn more about InEight and our integrated project controls platform. Ali, special thanks to you. Great job with the demos. Appreciate all of your hard work as always.

Ali:

Thanks, Brad.

Brad:

And then lastly, shout out to all of our great product teams that create all of this fantastic software that our customers use to their benefit and that we get to show off here in sessions like this. Thanks everybody for attending. Have a great day.

Ali:

Have a great day.