The Future of Construction Scheduling: A Collaborative Journey with AI

Hello everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar. While everyone’s entering the room, I’m going to go over a few housekeeping items for today’s event. We will be taking questions at the end of the event, if you have a question include it in the Q&A box located at the bottom of your screen. And then please note that attendees are able to upvote each question by clicking on the thumbs up icon next to that open question. We’ll try and answer the questions with the most upvotes at the end of the webinar.

Today’s webinar is eligible for CEU credits. The AACE team will forward your certificate of attendance within the next couple of days once the webinar is done. And then on behalf of InEight, I want to thank AACE team for allowing us to present today. Registration for the 2024 AACE Conference and Expo is live, so be sure to register so that you can get the early bird rate. The event is taking place in Atlanta, Georgia from June to the 18th, and InEight is a champion sponsor at this year’s event, so we hope to see everyone in Atlanta this year. Dom and I will be there. So looking forward to that event. And then if there’s any other type of comments other than questions, by all means throw those in the chat and we will get around to those.

So with that, today, Dom and I, we’re going to be talking through the future of construction scheduling. Before we jump into any intros, we do have some polls that we like to do before we start these webinars. So I’m going to pop up a poll and answer those and then we’ll look at the results here.

Okay. I’ll give you another 30 seconds here and then we will stop this one.

Okay, let’s go ahead and look at the results here. So looks like we have, oh, a good number of everything here, minus architects. So we’ve got a lot of contractors, owners and engineers. That’s good. That’s a good mixture. And then the role predominantly that you’re fulfilling right now, cost engineer estimator, scroll down there. So there’s a lot of scheduler project managers. That’s good. And then a good mixture there too. Mostly project manager scheduler heavy, which is good, scheduling focus. So this should pertain to you. Appreciate that.

So quick intros here. My name’s Jordan Brooks. I’m the principal product manager at InEight. I’m responsible for driving end-to-end product like cycles for the scheduling and risk management at InEight. Prior to joining in InEight, I was in the construction industry over 10 years. Various different roles for a few organizations, so a lot of background in the construction industry and then moved over to the construction technology side later in my career, which brings me here today. Dom, why don’t you go ahead?

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, I’m Dominic Cozzetto. I am a product director for InEight. I drive the development of the schedule and risk products now, I was in charge of the plan in progress products for quite some time before that. So I’ve been over here for about six and a half years. Before I came over to the InEight side, I was doing the same as Jordan, a field engineer, project engineer, scheduler and lead estimator for TIC for 12 years. So had the opportunity to jump over and kind of drive more from the software side. And sure enough ended up here with Jordan today talking about some scheduling and planning.

Jordan Brooks:

I always like to say Lucky Dom when he says that too.

So quickly about InEight, for those of you who don’t know who InEight is, we are a platform solution in the construction technology industry and our main focus is bringing scope, cost, and schedule together for our clients. And by bringing those scope costs and schedule items together in a platform solution, we’re looking to increase the visibility for our clients, give them the ability to make timely decisions based off of the data that’s being brought together, and then being able to mitigate risk in a schedule specifically or on the job and then be able to accurately capture progress, all in a collaborative platform solution. That’s InEight’s main focus out in the industry today. That’s just a quick marketing ploy there. And then we’re going to get into the good key takeaways here.

Dominic Cozzetto:

So today we’re going to really start to look and understand the shortcomings of the traditional scheduling methods, what we see trending in the industry today to explore some of the benefits of a few things, but mostly collaborative scheduling and really getting input from different team members. And that’s going to flow straight over to learning how AI can really enhance the process, not take over the process, enhance the process. And then we’re going to give you some strategies on how to integrate the collaborative scheduling practices and the AI into your scheduling today.

Jordan Brooks:

So first thing we’re going to touch on are the shortcomings and the opportunities that we see in the marketplace today When it comes to scheduling. I saw with that poll that came in, a lot of you are schedulers and or project managers, so most of these are going to be pretty relevant and obvious to the audience. But today, within the scheduling specific workplace and business processes, schedule is very siloed within organizations. When we go and talk to not only organizations but even projects, the scheduling workflows and even the scheduler seems to be siloed a lot of the times. When you envision a scheduler there, it’s one person on a job or project in a room behind a computer screen just typing away on his keyboard, really not interacting with the team a lot of the times, not getting out into the field and interacting with those field execution personnel.

So it’s incredibly siloed, which that siloedness leads to the next pain point that we see of misalignment and lack of buy-in. And the one I like to point out when it comes to this, the business process is really that short interval planning process that Dom’s going to get into a little bit later. A lot of the times because of the fact that the scheduling processes are siloed, there is a lack of buy-in from the field execution. A lot of the times they don’t even know what the project schedule is saying. It’s seen as a contract document that doesn’t really pertain to their job and what they’re doing. They’ve got their short interval planning schedule or their execution work schedule off to the side and they’re working towards that, and a lot of the times it’s incredibly misaligned.

Also, a lot of the organizations and projects we go to, there’s non-quantitative contingency determination being done. So a lot of the projects and organizations we talk to today, whether it be lack of knowledge to do it, lack of a resource to do it, or just never had the right tool to do it, A lot of projects and organizations are not doing that quantitative analysis to figure out their contingency and they’re setting their jobs up from the very beginning with not only an overly optimistic schedule, but oftentimes an overly optimistic budget even. The next one, the separate tools used as side schedules that again, that tied back into that direct one above of the misalignment and buy-in with your field execution personnel, putting together their own schedules outside of the same tool, not using the same data to make decisions off of, again, it’s creating that misalignment.

The next one, painful experience. Now I know a lot of schedulers in this room can relate to this one. The scheduling tools that are primarily used in the marketplace today can be a very painful experience. I’ve talked to a lot of people who are experts at that software or the softwares that are available. They know what buttons they need to click, they know how to do what they need to do in the software and make it do what they want it to do. But you get someone new in there who hasn’t seen it before, it’s hard to learn. There’s a lack of training and it’s very complicated when you first jump in. The next one, the not risk adjusted, we talked about that one with the non-quantitative contingency. So when you’re not risk adjusting, you don’t know what contingency you need to add to your budget and or schedule. So that’s what drives that non-quantitative contingency determination from above. And then oftentimes, the scheduling processes from building a schedule to doing risk adjustments or risk workshops are oftentimes time consuming, leading to project planning kind of being delayed.

So when you go from these pain points to a new way, a new and improved way of scheduling today, you can see it’s really one-to-one here what we’re going to, so from a siloed process to a way more collaborative, democratized and streamlined scheduling workflow. We’re seeing a transformation in the scheduling world today with the softwares that are being provided in a way that clients and organizations are doing work specifically with scheduling workflows. And really this is being driven by not only just innovation in software but also in contract types.

So you talk about EPC design build type contracts that require way more collaboration to be successful on a project that’s kind of driving what technology is providing for our users today. So we’re seeing a lot more, like I said, collaborative, democratized streamlined processes. With that collaboration there comes a shared accountability. So by being collaborative not only with say an owner or a designer or engineer or a general contractor, by getting those field execution people involved early on in the planning phase, then they have some sort of accountability to that plan and they’re bought in and they’re working towards the same expectations that everyone else is on the project.

Also, by doing qualitative and quantitative risk assessments, there’s an enhancement in visibility and the accuracy of that project plan. You’re getting real-time adaptability with the short interval planning integration that Dom’s going to go through. So by collaborating or integrating your short interval plan and your scheduling software into the same tool where they can talk together in an integrated way, you’re getting way more real-time adaptability to changes that are happening on the job. And then by going at the workflow of creating a schedule or building a schedule in a more templatized approach, there’s way more efficiency in that upfront planning that we’re seeing within the scheduling workflow today. And then by embedding risk management and then AI driven efficiency and insights into those project plans using innovative software, we’re seeing a lot more collaborative workflow when it comes to not only risk management, but like I spoke about earlier project planning as a whole, and then we are integrating with AI driven efficiency and insights, which is significantly increasing multiple business processes in the scheduling workflow today.

Dominic Cozzetto:

So how do we take all those efficiencies and then drive them into our software in a way to make it relatively easy for everyone to use? Go ahead and go to the next one, Jordan. So we really concentrate on these four pillars here and like Jordan was saying [inaudible 00:12:46] from what he just showed in his slide, making everything streamlined and democratized. So we’re including our SIP tool, our short interval planning tool. We’re embedding risk management into the same software and we’re really putting multiple processes into the one tool. So you get out of the export import plugin scenario to really help drive the efficiencies in there because if something’s easy, efficient and repeatable, you will get good at it a lot more quickly than you will if you’re struggling through software. Making our tool credible and trustworthy, it’s a really straightforward CPM scheduling tool, but it is highly accessible for people.

So you’re not spending the four week training process just learning how to use the tool. Instead you’re starting to learn how do I actually plan the work? How do I schedule the work? How do I go about getting my percent complete from my field and learning from other people who have done this before. Efficient and realism, we’re peppering in that AI to help provide insights into the schedule quality, help accelerate the upfront planning and development from past cost data. So I’m not starting fresh every single time. I’m starting from a place that we’ve done it before, making small adjustments, and then moving forward in a quick manner. And then we talk about the power of the platform all the time. Since we are a core product in the InEight platform, all of our data moves to the same place that everyone else’s data. So you have your cost data, you have your planning data, your daily plan data, your quality data, all in the same place. You have the same look and feel throughout all of your tools and you can report out on everything together. Go ahead Jordan.

Now if we take a step back into exactly what we’re talking about as far as just InEight Schedule, here are all the modules that we have connected inside that. So in plan view here, this is what you’d be most familiar with from like another CPM tool. So you have your master schedule in there, your CPM view, you’re assigning your resources and your markup assignments. Where we go above and beyond that is now we have other tools integrated and connected as one platform. So I can send out a markup cycle to get that collaborative effort from my field personnel, from even management, whoever I want to get that feedback for and send that into the schedule view so I get that buy-in as a whole project. We’re seeing increasing trends in the market where we’re losing that one subject matter expert that was really good at power plants.

You had that one very experienced person in your office you’d go to give you kind of that sanity check because he or she had built that project 15 times already in their life. That institutional knowledge is slowly going away because we’re seeing less and less people stay on, a big retirement process or retirement cycle coming up, and people tend to jump organizations faster than they used to in the past. So you’re not getting that person who has worked 35 years that has seen the ups and downs of the company and knows where to look for maybe some red flags inside of your schedule. So by doing it this way, I might have a subject matter expert in concrete that I’m getting his, I’m getting a subject matter expert in electrical, I’m getting hers. We’re just kind of spreading that out. So I get that collaboration from the entire team instead of just the one person.

And that also ties into our risk register and our cost risk modules as well. So we can look at that holistically from a project view, not just the small CPM plan that was really just a contractual requirements. One thing that’s near and dear to my heart being from the field is we’re integrated straight to that short interval planning tool as well. So that gives us a more detailed, smaller digital look ahead that is really bought in and put in by your field engineers, your foreman, your superintendent, and where this goes, go ahead Jordan. Go to the next one. Is straight into a quick screenshot of our short interval planning tool. And the benefit of doing it inside the tool instead of perhaps a side spreadsheet or something home built that’s on everyone’s computer is that you can see I can bring in my activities from my CPM side to make sure I’m planning my work for my crews within the same window that that activity is showing on the CPM side.

A lot of times you’ll get completely out of flux here and actually breach those CPM activities if you don’t keep that in mind in the field. For example, I used to pour concrete, we would go from one similar foundation to the next and try to reuse those forms as quickly as we could and as efficiently. And that might not be in the same sequence as my CPM activities are. So this way I have it in the same tool. I can say, “Oh, I might be very effective doing that, but this next foundation isn’t what I should be concentrating on. I actually need to shift my focus to a different overhead.”

So this tool, putting it within the system and bringing in different users besides schedulers helps give insight to that and that breach detection to make sure I’m processing through my job the correct way, I’m following the correct path of construction to actually get my deliverables in place in time for our CPM schedule. Another benefit of all doing it in one system, I can now see if I might be in the same area as a different foreman and I can actually have communication open up between my foreman and superintendents to make sure I’m not working in that same area at the same time. So lots of benefits here, especially that breach detection and having it all in one platform where I’m not relying on exports and imports, but it’s just there and available for me to use. Back over to you Jordan.

Jordan Brooks:

All right, so one of the other pillars with InEight Schedule that we’re using today to see a transformation within the scheduling workflows is AI and what we consider AI is augmented intelligence. So I’m going to go through some of the rationale, benefits and barriers to why use AI in a scheduling workflow. It’s going to be very scheduling specific, but I think augmented intelligence is something that we’re going to see more and more of in construction technology and in a lot of other workflows as well. Not just scheduling, for example, risk management within InEight Schedule, but also cost engineering, possibly document control, things like that where there’s a lot of opportunities to improve efficiencies. That goes into the rationale of why you would look to improve workflows with augmented intelligence. So when we talk about why does it make sense to try and augment a workflow, we look at there being a lot of specialized jobs today in the construction industry and in a lot of organizations, as Dom spoke about earlier, the workforce is decreasing significantly with not only in the construction industry, but I think in the workforce overall.

We have an aging workforce, there’s fewer people that are backfilling these specialized jobs and there’s a lot of knowledge that is being lost with this decreasing workforce. Because of that, there becomes a necessity to somehow either train your employees who are backfilling those specialized jobs or be able to quickly find replacements from other organizations. But when you do backfill them, you also have to train them quickly. So because of those needs, there arises a way to or an outside looking in trying to find efficiencies in how we expedite these specialized jobs or possibly make them more repetitive, make them a lot more efficient, a lot more easy to achieve is what I’m looking for there. So what we look for in there is also work processes that rely on technology. The reason we say that is that AI, augmented intelligence obviously relies on data to be useful.

You need a repetitiveness of gathering data, learning from that data and then increasing your efficiencies on that data, which relies on technology to be able to capture that. So by being in a platform and using technology to do your workflow processes in a platform solution, we’re able to capture data, let our augmented intelligence learn from that, and then it increases the efficiencies of that, which that goes into the benefits of using augmented intelligence specifically in the scheduling world. So one of the things I’ll go through next year is a case study of one of those efficiencies, but what we see a huge benefit in is the building of schedules, CPM schedules. As many of you know who are schedulers on this call, takes a lot of data to be able to build a schedule. Sometimes you’re provided that data, sometimes you’re not, I guess. But a lot of times you could have an estimate, you’ve got a budget, you may have a general arrangement drawing.

You’re trying to gather information from a bunch of different subject matter experts and trying to make sure that you got the sequence correct, make sure that you have your durations correct or whatever your productivity factors should be on that specific workflow, that work process that you’re working on in the field. And all of that’s hard to gather and bring into one area. So by using past data, organizations past data, at InEight Schedule, we believe that there’s some huge efficiencies that can come from using that past data to quickly build what you’re going to do on the next project, especially if it’s something that you do repetitively, which I talked about earlier. We’re looking for repetitive workflows. Even repetitive projects can help create efficiencies with that augmented intelligence that you use in the scheduling workflow. And then another benefit that comes from using augmented intelligence is measured results.

And what I mean by that is by using augmented intelligence and utilizing your past data, you almost have formed your own benchmarks to work towards. So the AI is suggesting, “Hey, you’re building this new project. It looks a lot like the one you’ve done in the past. Here’s what you achieved back then. Here’s what we think you should be close to achieving on this job.” So you have an idea and you’re going in with a way more realistic, I’m not going to say pessimistic, but a realistic look at what you should be achieving and how quickly you should be going specifically in the schedule on certain activities based on past results that you saw on other projects.

And I know AI is a very big hot button today in the industry. I think I can’t sign on to any social media platform without seeing something about AI. And so it begs the question of why do a lot of organizations not try to implement augmented intelligence into their workflows? And it may be a little bit more relevant or maybe more obvious to some than others, but there’s a lot of barriers to AI, augmented intelligence within an organization. And one of those big things is change management. It kind of feeds into the next bullet point below of technology innovation, but change management requires a lot of people in an organization to be bought in to a vision to go down a change management path, especially when you start talking about redoing what technology or looking at new technologies that you use for all of your processes.

We’ve gone and talked to a lot of clients and customers who see that as a huge barrier. They ask a lot of advice on how to do it, but I think the big thing is you just have to have buy-in from those organizations and they have to see the vision on where that technology is going to take them and the efficiencies they can gain from using augmented intelligence or an innovative way of scheduling, for example, to make that change. They need to be assured that that’s going to be worthwhile to them.

And then the other barriers that we see out there is really just a lack of technology innovation being seen specifically in the scheduling sector of the market. A lot of the software that’s out there today has not had a lot of innovation. It’s lacking on future thinking. We’re seeing more and more of those be introduced to the marketplace, which is great. That’s helping out a lot of organizations be able to be assured that if they do make a change in their workflow processes, they’re going to have the software to support them. So that’s something that is always hanging heavy on people’s minds, but we’re seeing a more and more innovative approach to specifically scheduling, and that’s good. That’s leading us down a path of that transformational scheduling that we’re seeing.

So just to jump into some case studies quick that touch on the rationale benefits and how we overcame the barriers that I spoke about earlier. First one is schedule creation. So I’m going to look at these as case studies, not of specific projects but of specific workflows that we’ve seen AI, augmented intelligence be introduced to and it actually help with. So schedule creation being one of those. There’s a lot of software’s out there today that will go in and create WBS’s for you, activities, logic. You can start resource loading those schedules quickly and easily. And then users aren’t having to gather all that data I talked about earlier and then try to combine it, get some sort of their version of the schedule, go to an SME, try to get feedback, and then come back and make sure that they’re good to go before they submit that for a baseline schedule.

They can, again, mine past data that’s in the knowledge library of an organization possibly. And with the help of augmented intelligence through suggestions to the users, they can select which pieces of certain schedules make sense for their project that they’re on now. And that way not only does that kind of cover you being overly optimistic, you’re a little bit more realistic, it also is done quicker so that there’s a little more thought done to that project planning. And then as Dom talked about earlier, when you get done making this baseline schedule and you send it to that markup phase, you actually get feedback from your subject matter experts, your field execution, and you’re going in there with a schedule that should be adjusted and hopefully way more realistic to what you’re going to see on your project as you go through it. And we’ve seen anywhere from a 30% increase in efficiencies on when you talk specifically about building a schedule from scratch, we’ve seen some big jumps in efficiencies for our users.

The next one is risk management. So like I spoke about earlier, and it was more specific to scheduling, risk management is also a very siloed workflow or work process that we see in organizations. Typically you have a risk manager, they’re very specialized in what they do. A lot of times organizations may even call in third party consultants to do some of their risk management for them because they just don’t know where to start, don’t have the resources to do it, aren’t set up to handle the risk management side of things.

But by utilizing augmented intelligence in software, we can empower our users to be way more savvy or at least usable and dangerous in a risk management setting that you can get some good feedback from them and use that in your project schedules. Like I talked about earlier and Dom talked about earlier with the schedule risk workflow, we utilize a centralized risk register within InEight schedule that allows users to go in there and reference those register events when they’re going through say markup or schedule feedback and be able to embed those risks within the schedule, even from conceptual planning phase, they can begin embedding risks into the schedule from that centralized risk register.

And then also with the use of markup, they can get further suggestions on what other risks they may be missing. So as a user at the field execution level, I may not have any idea what I need to do in a schedule for risk management or what risks are even available to me for that matter. But by going into a software that provides suggestions to that field execution user that can easily and quickly identify risks that they know will impact their operations and even hopefully spur some thought of what other further risks aren’t accounted for on this activity or this portion of the schedule.

And then by going through that register creation, the maintenance, you get the feedback, and then you go into the workshop phase again, you’re good at gathering data to get to a more realistic, what’s the scope of my project? What’s the cost going to be on my project? And what’s my schedule going to look like at the end of the day? And by utilizing that feedback that you get from the subject matter experts utilizing that centralized risk register and going through the workshops and the simulations, you can get a way more realistic look at where you’re going to be at not only the beginning of the job, but at the end and set yourselves up for success further down the road.

Dominic Cozzetto:

That about wraps it up for Jordan and I today, just to go over what we went through is really understanding the shortcomings of what we’ve seen with the traditional scheduling methods, adapting some of your procedures, looking at some software that helps you adapt to those procedures, explore the benefits of the collaborative scheduling, learn how AI can enhance that process as also being that augmented intelligence as another voice in that collaborative scheduling is how I like to view that.

Using technology to help you advance and really stress test these processes, gain those practical strategies for how to integrate the AI and the collaborative scheduling practices, as well as bring that into your risk adjustments and to facilitate buy-in from your field. So this kind of wraps up where we’re at for this presentation. Jordan, go ahead and go to the next one. We do have a microsite out there for InEight Schedule. You can jump on there. We’ll leave the link here, see what we think about scheduling. There is a ebook on there as well you can download and learn more on a philosophical side, more than what Jordan and I were saying today and really just explore and look at our tools and how we’re trying to help enhance the scheduling in the industry today. Go ahead.

Jordan Brooks:

So yeah, so we’ll open up the question in the Q&A panel here, and like I said, we’ll start answering the questions with the most upvotes. I am going to pull up a QR code for a survey. I know there’ll also be a link provided if you don’t want to try and scan this QR code, but I will leave this on the screen for those who are looking to get in there and do the survey here. So let’s go to the first ones. Looks like one’s been answered, but okay. Do you guys work Oracle to connect to Primavera P6 schedule platform? So this one we can absolutely answer. So we absolutely can work with Primavera and Microsoft project formatted files to be able to import into our software and utilize the services we use, including risk, SIP, even if you want to take advantage of the CPM scheduling functionality we have, we do absolutely work with Primavera and Microsoft Project both within our system.

How exactly is AI helping schedulers? Where is the AI pulling the data from [inaudible 00:33:54] data and how recent is it? Can we see an example? Okay, so for the example portion, if you want to see an example, by all means I would go to the microsite and reach out for a demo on that one. But as far as how the AI specifically is helping schedulers to augmented intelligence, again, that’s through suggestions and it is absolutely utilizing a knowledge library to make those suggestions. That knowledge library is typically an organization’s as-built data that’s loaded into that knowledge library. And then it will give suggestions based off of a couple matches that it looks for as user either goes in and is building a schedule or like I touched on at the end with the risk workshops, it’ll suggest risk events that should be embedded for that activity for your risk simulations.

Now, oftentimes I’m going to answer another question that could possibly be dumb, but it usually comes in conjunction with that is a lot of users will ask, how much data past data do I need to make this knowledge library and the suggestions useful? And for InEight Schedule specifically, we require no more than one to do that. You absolutely load one as-built in there and then based on user selections when they go through and use those suggestions, it will learn from those and adjust its ranking orders of suggestions based on selections. But again, the more the better though, right? If you have one that’s great, if you have more, load it in there and that will only improve those suggestions for a user. But if you don’t have a lot, by using InEight Schedule, you can absolutely build that knowledge library up over time to make it more useful for you.

How can we be sure that our past data won’t be shared with our competitors via your AI tool? We do not share that, I guess. That is something that we can talk about if a user or an organization is interested, but data is not shared by InEight whatsoever from our platform. I guess right now you’ll have to take my word for it, but if you want more data, more information on how you can be assured, by all means reach out and we can get you that information.

Okay. Talking about collaborative journey and construction scheduling using AI, are there any use case examples of schedule optimism, cloud-based AI schedule… [inaudible 00:36:17]? This one I may take offline. This is actually a great question. I’ll take this one offline and answer it in an email. I’ve got the user, so that’s actually a pretty good one that I’ll take offline, but I think that one can get long-winded, so I’m not going to go into that one right now, [inaudible 00:36:37] may not be reliable to unique infrastructure projects…

So question on how can you trust the AI data correctness and accuracy? The data and the correctness and accuracy is really purely going to be based on an organization’s knowledge library, obviously, with what past data is filled in there. So by going in and making sure that past data is quality prior to loading it into a knowledge library, say it gives you that extra check before it goes in and starts making those suggestions via the augmented intelligence. So that’s one way organizations typically are encouraged to make sure that you have good data coming out, is to make sure that you’re putting good data in before you load it into the knowledge library. So that’s just a process that your organization has to go through.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, and I’ll add on top of that, that is an absolute business process to make sure what you’re putting into the system is beneficial coming back out. So yeah, we’ve seen a lot of good change management around that for our adopters, not only in schedule but as a platform as a whole on how to actually use the software and standardize a business process throughout a huge organization at the same time and a lot of success depending on the effort put in there.

Jordan Brooks:

And it looks like, so I’m going to combine the answer to a couple of these together because it kind goes with collaboration and whether or not it’s a black box. So within any schedule, at least it utilizes a knowledge library and multiple factors to make suggestions based off of all of these are, we can absolutely, if you’re interested in our tool, we can go in depth on what those matches are. It is absolutely not a black box. We are very open to our users on how suggestions are made, but the way it’s collaborative is AI is not taking over building a schedule or doing a risk workshop for you or embedding risk on an activity or assigning a risk event or a register event to an activity. It’s purely suggestions. So it’s going to take a user looking at those suggestions, validating those suggestions are accurate, and then accepting those suggestions.

So it’s very collaborative the way it’s built in. And then the collaboration portion, at least with InEight Schedule, really should be more focused on collaborating with the field execution personnel. I know Dom said he was very passionate about that, which I know already. But really collaborative when we talk about collaboration with InEight Schedule, that should be really focused on collaborating more on the CPM scheduling processes, getting more people involved in that, and making sure that you’re getting buy-in, feedback, everything you need up front or throughout even the update process of your project to make sure that you have accurate data going into that schedule. And that’s through the integration of SIP too. I don’t know if Dom is going to add on to that, I’ll let him. But really that collaboration that we’re talking about, we really want that to hinge on your field personnel, field execution, and everyone else on the job aligning on what it means to be successful in that project.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Yeah, yeah, you really want that collaboration when it rolls into that short interval planning session there because that really is almost a translation point from your field engineer or your field management team saying, “Hey, this is what the activity is in your CPM side. Now break it down into how you’re actually going to build that and move your crew around site.” That cannot be done in a room that’s closed without any collaboration from the field. So that really is your foreman, your superintendents, any of your field personnel, getting in and building that site together on a piece of paper over the next three weeks and making sure it ties back into that CPM schedule. So all the communication needs to be done on that level to ensure there’s no breaches in CPM and not any work front interference from different crews.

Jordan Brooks:

There’s a couple questions on demos in here. Let me check the time too. Okay, we got time. There’s a couple questions on demos in here. If you’re interested in demos, by all means, reach out to us. We’re more than happy to give you a demo on the software itself.

Sorry, I’m scanning through here to see to make sure that there’s another one in here that we have not touched on yet.

That one is long, I’ll have to read that one later. That one was long-winded. I apologize there. Okay, so here’s, when the AI makes suggestions. Is it on activities, relationships, cost and risk? So the suggestions we use, like I touched on earlier, it’ll suggest a WBS structure for a schedule. It can absolutely touch or bring in activities for a schedule. It’ll bring in logic for that and it’ll even possibly bring in past risk registers or data from your centralized risk register to populate a risk register for you to start out your project with. That’s a lot of the data that we bring in to help out users so they’re not starting from scratch on those, which a lot of times we see on projects that’s happening a lot, we’re starting from scratch even though it could be very similar to another project that that firm, that contractor has done in the past or owner. So it gives you a good foundation starting point for a scheduler and those risk workflows to start going through.

Okay, so here’s one that we touched on about asking what do we consider inefficient time-consuming project planning? So the inefficiencies that we typically see out there that we’re actually combating, I guess with InEight Schedule is, one is building that schedule. If you don’t have a basis of a plan, then that project planning is delayed from the beginning or it’s going to be delayed as long as it takes you to have a basis to actually do some meaningful planning from. So by quickly being able to build a, let’s say baseline schedule, it gives users and project teams a lot more time to go in and make adjustments, whether that be through SME markup on durations or going through your risk workshops early on that oftentimes don’t happen. It gives the jobs way more opportunity up front to make sure they have a realistic plan when they go and submit at baseline time or they begin their project and start going into execution phase. When we talk about that inefficient time-consuming project planning, it’s really the time lost based on that inefficient schedule builds is one we see a lot of.

Dominic Cozzetto:

Another one I’m going to comment on there is getting markup and progress updates from field personnel. Trying to get all of that from the same people at the same time while they’re on trying to build the project is near impossible. So putting it in a centralized location instead of trying to maybe print off a sheet and give it to people for them to update, and then you get it back and type it in manually, our process streamlines that. Having it all in the same tool so you can have those markup and progress updates come back automatically. If you have questions, then you can go start a conversation, but that also is something that’s very inefficient in the field.

Jordan Brooks:

This is a good question, not specifically about scheduling, but about InEight. InEight, We’ve been talking about it being a platform solution. It absolutely can be module independent if needed, by all means if you’re interested in that, reach out to InEight and we can kind of get you the details on that.

Dominic Cozzetto:

I think we’re at time, Jordan.

Jordan Brooks:

Okay, perfect. Thank you Don for looking at that. There’s a lot of great questions on here, a lot of questions I did not get to, some long winded ones that I’m going to have to go back to. So I’ll talk to AACE to make sure I get those questions sent over to me so I can answer them and send through an email outside of this platform. But again, thank you everyone for joining us, Dom and I appreciate you having us on, love talking about scheduling and the way it’s transforming in the future. And if you have any further questions that you possibly didn’t get into the Q&A, by all means send those over and we’ll get those answered. Thank you everyone for joining. Appreciate it.