Why Your Most Complex Projects Demand Next-Level Document Control

All right. Welcome everybody. My name is Brad Barth. I am chief product officer for InEight. And my goodness, I am so excited to bring an amazing group of panelists here today to talk about a really fun topic, I think. And you’re going to hear a lot of great things, a lot of great experience from these panelists. And our topic today is why your most complex projects demand next level document control. So a lot of things going on in that area, particularly as it relates to technology. So the folks that we’ve assembled here today have a ton of great experience in going through that technology evolution. So I’m really excited to introduce them, but I’m going to hold on just a sec, get a little housekeeping out of the way, and then we will introduce our esteemed panelists here. So again, I’m Brad Barth, broadcasting to you from Scottsdale, Arizona just outside of Phoenix, where it’s currently about 195 degrees I think. So happy to be indoors during this.

But yeah, let’s do a little housekeeping. That on 24 experience that you’re watching this through is pretty customizable. So if you want to play around with most of the little panels you can resize, if you move your mouse to the corner, those things drag them around or resize them to get it to where you’re comfortable. One thing I’ll point out too is we will leave some time at the end for questions. So if you look at that, there’s a questions box in there in your panel. Please put in a question. If you’re curious about anything, put it in there. And like I said, we’ll try to leave some time at the end to go through those. So let’s get into a little bit on … Let’s do introductions. Before I introduce our panelists, let me give you a little bit of background on InEight. I’m sure all of you out there are following everything that InEight does every step of the way. But just in case, I’ll fill in some blanks for you.

So InEight’s been at this for about 30 years. I’ve been at this as part of InEight going back to early 90s. And really our vision hasn’t changed. Our vision at InEight is to create this project controls platform, and over the last 10 years, we’ve really realized that vision through the cloud. So a lot of the changes in technology have enabled us to do a really a lot of good things on this platform in the cloud so it’s super easy to implement. But our focus is really on … At the end of the day, it’s bringing together scope, costs and schedules for these projects. Trying to get rid of the silos. So as you can see on the screen there, those four categories. Everything from project cost management, estimating, budgeting, that of stuff to document control, which is our topic for today to even things like work planning and quality and that sort of thing.

So 16 different … I won’t name them all, but 16 different business processes that we bring together in that project controls platform. So that’s the only commercial that I’m going to give. But just so you know, where’s InEight at on that vision? And like I said, I’m thrilled to be able to bring three of our customers here today that can talk to their experiences, not just with InEight, but just in general in terms of all three very impressive companies and what I would consider just the forefront of technology and innovating and staying in front of that curve. So let’s get right into the introductions here for our panelists. And I will start. I’ll just let you all introduce yourselves. We’ll go around the table so you can provide a little bit of background on yourself and your company. So Curtis, you are top left for me. Curtis Smith, you want to kick us off? Tell us about yourself and your company.

Curtis Smith:

Perfect. Yeah. Thanks, Brad. Curtis Smith with Sundt Construction. I’m project controls manager. Sundt is a pretty diverse business. We do infrastructure, industrial, building concrete renewables. I’m headquartered out of the Tempe office here in Arizona, but we do work all over the southwest, northwest, Texas. I like to identify Texas because it’s its own thing because everybody likes to say it’s its own country. So Texas and then we do a lot of work on the East Coast now as well. So we’re really diverse across the states. But I’m really excited to be here to have a conversation around document control and what that looks like.

Brad Barth:

Awesome. Thanks for taking your time, Curtis to join us. Michelle, how about you?

Michelle Orizzonte:

Sure. I’m Michelle Orizzonte. I worked for Graham Construction. For the last five years I’ve been the corporate doc control manager in our corporate office in Calgary. Before that, I was on site for 12 years. I worked in our buildings division and I was coordinating projects from sites. So currently in my role I’m guiding a team of regional doc control leads. So Graham is getting bigger all the time. We work across North America and we’ve span a complete spectrum of projects. Buildings, industrial infrastructure, water and development projects. And then me and my team, we work on streamlining and standardizing our processes and making us more efficient and reliable when it comes to document management. So I’m really excited to collaborate with Curtis, Chris and Brad today and share some insights and hopefully we can do some brainstorming and ways to advance our dot control practices together.

Brad Barth:

Wonderful. Thank you Michelle for joining us. And that brings us to Chris. Tell us about yourself, Chris.

Chris Perrin:

Hi everyone. Chris Perrin. I’m the vice president of project services for Orion Group Holdings. Orion is a specialty engineering and construction contractor. We primarily focus on commercial, concrete and marine construction. We are headquartered in Houston, Texas, but we operate from the Caribbean across the United States into Alaska and the Pacific Islands. I’ve been with Orion rather since 2015 and had been in some form of a project controls role and function for the last 20 years now.

Brad Barth:

Excellent. Thanks for joining us, Chris. Yeah. And as you all heard from the three panelists, I think we’ve got the full gamut of the construction industry covered here. I think across your three companies, every market from infrastructure, to offshore to vertical building, oil and gas, and the whole works covered here. So it’d be great to get that spectrum of perspectives and opinions from you all. So with that, yeah, let’s jump into our first question here that I will pose to the group. Curtis, we’ll start with you. I know you guys, you take on a wide variety of projects. And I think I mentioned to you, I grew up in West Texas so I was familiar with Sundt since I was a kid, just seeing some of the things that you guys build. But all sizes, varying degrees of complexity. Relative to this document control topic we’re talking about, do you guys take a standardized process to that across all projects or how do you find the balance between maybe big projects versus small projects or complex versus not complex? How do you guys approach that?

Curtis Smith:

Yeah. We take an approach of standardization. As I stated earlier, we’re unique. We’ve got several different unique business units. Each of them have their own unique operations to them. So we try to standardize at a high level certain capacities within our doc control process so that from a business perspective, we’ve got controls that we can manage across the organization. Each job’s going to be unique where they need to have flexibility to navigate their contract requirements, their project specific needs. But having those controls and having standardization, it’s really helped us become more efficient, it helps with quality control compliance, scaling our work so we can go to the next job and people are trained and understand what they’re doing, so it’s not a big change every time they go to another job. And it also helps with collaboration across the different business units so that when we’re having struggles or have an idea, we can collaborate against that.

Standardization also lets us get data capture that we then use to identify certain key performance indicators that are critical to the business and also gain insights to the project to see if there are areas where maybe the job site just can’t see it from their view on the job. And from a 30,000-foot view, there might be things that we can identify to help them out. Training’s key with standardization. So one of the big things we’ve done here using InEight’s modules, they have some great training resources, but of course in house we have our own training, which I think my partners here in this panel will probably say they have their own standardized how-to documents as well, because there’s always unique processes that we do that may be different than how InEight has established it. Managing our risk, it gives our stakeholders confidence that we know what we’re doing and how we’re going to manage their work, that the information that needs to be communicated out to the entire job site is being communicated clearly and everybody’s on the same page so that’s key.

And then lastly, one other big piece about standardization is allowing us to capture historical information. So being able to understand how that project went through the doc control process, what RFIs are we getting, how did the submittal process go? How many iterations of drawings did we have on the project? That really allows us to understand, okay, we’re doing work with a certain designer of record or a client, we can understand maybe … There’s some key insights there that we can manage moving forward with them that help offset some challenges that we dealt with on a specific job and moving forward mitigate those in the future. So that’s in a nutshell what I would say we try to do with standardizing what we do here at Sundt.

Brad Barth:

Sure. Yeah. I love that last part too, just because I think part of InEight’s message certainly is it’s one thing to make sure that you’re delivering on the project at hand and doing that successfully meeting your contract requirements. But while you’re doing that, if you can capture information that’s going to help you on the next project or help you better understand the business and get better every time, then why wouldn’t you do that? Sounds like that’s what you guys are doing. We do certainly hear from some folks, sometimes it’s something like InEight might be overkill for small simple projects so maybe we’ll just use it on the bigger projects. But it sounds like you’re finding the benefits of if we do standardize, even if it might be heavy-handed for the smaller projects, there’s value in being able to move people around from project to project or collecting that historical data. Is that what I heard there?

Curtis Smith:

Yeah. So to your point, if it’s a small job, what’s funny about our industry, and I bet the panel people would say the same, is that you could have a job that’s a million dollars and a job that’s a billion dollars. The document management process is still as complicated on a million dollar job as it is on a billion dollar job. You still have to do all the same things. You still have to do RFI submittals, doc management, meeting minutes, all those things. And so yeah. While they may not do all of the process that InEight offers, we try to make sure that certain components of the system are done. For example, RFIs, it’s becoming more and more across the business here at Sundt that everybody uses the system for that or meeting minutes. So yeah, that’s a great point. So it is unique. One of the other unique things is … And it’s just the industries is we’ve got owners that fly in and say, “Well, hey, by the way, we have our own doc system that you have to use.” And so then we play that game too where we have to play both sides of the coin and say, do we make the team enter data twice or do we just say we’ve got the system, we’ll get the information and capture it that way?

Brad Barth:

Hold that thought Curtis, because that’s a topic I want to explore with you guys as well. Yeah. Hold that thought because I definitely want to get into that one. Before we go to our next question, I’m going to turn to you, Michelle, and continue on that small versus large topic here. But before we do that, let me go ahead and tee up our first poll. We’re going to do a couple polls through this really just to help us understand you all in the audience and what kinds of companies do you work for and so forth. So we’ll do a couple of these. But we’ll go ahead and tee that up so that when that hits your screens, if you just click on the answer there, that best indicates what type of firm you work for. So appreciate everybody in the audience doing that. And then Michelle, over to you. Maybe just continuing on that theme that Curtis was touching on in terms of a large versus small. Certainly Graham covers that gamut as well, small project, large projects. Are you finding the same as Curtis was alluding to in terms of it’s the same thing on a smaller or a large project, it’s just scale, so maybe just more people, more information, but you take the same approach or do you try to delineate between different types of projects and different tech solutions?

Michelle Orizzonte:

No. I would agree with Curtis. I think the thing is when you have a small project, you can get away with less. It doesn’t mean you should do less. It means that … I like to say you could keep that information in your back pocket. You got a little million dollar project, you can have papers in the dashboard of your truck and I don’t know, some emails and an Excel spreadsheet and you can get away with it. Does that mean that that’s good? No. So getting everybody doing the same thing and getting them in the right processes. This is really setting up your people to succeed as well because they’re more than likely, maybe they’re on a $20 million project this year, but they might be moving to a larger one. So having everybody use that same tool and get to know it. And maybe they’re doing less things in the tool on the small project than the large one, but there’s definitely benefit there. I think some of the other things to consider between small projects and large scale projects is if you make some mistakes at the beginning in a large scale project, it’s just got larger consequences. I guess back to being able to get away with less on a small project, it doesn’t mean you should.

In a large project, there’s more staff to train. Process becomes so much more important on a larger project. You’re repeating the same thing over and over again. That process needs to be the most efficient possible. Those inefficiencies will definitely show up more on a larger project. The work tends to get more compartmentalized. So now instead of a coordinator maybe initiating and monitoring a form workflow like an RFI, perhaps you’ve got steps for doc control or maybe quality control in there. So with more people doing smaller bits of work, having all of that data and all of that information done in one system becomes more important. You can’t have a bunch of side spreadsheets and Outlook emails managing these processes on a half a billion dollar project. You’re going to have a really big mess if you do that. And then in addition to probably more compartmentalized work, you also have a larger turnover of staff on those big projects. Again, getting that standard process and getting everybody doing things the same way you’re dealing with some turnover, it’s a little easier. You’re pulling somebody from another project who already knows the system, who already knows the basics. They can hit the ground running and pick up where the last person left off.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. I love the focus on not just process continuity and making sure you’ve got handoffs and that stuff, but you mentioned a focus on your people and what’s the career path for them. And like you said, they might be on a small project today, but a big project tomorrow. So I think that’s certainly in this environment where it’s hard to find people and you want to develop them and make sure that they are on a good path. That’s I think maybe another one of those often overlooked benefits of that standardized approach is it puts everybody on an equal footing in terms of that career development. So that’s great to hear that.

Let’s see if we can get the results from our poll here. So let’s see what we’ve got. 46%, 47% contractor, 18% owner, 32% engineer, 2% architect. Nice range there or spectrum of people watching. So great. Appreciate everybody answering that, which is probably particularly between contractors, owners, engineers, probably a good reflection of the industry in general there in terms of those percentages. So great. We’ll do another poll here in just a bit, but let’s keep going here on our questions. So let’s get to I Chris. Maybe changing gears a little bit. The technology, as I look at … And you guys have all been in this industry for quite a while. When I think back to when I first started, no email, no internet, certainly no cloud solutions. Those things that we take for granted now relative to technology just weren’t around then. And all of those things have made it easier to collaborate. That’s one of the nice things about just technology in general.

So when you think about something like InEight document or purpose-built construction specific document control system compared to just using just general technologies like maybe a SharePoint or emails or messaging systems or something like that. I guess if you could touch on where are you seeing the difference between just the general technologies and something like InEight document in terms of helping you guys collaborate? And that could be internal collaboration or collaboration with your customers, your partners. What’s your view on that?

Chris Perrin:

Sure. I think the biggest benefit … And Curtis touched on this earlier. Is the standardization of the document control processes. So the good thing about InEight document for us is that it seamlessly integrates with some of those legacy systems and applications that we are not only used to working with, but our customer base is used to working with like Outlook like SharePoint and some of those other collaboration tools. So we’re able to standardize our processes around document controls because we have an application like InEight that we have built the processes that we want to be standard operating procedure around document controls in there, but we’re still able to take advantage of some of those legacy applications that all of our folks are comfortable with and all of our stakeholders are comfortable with.

You mentioned internal collaboration. One of the things that we’ve been able to evaluate and work on implementing is streamlining our AFE process through InEight document. And so developing, because of the tools and the templates and forms functionality inside of InEight document, we’re able to develop our AFE form and we’re able to route it through InEight document to our internal stakeholders for markups and approvals. And so the benefit of that for us is when somebody has a capital expenditure that needs to be evaluated potentially all the way up to our CEO, managing it through InEight document gives us the ability to know exactly where it’s at in that workflow to be able to ensure that we’re working on the current version, that somebody’s not reviewing a document that somebody else has already marked up. And we’re potentially creating confusion and chaos within our process there. And to be able to make sure that it’s getting pushed through that workflow and it’s not just sitting on somebody’s desk because we have visibility to whose ball is in court as far as that document routing goes. All of those are benefits as well with our external stakeholders. But we’ve been pleasantly surprised to be able to get benefit not only with our third party stakeholders but also our internal stakeholders.

Brad Barth:

That’s a great point too. We tend to think of something like document, InEight document as how do you move documents around and through review and approval. But it sounds like you’re using it for other business process, whether it’s … I know some customers use it for procurement or budget decisions, things that require comments or certain levels of approval or steps that can be automated through the same process. So that’s great to hear. Good stuff. And I think management of those workflows, I would imagine. I mean, Chris, as you guys get … You mentioned internal and external. And maybe just touch on an example of how you use it to collaborate externally. Are you doing that with your customers or partners? Where do you see that external collaboration come in?

Chris Perrin:

Right. We can do it with our customers, our owners, our general contractors. If we’re operating as a subcontractor, we can do it with our subcontractors and vendors as well because in both cases we’re having to route documents for review, for approvals. And so the great thing about InEight document is it doesn’t really add any effort or any duplication of effort relative to our legacy processes because we’re able to create a document, an RFI, for example, in InEight document and we’re able to route it to our customer or engineer of record through Outlook. They’re able to click on a link in Outlook, review, update, approve, whatever they decide to do, kick it back through Outlook into InEight document and we’re able to continue to move it wherever it needs to go from there. The great thing about that is as opposed to our prior process, which Michelle mentioned a more manual process involving spreadsheets and involving attachments to emails and that sort of thing is as we’re moving those documents, as we’re updating status, as we’re even creating documents, they’re automatically getting logged and they’re automatically getting status updated in the system. And so we’ve got one place we can go to see the latest and greatest with any spot that that document might be within a given workflow.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. That’s great. And are you noticing as you’re hiring folks and your employment base gets younger and younger, are the expectations changing do you think as younger folks that maybe unlike me, they grew up with the internet, they grew up with messaging, they grew up with mobile phones … Just to profess, I always remember there was actually down the street from where you are, Chris, a large global engineering company that I was in their office probably 10 years ago. And the first thing we heard from them was, we need mobile apps, we want some mobile apps. And we asked, okay, well what do you need them for? And the answer was surprising. It was, well, it’s not so much what we need them for from a functionality perspective, but it comes from a morale issue. The people that they were trying to hire and retain just expected that. The expectations at that time were changing and I feel like they’ve probably fully changed now. Have you seen that shift as well as you’re interviewing folks and bringing new people on board that they expect something like this and not just have to do attachments and emails and things like that?

Chris Perrin:

Absolutely. We’re two hours from Texas A & M. They have a great construction management program. And the folks we see coming out of Texas A & M with a construction management degree, they were educated in college on these sophisticated applications and technologies as opposed to when I was in college, my first email address was my college email and it was a relatively new thing and we learned how to do everything in Excel, which has been the way a lot of these things have been managed over the last 20 to 30 years I guess. Now they’re being educated on the newer technology. And so we as employers are actually behind the eight ball relative to what the workforce coming in is capable of. And not only that, but what they’re comfortable with. They’re not as comfortable building out VLOOKUPs and macros inside of Excel because that’s just not the wave of the future.

Brad Barth:

Yeah. They didn’t have to figure out that stuff on their own with these purpose build solutions that they’re able to get started with. Yeah. That’s great. All right. Let’s tee up our second poll. Get a little bit more specific here on this next poll. And I think this goes right along with what we were talking about in terms of what systems people are using today. So we’ll let that second poll get teed up here and then when that hits your screen, just answer that in terms of … And it really just goes to that same question. How do you approach things today? Is it SharePoint, is it purpose-built systems and things like that? So answer that one if you don’t mind and then we’ll look at the results on that.

Okay, back to you Curtis. Question for you in terms of one of the things that I hear that we hear at InEight from time to time, and it usually raises my eyebrows a little bit, but there seems to be a little bit of a philosophy around maybe the role of the document controller is at the very least changing. But in some cases I think people look at it, maybe we don’t need document controllers anymore. A good system can automate things. It’s about configuration and getting process set up and then you let it go and self govern with metrics and benchmarks and things like that. Not trying to put you on the spot on either one of those ends of the document controller philosophies, but do you see the role changing from your perspective?

Curtis Smith:

Well first I don’t want to upset Michelle, so don’t take anything from what I’m about to say, but-

Brad Barth:

We definitely want to get Michelle’s opinion on this one too.

Curtis Smith:

That’s a unique question. I think the role is important. It plays key point for Sundt. I’ll give an example. The building group that I’m part of, we don’t typically have large staffs on our jobs. We’ll have a project manager, a superintendent, an engineer, and that’s what we can get paid for by the client. So it’s really on the engineer to manage the doc process for us. So a lot of times in the doc side in building we don’t see that, but on our more complex work, industrial, transportation and infrastructure, those jobs can be highly complex. Several hundreds of millions of billion dollar job where the documents are getting changed nonstop. There may be five or six GMP amendments with documents that come in. And so to have an engineer that’s also doing other work manage that process is not feasible on those types of projects.

So we’re diverse in that. We have document controllers at Sundt. We don’t have a centralized doc control person for the business per se. But I do see that the role is morphing a little bit because with the system like InEight document out there, it does help eliminate a lot of that mundane tracking and updating. That would take a lot of time to Chris’s point, an Excel spreadsheet. Because now you can just use the system to do that work. So it’s a slightly loaded question because I see the need, but it’s very specific. I could see as Sundt grows, if we could become a much larger business that there’s a need to have a centralized doc control person that sets the standard for the business. We do that through the project controls within the business. Yeah. That’s where I see Sundt at and that’s what I’m seeing out there. I talk to a lot of people. But again, it depends on the type of business you’re doing, what type of work where you might need someone in that role for sure.

Brad Barth:

That’s good perspective. And yeah, Michelle, with your background specifically in that role, you’ve probably noticed some change over the years in that I would assume. But what’s your take on that?

Michelle Orizzonte:

Well, I actually agree with Curtis. When I was in the field, I was a project coordinator, so we didn’t have doc controllers on the buildings projects that I was involved in. And I think it’s still like that. Larger projects, more complex projects, you definitely need somebody there masterminding that. And on a smaller project, your coordinators and your admin staff can handle the tool. And everybody does their work in the tool, it does its own thing. You’ve got your initial upload of drawings and you might have somebody come in and help with that for a week or so. That’s part of what our leads do in each group is they get the jobs set up and get them going. And if they’re a smaller job like that, less complex, they don’t need somebody there all the time. But for sure the large ones, the complex ones, I think it’s still a valuable role to have on them.

Brad Barth:

And just with the use of the technology now you you’ve seen maybe it’s not that we don’t need document controllers, but maybe used to be maybe a one-to-one per project or whatever the ratio was, but now an individual doc controller can cover more ground or more projects than in the past. Has that been your experience?

Michelle Orizzonte:

Yeah. I think that we’ve always had doc controllers cover more projects if there was … Again, our industrial sector for example. But we can definitely juggle that. And again, if it’s in the same tool, there’s no problem. They have three or four projects that they help out with and they go from one to the next very easily because they’re all doing things in a very similar way.

Brad Barth:

Good. Good. Well it looks like we got-

Curtis Smith:

Real quick on that. Just to add to what Michelle said, I think one of the things that InEight allows you to do is have these templates built out, which we’ve created on our end. So each of the different … I didn’t mean to take away from you, but that really helps offset that challenge where you physically need a person doing doc control because you can have a template that has all the standards that you need to have for the job site to implement on their job. And when you create the new project, you use that template has all the stuff built into it. So that helps out a lot with what Michelle was talking about.

Brad Barth:

That makes a ton of sense. So you take your best people, institutionalize how they would approach it and then make that available to other people. A great way to scale. Good. Yeah. Let’s jump into the results of the poll here should be coming up on your screen. What technology are folks using today in the audience for controlling documents and workflows? So 58% SharePoint or general purpose file management system, 35% construction specific document control system. That’s good to see. 6% don’t have our own system and use whatever the project owner uses. That’s one of the questions Curtis would ask you to hold your thoughts. One of the questions I wanted to see what response we got here and then we’ll explore that as part of the panel here too in just a second. But pretty small response on that, which is about what I expected, but definitely want to probe that one a little bit too and see what does that mean. If we’re not using what the owner’s using, we’re using something else. I’ll ask you all here in a minute how you deal with that from a turnover perspective and that stuff.

Let’s keep going here with our next question. So let’s come back over to … Let me get to my next question here. Back to you Michelle. What I really want to follow up on with you is that same question. And I’ll pose it to each of you. But Michelle, from your perspective, that question around what you use versus maybe what the owner uses from a document control perspective, how do you deal with that? Are you always using InEight and then if the owner is requiring that you use their system for certain things, do you double up that effort? How do you approach that? What’s your perspective on that?

Michelle Orizzonte:

Well at Graham, we have a doc management standard that states that solely storing our project information outside of our own system is not allowed. So there’s risk and liabilities there. If our data isn’t in our system, we don’t want to think about when things go south, but sometimes things go south and you don’t want that data lost. So even if the owner has their own system, we’ll put the essential data inside our own document management system. So we’re trying to be almost a hybrid between those two things. We don’t want to have our project staff do everything twice. It’s not very efficient, but we don’t want to put ourselves at risk by having all of this important information outside of our system. So if you have something like an RFI where the owner may have their own workflow management tool, we’ll take that question in. Maybe we’ve posed it, maybe it’s come from a subcontractor, that question is in our system probably via InEight mail so it’s there. We’ll put it in the owner’s system, it’ll go through the workflow and when it’s complete we have that process, we’ll put that completed RFI into our system, into the doc register or whatever and then transmit it out. So I feel like we can get the best of both worlds without having to do absolutely everything twice.

Brad Barth:

So as part of your process, whether it’s an RFI or whatever, you’re doing that catch up along the way so you’re not waiting until the end for example to … Well now let’s go back and load all that stuff in. People I think that try to do that, that never happens because then you get moving on to the next project and things get behind or lost. So it sounds like you’re doing that as you go. Might be a little bit of extra effort to stay in touch with the owner system, but it doesn’t sound like that’s too painful of a process for you.

Michelle Orizzonte:

No. It would be painful if you waited until the end, but if you’re doing it as you do, you’re working on something, your head’s in it and a couple more clicks and you put it in somewhere else. It’s not so bad.

Brad Barth:

Yeah. And Curtis, you started to go down on that question as well early and I asked you to hold your thoughts, now’s your chance. What are your thoughts on that? You guys approach the same way as Michelle was saying or different-

Curtis Smith:

Yeah. We’re similar in a sense. We don’t necessarily use InEight document for the process she just explained. It would be more of an internal server. We have our internal servers with a job drive and so that communication process, those answered RFIs, submittals, the documents that come in. The owner may make us use their system and that’s how we manage the process with the owner. Everything is in essence duplicated on our servers. To Michelle’s point, we don’t want to be at risk if that thing doesn’t work or it fails or it gets corrupted. We want to have everything that we can on our own side so we have access to that just in case that happens. So it’s very similar, we just don’t use InEight document yet. I could see in the future us doing that. That’s a great point, Michelle. I didn’t even think that. But I do think that’s a really good way to get all of that that communication on the job that’s relatable to document management, that it’s in document. I think that’s a really good use case that I didn’t even think of. So appreciate you bringing that up. That was really good. But yeah, very similar to what Michelle said, we just don’t use InEight document for that.

Brad Barth:

All right. We’re going to check up on you in a couple of months Curtis to make sure you’ve implemented that.

Curtis Smith:

I may be reaching out to you Michelle to ask about that.

Michelle Orizzonte:

Anytime Curtis. Anytime Curtis. Having that information in our system is also really important for our data sets. So when you look a little bit forward and you look at dashboards and being able to have some visibility into your projects, if it’s all sitting outside of our own tools, we’re never going to get there. I’ve been talking about that a lot more lately with anyone who will listen is we can talk about magic when it comes to software, but you can’t do any magical AI or have nice dashboards if your data isn’t clean and in the same spot. So a lot of back of our mind has to be like, how is this going to report upwards? How are we going to have visibility into our data?

Brad Barth:

Makes a ton of sense. And that’s a perfect segue actually over to the last question I had for you Chris. I think people tend to think of document control systems as really first and foremost, how do we keep everybody on the same page? How do we make sure everybody’s working off the latest information? But both Michelle and Curtis both talked to the risks. There’s a certain accountability and maybe even claims avoidance that can come through a proper use of a system like this. Is that something you guys recognize as well Chris, when you decided to go down this path with InEight document? Was it primarily, like I said at the beginning of this statement, let’s get everybody on the same page and not have to send stuff through emails and attachments and manage workflows or was it also, let’s see how we can drive that accountability and make sure that we’re protected in case we get into disputes or those things?

Chris Perrin:

Yeah. Absolutely. Every contract for every project has terms outlined around submittals and review cycles. And most of that activity is happening at least the heaviest portion of it at the very beginning of a project. And so if those things start to get delayed, start to get off track, your schedule can quickly get out of control. And so being able to have visibility early on to where some of those bottlenecks are in routing your transmittals gives you the ability to get out in front of it and A, either mitigate it or B, begin to document those delays so that you cover your organization from a cost and schedule standpoint to make sure that we’re getting things turned around in a timely manner. And if we aren’t that we’re able to demonstrate that to the client or the owner and make sure that we’re getting equitably compensated for that.

To me as well, it’s a risk mitigation because of the fact that in our legacy process where we weren’t as standardized and still aren’t as standardized because we’ve gone through a phased implementation with InEight document. But when you do start to get into those unfortunate situations where something becomes a dispute or becomes a claim, then there’s a forensic document gathering project that goes on. And usually you’re trying not to bother the project team with pulling all of those documents because they’re still trying to execute the project. So you’re having lawyers and you’re having support people go into those project files and try to find documents that are in different places from project to project and or are named something completely different that’s not very intuitive and or are not well documented as far as the latest and greatest version of whatever that document is. So it makes that exercise a lot more cumbersome when you don’t have a tool like InEight that you’re utilizing for document control.

The same risk applies to when we have turnover on a project and we have to send somebody new completely blind to the project onto a project midstream. Now they’re trying to get up to speed. And because there’s not a consistent way to how these things are being managed from project to project, it just makes that onboarding effort a lot more tedious and a lot more time-consuming than it otherwise would be if project A is doing things the same way project B is. So I think there’s a lot of advantages just in having that consistency, that level of visibility, that accountability to how things are being documented, how things are being stored, and that level of visibility of who’s responsible for what and where is it in the process/

Brad Barth:

Makes a ton of sense. That’s good. I’ve been monitoring the questions as we go here. Quite a few questions coming in here, so let’s turn our attention to maybe answering some of those and I’ll answer some of these, but some of these I want to throw to you guys. So one of the questions here from Malik for external communication, do the external parties need licenses or training? I’ll answer the licenses part and then maybe Chris Curtis, Michelle, you guys might talk to your experience in getting external folks involved. Do they need training or not? But from a licensing perspective the answer is no. So you can have as many people involved in InEight document as you invite. People outside your organization, all you need is an email address to get them into the system and participating in workflows or uploading documents based on the role that you give them. So they do not need a license. But let me ask the panel. I think each of you mentioned external collaboration through the tool. Have you experienced either resistance or people that were, they can’t figure it out or what’s been your experience with that with those external parties?

Michelle Orizzonte:

I can talk about it. I think we have all of the above. If we’re writing the contract to a subrate, we write in the contract, they have to use our tools and they do. We can enforce that, it’s part of their contracts. Not really a lot of training. From their perspective what they need to do clicking on a link or whatever, it’s pretty straightforward. We probably sit them down for about 15, 20 minutes and just go through with it. The main thing is they need to remember their log in information.

Owners sometimes we’ve talked about they have their own system, they don’t want to go into our system. So then we come up with a different solution and a little bit of a hybrid. And then we have owners that absolutely love it and look forward to the next project using the tool. So we do have that gamut and I think that is a bit of a challenge sometimes with rolling out a solution like this. There are those variabilities and as soon as your project teams understand that there’s a way to address every scenario, it starts to go a lot smoother.

Brad Barth:

Yeah. And I think from InEight’s perspective, we certainly see that exposure. We’ll hear from people that say we use InEight document on a Graham project or a Sundt project or a Orion project, whatever it is, and we want to get it for ourselves now. And then sometimes it’s the other way around, like you were talking about Michelle, maybe it’s the owner that got exposed to it from one of you guys or one of our customers and then they start using it on all projects. And it varies in different parts of the world, but certainly we’re seeing a lot of more and more projects where the project starts off from the owner initiative in InEight document and then as the contractors come along, they’re continuing to use it. So obviously we love to see that and it just simplifies that collaboration.

But that goes to one of the questions that came in here around the types of organizations that do use InEight document. The question was, the three of you all work for let’s say medium to large construction organizations, can this be used by engineering companies? And the answer is yes. We do have quite a few engineering organizations using the product as well as construction management firms. So some of the larger ones in the world are using InEight document, but of all sizes as well. So both on the engineering side and the construction side, small, medium and large. So we do build for that. We try to make it as easy as possible to get going into tools. There’s a lot of training available online and otherwise.

So let’s throw another question out here. Let’s see. We got a bunch of them. So question from Frederick. Is active document management done in real time? And I think this goes to that question you all touched on a little bit in terms of like you were talking about Michelle in terms of keeping things current and multiple systems as things are going along. But maybe I’ll throw that one to you, Michelle. So that role again, whether it’s document control or others involved in the project, is that a real time thing? Are most of your folks, whether they’re on mobile apps or laptops, are they doing things in real time inside of InEight or will they gather things up and at the end of the week go back and put stuff in?

Michelle Orizzonte:

They should be doing it in real time. Definitely it’s hard to wean people off their spreadsheets and that’s a process, but the more successful projects, they’re doing it in real time.

Brad Barth:

How about you Curtis? I see you nodding your head, same thing?

Curtis Smith:

Yeah. I agree with that. And also answer your question. Yeah, you can have … One of the things that’s real time that I think of too is multiple people within the system at once. So you might have a crew of engineers that are managing different components of the doc management process and they can all be in there working, which is really beneficial. It’s not a spreadsheet that’s shared online. It’s I need to write an RFI while there’s another person doing a submittal and there’s another person uploading documents. All of that can be done real time at the same time. So that’s a big benefit to add to what Michelle said.

Brad Barth:

Chris, your thoughts on that one?

Chris Perrin:

Yeah. I agree completely. That’s really the whole idea of behind a tool like this is that you have that real time visibility to what’s been marked up, what’s being marked up and where it’s at as far as its status along the way. And again, I mentioned this before, but ensuring that everybody’s operating off of the latest and greatest document because we’ve had cases in the past where somebody pulls a document, whether it’s a design document or some other submittal that’s three versions ago and we’re not all singing from the same handbook and that can create a lot of chaos and a lot of money lost on a project.

Brad Barth:

That’s perfect. So I’m going to take this one last question, I’ll pose this to each of you to end with, and I like this question because I think it’s a great one to end on, which is what have been the biggest benefits that you’ve seen that we could expect if we go down the same path? So I think the question here is, as you guys think back to why you started to implement something like this, what problems were you trying to solve and maybe touch on what are the key problems that you have solved and maybe is there anything unexpected? Perhaps I’ll just add that into the question. Anything that maybe you weren’t expecting but was a benefit coming out of implementing the solution? So Curtis, how about we start with you? What do you see as sort the biggest benefit that you could tell our audience about to encourage them to go down the same path?

Curtis Smith:

Well, the first thing I want to say is one of the benefits of your product, InEight’s documents product is the flexibility of the software. I want to start there. While that poses complexities for us that work in controls because there is that ability to modify things, it does bring an immense value to us as a company because now we’re not beholden to … I’m not going to say any of your competitors names. Their specific process that they have deemed as the only way to do a thing in the system. Your product allows us to say, well we don’t really want to do it that way. We want to modify the workflow or the process. That’s been super beneficial to us.

Some of the other stuff that’s been really good for us, as silly as this is the forms module. For those of you that are listening forms is a highly complex platform where you can have an incredible amount of workflow capacity to send it to multiple people, different actions. It’s really, really beneficial. And as simple as this is the RFI process we did before was print a PDF, send a PDF through email, get a response, update the response in the system. And that simple process now, to Chris’s point earlier, it’s all through Outlook. So when I send out that workflow goes other email, they click a link, it’s all hyperlinked, it removes the massive size of documents that we typically would transmit through an email. So that’s been a big benefit to us.

The other thing as we get into the system more and more each day we continue to put our roots out into different areas. And so mobile is becoming more and more important to us. I’m sure Chris and Michelle would also say to that, especially to our field teams. And being able to be flexible with the submittal management process while we’ve been working with you guys directly to try to improve that as far as how Sundt that process. Your guys backend team of developers have been really good at responding to our needs and helping us develop a really good process that we can use currently while we work through that with you all.

Overall it’s been great, but I think we’re scratching the surface. And what I’ve heard Chris and Michelle say today that I need to get with them offline and find out really what they’re doing because I think we could implement some of those best practices they have here at Sundt. So it’s been really good just hearing all that information today.

Brad Barth:

That’s great. Thanks for sharing that with the audience here Curtis. How about you Chris? Parting advice?

Chris Perrin:

So we are in the process of implementing Project Suite and we’re hoping to go live September 1st and we’ve been live on document for the last year and a half I want to say. We started implementing document two years ago because it doesn’t have any interdependency to Project Suite or any other products or applications, even your ERP or anything like that. So what I liked about it is that it’s a standalone system that integrates with other applications that you already have. And one of the benefits that I hope to get … We’re not getting yet, but I would hope to get. Because Orion is a publicly traded company, we go through a pretty stringent audit process and certain projects will be selected for audit and it’ll be a mixed bag. And right now my team of project controls folks are heavily involved in a very laborious process to be able to organize all of the documents requests that come in as a part of our quarterly and year-end audit process with the ability that InEight document has to tag documents, not just name files, but to tag documents.

And because of the business model InEight has of unlimited licenses for documents similar to the way we were able to create an internal process for RFIs and grant those user licenses and logins to folks who otherwise wouldn’t be using the tool. Doing the same thing with our auditors and letting our auditors go get their own documents and making that process a lot more efficient for them, but also a lot less laborious for my team and my folks.

Brad Barth:

Great perspective on that. I know we’re right at the top of the hour, so we might be losing some folks. I will just say before we get to it, I want Michelle to ask this question too and then we’ll wrap it up. But if you don’t mind, there is a survey, so down at the bottom I think below our video, there’s a survey in there. Would really encourage folks to do that survey. Only take a couple of minutes would really help us as we do these things going forward. So appreciate you guys filling out that survey. So Michelle, same question for you. What’s been your key benefits that you’ve seen going on this road and what would you tell the audience in terms of why they should do the same?

Michelle Orizzonte:

Well, I would echo what Curtis said in terms of the flexibility. So your process, your internal process becomes the star. You don’t have to mold yourself to another piece of software. The software will mold itself to your process. And I think that’s just so important that you understand your process a tool, a tool can change. A tool is there, it’s just a tool. But as a company to have a strong set of standards and processes and to follow those, that’s top for me. And this tool InEight is very flexible and allows that process to be the star. I can say a lot more-

Brad Barth:

No. I appreciate you being succinct on that. And then that’s the same thing we tell people as on day one. You probably remember this, but during implementation we said, “Look, we’re not going to teach you keyboards and clicks. First thing is let’s understand the business process that you want to implement and then we’ll configure the tool to do that.” So I think that’s another great bit of advice for everybody is just think about your business process. How do you want that to work, sketch it out, use a system to map whatever you’re comfortable with, but that’s how you’re going to run the business and then the technology can come in line with that and reflect that. So great advice.

Yeah. So I know we’re a couple of minutes over, so let’s bring this to a close. So Michelle, Chris, Curtis, I want to thank you for taking your time to do this. I know you all are super busy, especially this time of year. So thanks for taking your time. I sounds like maybe there’s some good things that you all heard from each other to go back with and I’m sure the audience got a ton of things that they can take back coming out of this. So best of luck to you guys going forward.

One last question I just want to clarify. So I’ve got a question here. What is Project Suite? So or Chris, you mentioned implementing Project Suite. So that’s the other modules of InEight. So there’s the document control is one of the modules. Project Suite is how we collectively refer to most of the other stuff. So looks like a couple of people wondering what is Project Suite.

Maybe on that note, I will just encourage anybody that wants to learn more about InEight, just go to ineight.com. You could also go to learineight.com. A couple of the panelists mentioned the learning material that we have, videos, tutorials, that stuff. We make that available to anybody. So if you go to learineight.com, you can see that stuff and look at business process and how the solution matches those 16 different business processes that are part of the platform. So on that note, again thank you to our three panelists. Thanks everybody for attending today and everybody have a great day. We’ll catch up with you soon.

Michelle Orizzonte:

All right. Take care everyone.