Why Your Projects Need Digital Material Tracking

Transcript

 

Mark Edwards:

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the webinar on Digital Material Tracking and Readiness, Critical Elements of the Digital Thread. Thank you for joining us today. I’m excited to tell you a little bit about what InEight and Jovix are doing with regard to material tracking. My name is Mark Edwards. I’m the Chief Delivery Officer for InEight. And I’m joined by Jack Motica and Jon Chesser. I’m going to let them introduce themselves. Let’s go ahead and get started. Jon, we’ll start with you.

Jon Chesser:

Sure. This is Jon Chesser, Chief Revenue Officer with Jovix. I’ve been working with Mark and Jack for several years between InEight and Kiewit, and I’m happy to be here.

Jack Motica:

My name is Jack Motica. I work for Kiewit. I started 25 years ago as a field engineer. I’ve worked my way up to the Director of Project Controls for the Oil and Gas and Chemical Division. Like Jon, I’m glad to be here.

Mark Edwards:

Thanks, guys. Well, like Jon said, I’ve worked with Jack and Jon for several years and had the opportunity to work with several projects implementing different scenarios around material tracking and visibility. And the great thing about my role at InEight as Chief Delivery Officer is I have the opportunity to implement several solutions, making our field work more efficient and, all the way from the glimmer in the eye of enhancements that we want to do, all the way to delivering those to our customers.

Mark Edwards:

So what we’re going to talk about today is we’re going to take you through a few different steps in the evolution and maturation of field visibility to material. And we’re going to start off and actually just use some stories of projects that we’ve been involved with throughout our working together. And talk to you about that evolution and what we can glean from digital material tracking throughout the lifecycle.

Mark Edwards:

Before I get started though, please, if you have questions use the Chat and then since this is a recorded webinar we will make sure that any questions that come up in the Chat we get those answered and get back to you. Thanks again for joining us and we’ll get started.

Mark Edwards:

I think where I’d like to start, Jack, is with you talking about your experience on projects early on that didn’t have the benefit of digital material tracking, but obviously, material is a critical element for all construction jobs. So, tell us a story kind of back in the day as you were starting about how projects determined where the material is and how they know when they’re ready to begin work.

Jack Motica:

Okay, I’ll go to one of the first jobs I worked at back when you had to walk up hill through six feet of snow both ways to the job. And the material really started with the field engineers, and they were responsible for getting the drawings and doing the take out, figuring out what pipe, what cable, what conduit, what anchor bolts, all those things. What did we need to buy to actually build the job?

Jack Motica:

And so after they’d done that, at that point that had the build materials and they would take that and either call the vendor themselves or hand it off to purchasing. But it was that field engineer generated build bulk materials that they would hand off and the purchasing agent would go ahead and they would write a paper purchase order and the field engineer may get a copy, they may not get a copy. But you just trusted that all that stuff got bought.

Jack Motica:

The second class of material that we would get would be the fabricated material. And when I talk about fabricated material that’s more of the piece marked steel where each and every piece of steel has a unique tag on it. The same thing for pipe. We’d have spooled pipe where each piece of pipe would have a different, would be unique, it’d have a tag on it. That’d be something after we had written the purchase order we’d get that list back from the vendor. And it was this ever evolving list where the tag numbers, some would get added, some would get deleted. But once again that fell on the field engineer to know what was the current list and the changes they’d have to go through and figure out by hand.

Jack Motica:

The last one I’d like to talk about would be the engineer equipment build material. And so that would be something where we would go and we’d buy something like a ball mill or a combustion turbine and you would buy that, that large piece of equipment from a single vendor and then that vendor might have 100 different sub vendors, that they would get the pipe from this guy and they might get the liner plate from that guy, they would get the oil skin from somebody else. But that vendor would leave it up to you to figure out what is all the material that I expect to receive from all their different sub vendors. A lot of times that could be difficult because you didn’t really have a relationship with those sub vendors and so you were at the mercy of them telling you, here’s what I’m going to send you.

Jack Motica:

But what that all really resulted in was that field engineer, and they had to keep track of here’s the entire build materials for the project that I need to build my little section of it. Once it had actually gotten ordered, we didn’t really have a formal expediting process and so it would fall on the field engineer to call the vendor every once and a while and say, “What’s the status of material? When do you think it’s going to be here? It’s changed since the last date.”

Jack Motica:

The field engineer is always the one to try to figure out at what point do they think that material was going to show up, and something that I should have probably mentioned upfront was on a project it was really every field engineer for himself. So they would take the project and divide it into multiple areas, or they would divide up the scope of work. And it was on that field engineer that that was their little piece of the project. and they were the ones who really had to go and buy that piece out.

Jack Motica:

And because of that, because people would leave the project, you’ve got new people show up, boundaries would change, but there was always a possibility that two field engineers would buy the same thing, that the boundaries wouldn’t be clear. They’d accidentally double buy the conduit, or there as a chance that something wouldn’t get bought and that there was a certain portion of scope on the project that hadn’t been assigned to anybody, and in that case it wouldn’t be purchased.

Jack Motica:

So that was something that we really didn’t do very well with coordination amongst all the field engineers to make sure that we had a comprehensive, complete build material for the project to ensure that the entire thing that had been purchased was on site.

Jack Motica:

So I talked about the expediting where the field engineers call the vendor to find out when the stuff gets there. When the truck would actually roll through the gate, at that point the warehouse would get on the radio and notify the field engineer and say, “Hey, your stuff’s here.” And we would have to go down and you’re checking in the material. And so once again you’re hoping that they got that comprehensive build material. But when the truck’s there, going through and figuring out what’s on the truck, is it the correct stuff, has it been damaged during shipment? Did I get enough of them? Did I not get enough of them based on what I ordered? Usually, you’re trying to verify that yes, I got the right stuff. It’s in good condition and I got the correct quantity.

Jack Motica:

So at that point it would be handed off to the warehouse. What the warehouse would do is they would take it and if it was something that had to be stored inside or something smaller, then they would put it inside the warehouse on a shelf. If it was something larger, like the pipe or the steel that I mentioned earlier, that would be something that would go in the laydown yard. And the laydown yard might be three or four acres worth of land and what they would do is take it and then they would grid it out. And when I say grid, they would assign, if you envision this, across the top they would do letters. So it would be A, B, C, D and those letters might be every 20 feet. And then down the side they would put a number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Jack Motica:

And the idea behind that was now they’ve got a grid and then they could say that this certain 20 X 20 square within the laydown yard was A7. And so they would take the material that had been received, put it in the laydown yard and then somebody would write down, steel piece marked 42 is in A7. And they would take that back to the warehouse. That way if somebody came looking for it they would know to go out to A7 and that’s where the material should be.

Jack Motica:

One thing we’d have a lot would be that they would have to shuffle stuff around to accommodate new material that showed up or consolidate the steel and the pipe into a given area. And so it may have started in A7 but then you were at the mercy of the warehouse to have noted that I picked it up from A7 and I moved it over to B6. So, that was also a challenge, not only is it on the site but where is it in the laydown based on how it may have shifted around?

Jack Motica:

So it might be there for two or three months and then the field engineer, another thing they did was to put together these work packages. And so a work package would be roughly two or three weeks-worth of work for a crew and in that work package they would list out the material that was required, and then that material list would be given to the warehouse. When the time was right, the warehouse would go and retrieve the material from the laydown or from the warehouse or somewhere like that and they would deliver it to the work place to be installed.

Jack Motica:

And so material management was really a pretty time consuming, manual effort. It might be in a notebook, it might be in a spreadsheet, but it fell on each field engineer. They were responsible for their own scope of work on the project. And that was in addition to their other duties where they might have to write a request for information because you had a bad design and there’d be a question we’d have to submit to the engineer. Or they’d be out there verifying time charging or quantity tracking. But a field engineer’s day was really pretty full and the material management portion of it consumed a significant amount of time. Because really the field engineer, at the end of the day, they were just trying to make sure that we had the material in front of the crew so they weren’t held up in any way.

Mark Edwards:

Thanks, Jack. Each of these field engineers are their responsible for a given scope of work. How much time do you think they would spend specifically on material tracking in a given day, on a percentage basis?

Jack Motica:

It would really come and go, but I would say probably 30% of their time was spent dealing with material, whether it was getting it ordered, expediting it, checking it in, but I’d say at least 30% of the day.

Mark Edwards:

Yeah, it’s amazing how, a good sized project has several field engineers that are all doing the same thing. I think there’s probably some overlap also. There has to be times when you buy too much because you’ve got field engineers that are focused on their area and that cross area coordination is difficult at best when it’s so manual.

Jack Motica:

Yeah. It really is. And, hoping everybody’s talking to each other and that you’ve got the boundaries clearly defined and that you don’t get two people buying the same thing.

Mark Edwards:

Absolutely. Thanks, Jack. I’ll tell you what. Now, let’s take the next step from a Jovix perspective, let Jon talk about some of the challenges that Jack mentioned that field engineers go through around just figuring out whether a work package is ready or not. Jovix does a really good job of tracking that stuff. So we’ll turn it over to Jon. And Jon, why don’t you tell us about some of your project experiences when you move from that highly manual scenario that Jack talked us through to just implementing Jovix, and the value that you’ve seen projects glean from the Jovix implementation?

Jon Chesser:

Yeah, sure. I guess I’ll just start by saying what Jack described is what we have found over, I guess, the last 12, 13 years. I know when we first started we were a RFID systems integrator, and one of the local utilities were headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. One of the local utilities there called us one day and said, “Hey, we’ve got issues tracking structural steel.” So we went out to a laydown yard and looked at that, and sure enough, there’s tons of structural steel pieces that all look just alike and they’ve got a paint mark or something written on it that’s 20 characters long.

Jon Chesser:

And when we first started looking at and built Jovix, we thought it was all about just people were losing material all the time. But as we really got in and started to peel that onion back and really started to look at what the core problem was, it was exactly as Jack was describing. Pretty much all the systems that were procurement related they relied on paper to mark up a receipt and then to give it to someone else later that would ultimately key that into a system. And if it wasn’t a commercial system, it was a homegrown system that the company had developed, or maybe it was Microsoft itself. But this was, someone was jamming that in from a data entry perspective, and there’s a gap in time between when something is actually shipped and when it arrives. And then even further back up you don’t even know sometimes if they’ve ordered it.

Jon Chesser:

So the real problem wasn’t that, hey, the material’s not here, or the materials moving all the time. The real issue was these silos of information. Everyone would get their reports out of those systems or create their own Excel spreadsheet. Everybody’s got their own version of the truth and many times that can lead to chaos. And so we said, hey, what we’ve got to do is attack this real common work process, whether it’s a large project, a small project, a turnaround. We want to make that a digital workflow.

Jon Chesser:

And so once you make that a digital workflow now that information is available real time and it’s in the cloud. And so multiple people across that project, whether it’s suppliers, contractors, construction crews, they’re all looking from the same information. And so when you look at InEight and AWP, InEight is big into helping people with their AWP strategy, material readiness and feeding that digital information into these AWP systems is key. Because AWP is all about starting early, involving construction early in the planning so that you’re doing your engineering and you’re doing your procurement according to that path of construction.

Jon Chesser:

And so what we see is with the concept of a digital supply chain is that you really want to start at the source of that information. So that’s the supplier and equipment manufacturer or fabricator, they’re all going to be ultimately manufacturing or creating this equipment and these components according to the engineering construction plan. So you want to be able to make that a digital work process all the way from the beginning. Put the tags on, whether it’s a bar code or a tag. You also want to have a digital packing list and then tie that back into the work package so that that field engineer, that work based planner, those guys in construction, they actually can see am I going to have all the material that I’m going to have for that job? They can plan for their work accordingly. We always say bad news early is good news. So, if you know that you’re going to have a problem you can at least correct that before it’s in the field.

Jon Chesser:

I guess a couple of examples of projects… I’ll start, one project that was a big project, a 15 billion dollar project and then I’ll finish up and talk about a smaller project that was probably about 150 million.

Jon Chesser:

On the 15 billion dollar project, this was a large oil and gas project in Canada, and all the fabrication and equipment, everything was coming from Asia. And there were multiple fabricators, and specifically with the pipe and the steel they wanted to have that shipped from Asia according to the module work package and according to the installation work package. So that they can basically pull that out of the container, disperse it to the right work base and know that they have everything. Because in a situation like that, the lead times will kill you. If you think you’ve got all the material and you actually don’t have all the material and its coming from Asia, just the shipping time to get it there can create a major disruption in your material flow and construction.

Jon Chesser:

So, we were able to basically use Jovix and the mobile apps to put an RFID tag and barcodes on each individual steel and pipe item, put that loaded on a skid, tag the skid, load the skids into shipping containers and tag those containers. All of the individual line items were then tied back to the module or the installation work package, so that the guys that were in Canada, multiple contractors, multiple mod yards, they’re able to pull up in the application and be able to see, okay, am I going to get all of this material ahead of time and in the right sequence to be able to do that?

Jon Chesser:

So that was great and that helped them from that. But one of the things that we found on this project and with many projects is there’s often a disconnect between engineering, procurement and construction. And the level of detail that you need for construction may not be there in the procurement phase. In other words, you’re going to give a contract or a purchase order to a supplier, that granular line item detail that you need to plan your work for construction might not be there. So when you’re physically tagging something, you’re physically putting a barcode or you’re physically putting a tag on it, it forces you to ensure that you’re putting it on the right ID and that you’re putting in the right sequence.

Jon Chesser:

And so on that particular project one benefit that the owner was able to get out of that the owner and the EPC,  was that they found thousands of steel piece marks that were actually wrong, identified incorrectly with a paint mark. And so by going through that process it forced them to ensure identification was correct and fix that before it was packaged and before it was shipped. And that allowed them to avoid construction delays and issues there.

Jon Chesser:

But that’s on a large project. On a small project, another example, this is a project, a chemical project in Louisiana, and the owner is well known for the AWP strategy and so they mandate AWP on all of their jobs. In this particular project they didn’t use RFID tags at all. They basically used Jovix as that common online cloud database, if you will, between the general contractor, the engineering procurement contractor and then the construction management contractor and the owner.

Jon Chesser:

And so, basically, upon receipt they applied barcode labels to everything and then all that line item detail was then tied back into the construction modeling software, so that all the field engineers and the workplace planners were able to see a color coded model of what was going to be coming to the job site and what was going to be ordered. And we were able to go a little bit further because we knew, since we were also integrated with the engineering procurement firms, their procurement system, we were able to actually tell what had been ordered and what had not been ordered. And so based on some algorithms that we’d written we were able to predict and then add to the construction model whether or not they were going to be able to complete the work.

Jon Chesser:

And so that was, even on a small job where you’re doing workplace planning and AWP, you can still benefit from at least having a common database and attacking some of those problems that Jack talked about with field engineers having their own spreadsheets in there. I guess, two good examples there.

Mark Edwards:

Absolutely. I’m glad you pointed out this type of material tracking is not just for large jobs. I know a lot of times the thought is, “Well, I’ve got field engineers who know how to do this. It’s a small enough job. I don’t have to worry about it.” But the fact is you can use Jovix in ways that you describe as that single source that everybody’s looking at and it really does drive a ton of efficiency that the field engineers alone, we just can’t do.

Mark Edwards:

Do you want to touch real quick before we take the next step on the dashboard, on Jovix dashboard that rolls it all up and gives you a good view of where you are?

Jon Chesser:

Sure. This is what we call our Material Readiness Dashboard and really, one of the, I think, key benefits that we’ve been able to see from implementing a digital work process where you’re taking advantage of mobile apps and the technology that’s out there, is now that you are collecting the information in real time, you now can set benchmarks and key performance indicators. And you can look at trends over time.

Jon Chesser:

And so that’s one of the nice things about the dashboard is its able to say you can drill into this supplier, how are they delivering material or our receipts? What’s the quality of the data that we’re getting from that supplier? How efficient is materials being managed in the warehouse being on fulfilling requests from construction?

Jon Chesser:

One of the interesting benefits we’ve seen from this is there’s this age old, and Jack could probably attest to this, but there’s the age old argument between construction and the warehouse materials management. And if construction says, “Well, hey, I never had my stuff on time.” And the warehouse says, “Well, you don’t plan your work. You’re only requesting it and you needed it yesterday.” Well, you’ve got a dashboard like this that can actually give everyone looking at the same information that says, “Okay, you’re giving me a request 24 hours ahead of time, or 48 hours ahead of time. How are we doing against what we said we were going to do?” And it helps to hold everyone accountable, ultimately for, the end result is trying to make the entire project more effective and more productive and hopefully more predictable.

Mark Edwards:

Absolutely. Thanks, Jon. You touched on another thing I think that using a system like Jovix across several projects also starts to give you insight into supplier management. So we use the same supplier on a variety of jobs, how have they done getting us material when we said we needed it? And over time that is incredibly useful information that can be gleaned from the data that Jovix tracks.

Jon Chesser:

Yeah.

Mark Edwards:

So, now we’ve described the old school way of doing it. If you use a material tracking system like Jovix, the benefits that you get from a single source, but it really starts to drive value when you bring together InEight solution along with Jovix. And we’re really excited about the partnership we have with Jovix for that reason.

Mark Edwards:

The InEight tools are all about planning ahead, knowing where you are every day. Did you get done what you said you wanted to get done? And obviously, material availability and ensuring that everything you need for a work package. Even if you’re not an AWP project, and we’ll talk about that in just a second, bringing the InEight tools and Jovix together is extremely powerful. To that end, Jack, I’m going to turn it back to you and maybe you can talk about a project or two that you’ve been a part of that bring those two together and the value that we’ve seen from that.

Jack Motica:

Right, Mark. So when I mentioned before about what the field engineers are doing there, and Jon also alluded to with the advanced work packaging, and to me that’s not something new, but work packaging has gone on for years. It certainly goes way, way, way back. And the whole idea was find a work package… It’s actually the first guy I went to work for 25 years ago, he said, “If you put the [inaudible 00:27:20] and the material in front of the hands magic happens.” And that’s the whole goal of the exercise is how do I get the material in front of the hands?

Jack Motica:

And so when you go in there and build a work package, I mentioned earlier that the field engineers that build these lists, the things they’re going to need to build the project and that would be, it might have been on paper, it might have been on a spreadsheet. But it wasn’t in a single system, and what InEight allows you to do is take those components, as what InEight would call them, and you put all those components into a central database. That would be a list of all the piece marks of steel I need to build the job, or maybe all the cable I’m going to have to pull, or all the pipe I’m going to have to install by spool number.

Jack Motica:

Who would have that, that common list of what do we need to build the job? When the field engineers go to build those work packs they’ll go to that common pool of components and then they’ll select those things and put them in the work pack. And so, for instance, if I’m going to build a steel work pack I might look at it and say, “You know what, to build this particular, the first level of this structure I need this 147 pieces.” And you’ll go in there and it identifies those 147 pieces by that unique piece mark number. And by doing that when I get that work pack filled, because we have the integration between InEight and Jovix, it can take the Jovix inventory and say, ‘All right, you need these 147 pieces of steel to go out and build this work package. Now let me figure out which of those are on site, and do I have all of it, do I have half of it, am I missing two of them? If I am missing two of them, which two am I missing?

Jack Motica:

It allows you to, once again going back to that, nothing to hold the crew up. And so it’s that idea of constraint removal, and is there anything that would constrain them from going out, starting the work package, build the whole thing, finishing it off, closing it up quality wise and then coming back in and getting another one? And material is a huge part of that and so the integration between InEight and Jovix allows me to figure out is there any material that would constrain me going out and completing that work package?

Jack Motica:

The second thing I have in that work pack is going to be what date do I anticipate starting and finishing? And that day, can you imagine trying to assign required onsite dates, and so you’ve got a steel structure and there’s 8,000 piece marks of steel in it. If I had to go and try to figure out what day do I think I need each and every one of those, it’s a pretty onerous task. But because the field engineers go in there and they’re taking them and then they package them, those 8,000 pieces of steel might now be 80 different work packs. And the work packs are sequenced out based on how they’re going to build it.

Jack Motica:

Each work pack has a date. And so now because of that I can take that date and then send that to the fabricator and say, “All right, for sequence one, this 100 pieces I needed on July 1st, sequence two then I’m going to need by July 15th.” That allows you to give the fabricator required onsite dates because you’ve got that packaging mechanism. So I’d say those are two really big benefits to using the InEight in combination with the Jovix integration.

Mark Edwards:

Yeah, I totally agree. Do you want to touch real quick on the dashboard we have here? That’s the boiled up view of the InEight tools along with the data from Jovix to give us where we are with regard to work plans that are ready to go.

Jack Motica:

Yeah, you’ve got it. Kind of tough to read on the screen. But in the lower left corner, what it does is it lists out the work packs and then it’s got the work pack availability. And if it’s a blue triangle pointed up I’ve got it onsite, and if it’s an orange triangle pointed down that means I’m lacking something. What that does is it allows me to go through and figure out, all right, is all the material here and then if all the material isn’t here I can take it and drill into it further to figure out what piece am I missing?

Jack Motica:

And so if there’s 100 pieces in there and I’m missing 99, I probably got a problem and I’m not going to want to go out and build it. If there’s 100 pieces in there and I’ve got 99 of them and I’m just missing the one, I can figure out, all right, which piece is it I’m missing and then I can call the fabricator next to that and find out when it’s going to be onsite. So it really provides that visibility of, are there any constraints and then once we resolve those constraints by drilling down into it and figuring out what’s missing.

Mark Edwards:

Yeah. We talked about, a few times we’ve touched on AWP. Jon mentioned planning with the end in mind. And so, as we take our next step into the evolution of the value of digital material tracking and the InEight tools, probably one of our largest initiatives this year at InEight is implementing our AWP type planning into our tools. And I know there’s a lot of talk in the industry about it. We do have owners that are requiring it. But I thought maybe I would touch real quickly on what is AWP and then, because the integration and the benefit of bringing Jovix together with the InEight suite of tools and the planning that we do today, and like Jack said, we’ve been doing work planning and work packages for years. That’s not a new concept.

Mark Edwards:

What AWP brings to that party is the project setup as you see on the screen here, on the far left, you get all of those teams involved early when you’re setting up that project and determining how it needs to be built. What is the right sequence to build it from a construction perspective? So you get the design guys, you get engineers, contractors and owners, everybody together at the beginning.

Mark Edwards:

And then you start working through, as you step through these verticals to the right, you determine the path of construction and then you associate in that path of construction, the construction work areas. And then that construction work area is really, there’s several of those, but it’s the wrapper that contains engineering work packages, construction work packages and procurement work packages in that next vertical. And those then begin to be worked on according to that path of construction and the way those areas are laid out, and from a schedule perspective in that path of construction.

Mark Edwards:

And then the next step is you take that, you take each of those construction work packages and begin breaking them further and further down, like Jack mentioned on the 8,000 pieces of steel. You break them down further and further into installation work packages that now you can begin to look at each of those IWPs and figure out where you are with regard to material tracking. And then the constraints that you need to make sure are out of the way so that again, like Jack said, the magic can happen.

Mark Edwards:

If you, 30 days out if we are building a constraint engine that will look at the packages that are planned for 30 days out, and if there’s any constraints that are not taken care of, the notifications will get sent so that we start to build according to the plan that was developed early on. And that takes us all the way through construction into commissioning.

Mark Edwards:

So at a high level, from an AWP perspective, that’s what InEight is building this year, and we will have our first release of that coming up in the next couple of months. Obviously the package contains much more than material. We’ve got tools and equipment, safety is accounted for. All of the engineering drawings are ready. We’ve got people available and materials are a key piece of that. Without the integration and the digital thread that we’re starting to create with Jovix’s help, the whole thing falls apart.

Mark Edwards:

So with that said, let’s take the next step into… Jon, you mentioned as well, that your experience with an owner that is saying, “Hey, if you’re going to build work for us you have to use AWP.” Because they believe that that really does increase the likelihood of success and building on schedule. Does one of you want to talk about another project where you’ve seen AWP come together with the InEight tools and Jovix and drive the benefit?

Jon Chesser:

Yeah, sure. I think another one is a current project that we’re on right now. And so InEight’s use for the work packaging on that and then the customer’s using Jovix for their materials readiness or materials tracking tool. And in that particular case we’ve got a separate engineering procurement firm. So we see that quite a bit. It’s not always the exact same company that’s doing all EPC.

Jon Chesser:

So the engineering procurement firm is basically providing all of the engineering BOMs, all the different materials that come into that. So we have to take that, we have to consume that into Jovix and then take the work packages that have been created in InEight and marry that data together. So that, as this material is arriving on site and is being received, now we can update InEight so that they can just see, based on for the build engineers and the planners now, they can see what material is available.

Jon Chesser:

And so I think that’s been a really good situation for us and one of the things that we’ve seen there is a lot of times when you’ve got a different engineering procurement company and a different constructor there’s a lot of noise in the data. And so, one thing that going through this exercise of allowing to take the work package data from one system, take the engineering data from another system, and the procurement data that’s also coming from that system, marrying that up together, you often find issues that you can resolve prior to even arrival on site.

Jon Chesser:

If you layer in then also the best practices of having that supplier, that equipment manufacturer tag, upstream and create the digital package list, that’s where you begin to see a lot of, “Hey, this data doesn’t match. What’s going on here?” And so that allows you then to try to get in there, understand what that is and correct it with enough time to avoid any issues.

Mark Edwards:

Great point. I think the most critical thing that we’re talking about here from a work packaging perspective and making sure that all of the elements that are going to be needed for that package are available is, we touched on it several times, is the constraint management. Today, without a system like InEight is building, that still falls on somebody to make sure that, it’s likely the field engineer in their discipline, it falls on them to make sure they have everything needed so that when the work package is scheduled it can be executed and built without delay.

Mark Edwards:

That constraint management is, and on huge jobs, there are so many variables it’s almost impossible to do manually. And now with the InEight tools, with Jovix’s visibility to that, the digital tracking, you can bring those together. As well as InEight’s integration with schedule and model in what we’re building for AWP becomes incredibly powerful and where we believe we can drive even more efficiency in the construction process. So, is there anything more you guys would like to say before we wrap it up?

Jon Chesser:

No, I guess the last thing I would add is, give a little shout out to I guess the Construction Industry Institute. We’ve been working with them for quite a while. I think they’re big promoters of AWP. And over the last ten years you’ve really seen how owners and EPCs and contractors are beginning to adopt AWP. Owners are beginning to mandate it.

Jon Chesser:

Some of the more recent research teams and things that are coming out of that are around supply chain and how the supply chain impacts AWP. And too often, I think, materials management is an after-thought and so it really is important. If you could take anything away from this it’s plan early. You need to make sure… those supplies aren’t going to create digital packing lists and they’re not going to tag things just because out of the goodness of their heart. You need to plan that early. You need to go into the RFIs and the contracts and all the contract language that goes into it to ensure that you’ve done that. And to do that you need to start planning early. So yeah, I guess that’s the last comment I would make on that.

Jack Motica:

You bring up a good point. We do hear that quite often as we’re working with projects, as they’re doing their planning. Many times the contracts are written and you’re going back to those suppliers and asking them to do a couple of extra things to help with the digital tracking. And if it’s not in the contract you just have to convince them that this’ll help everybody. But getting requirements like that in the contract as you’re planning early is really important. I appreciate you bringing that up, Jon.

Mark Edwards:

Well, with that said we’ll call it a wrap. Again, remember, if you have questions that you’d like us to address please put them in the Chat and we will get those back to you. We’re on the cusp here of a really exciting time with regard to a bunch of automation in the construction process. And AWP is where we’re putting a bunch of effort to begin with the end in mind so the magic that Jack mentioned can happen. And InEight and Jovix together are key elements to doing that and we’re excited about it, and we believe it’s going to be a huge changer in the industry. So thank you all for joining. Appreciate it. Take care. Bye, bye.