Achieve your digital goals faster with intelligent workflow and automation

Sarah (CIF)00:00

Welcome to this afternoon's digitalization masterclass with CIF's corporate partner, FlowForma. We're joined by Shay O'Connor, Head of Solutions at FlowForma, and Rebecca McManus, Territory Manager, who will present on how construction companies can achieve their digital goals five times faster with intelligent workflow and automation.

Sarah (CIF)00:27

A few bits of housekeeping: this webinar is being recorded, all lines are muted, so please use the chat box for your questions, and there's a short feedback survey afterwards. We'll cover the current digital landscape of the construction industry, the outcomes of process automation, and real-world examples of how construction leaders are achieving their digital goals.

Rebecca McManus01:25

Thanks, Sarah. To start, we have a quote from Forrester about the pandemic and automation. Shay, I'll pass this over to you.

Shay O'Connor01:33

Forrester has been analyzing digital process automation for the last few years. There's been a gradual increase, but not the explosion that was anticipated. During the pandemic, though, there was a keener focus on people doing the same work in different locations, with a set of steps and rules governing how they operate. We've noticed at our end too that people's willingness to take part in digital process automation has increased dramatically.

Rebecca McManus02:48

We almost didn't include this section, because at this point everyone knows they have to digitalize. There's no downside to it, and the more effort you put into processes, the more outcomes you achieve. So why delay?

Shay O'Connor03:19

Even the organizations that were scratching their heads a year or two ago recognize they're going to digitalize at some stage. The real question is why now, and the answer is that now is as good a time as any. When should you plant a tree? Years ago. When's the next best time? Today.

Rebecca McManus04:11

When I speak with customers, they're all planning to do it at some point, but it might be on a five-year roadmap. You start seeing a return on investment a lot quicker the sooner you start.

Rebecca McManus04:29

Here are ten common challenges we're hearing for 2023. They aren't in any order, because priorities are different for every organization.

Shay O'Connor04:52

Everybody would recognize most of these. Organizations tend to have one or two that are a must-do. If your health and safety processes aren't digitized and it's a bit of a mess, the governing bodies won't be happy, especially if you're looking for ISO accreditation and you're still on paper-based or disjointed processes that can't be tracked. Someone else might have poor reporting, or lots of remote contractors on site who aren't included in the process. Where you join the journey differs, but 90 or even 95% of organizations come to us for one of these reasons, if not more.

Rebecca McManus06:32

So how do you digitalize? We've broken it into key areas: get started, collaborate, adopt, launch and expand. It's a general methodology for driving digitization in your organization. Everyone has their own way of doing these steps, but we've found this route to be the most successful.

Shay O'Connor07:14

Among the organizations that found adoption and impact successful, it boils down to these five headings. The first, start, seems obvious, but a lot of organizations look at different ways of digitalizing without actually doing anything, so they get no return and no data back. There's no shortcut: you have to start the journey.

Shay O'Connor08:10

Collaboration lends itself closely to adoption, and it works best in a no-code environment like FlowForma, because you can turn around processes and changes very quickly. You seek input from the business owners and the people you trust to know the process. It's a real knowledge transfer, and turning their input around fast increases adoption, because people feel ownership.

Shay O'Connor09:16

You start with one or two processes, collaborate with the business owners, adoption increases, and then you launch to the wider group. In the launch you need to be agile: when you get feedback on how the processes work, you make those changes, and adoption increases further. Expansion we'll touch on later. Stick to these headings and you'll find success.

Shay O'Connor11:05

We've gone through this lots of times with organizations, and we're distilling what the really successful adoptions had in common. First, you need a champion: someone or some group at a senior level who's behind this. You will get pushback, especially in construction, which has been a late adopter of digitalization across the globe. Without senior support, you won't get any momentum.

Shay O'Connor12:16

Second, target the obvious: one, two, maybe three processes that people will understand readily. Nothing cryptic to kick off with, because you want to bring people along, not scare them off. Most construction organizations are used to the inbox, physical forms and spreadsheets.

Shay O'Connor13:07

Third, set up a center of excellence, so you become more adept at creating your own processes and questions can be answered internally. Fourth, react quickly: when the business says this is great, but it would be better if we added this, turn it around fast. That increases ownership and adoption. And fifth, train people to help themselves. Don't give them a fish; teach them how to fish, so business units can create their own processes in a managed way.

Rebecca McManus15:01

This slide shows the types of sponsors needed to drive the project. In blue are your team leads: heads of compliance, HR, finance or any area of the business. They need to be driving this. In pink are the people dealing with these challenges and pain points day to day, who generally realize they need to digitize.

Shay O'Connor15:42

The ideal is having the most senior people behind you, but we've found the team-lead level has the greatest impact in getting something like this off the ground. We often hear from people in the pink group, a site engineer or a surveyor, who have pushed their project manager or HR or finance manager to say we really need this. They're at the coalface and want to be more efficient.

Shay O'Connor17:20

Think of digital process automation as giving time back to your people. It removes the time wasted on repetitive tasks, so people have more time for the job they were employed to do, instead of looking for someone to pass something to. And the team leads get improved visibility and can make better decisions.

Rebecca McManus18:26

The more senior support you can get, the better. If a couple of people leading teams buy into the idea, that's the way to go.

Shay O'Connor18:41

If there's just one evangelist, even a senior one, it can fall on deaf ears, because they're outnumbered. Support from other senior people makes all the difference.

Rebecca McManus19:12

Next, flexibility and scalability. You want a solution you can use to drive innovation across different teams, not one limited to finance or to health and safety, but something any area of the business can use.

Shay O'Connor19:54

You may start in one area, HR or health and safety, but when other groups see the impact, you get a very healthy queue of people wanting their work done. It can grow in parallel, not sequentially. The first one or two processes might take a few weeks, because you're learning a new way of doing things, but then the next 10, 20, 30 escalate, and the more you've digitized, the more efficiencies you get.

Rebecca McManus21:23

And just because a team already has a system in place doesn't mean there aren't gaps in it.

Shay O'Connor21:40

We see it all the time. An organization has four core systems, say HR, finance and ERP. FlowForma sits like a blanket over them and talks to them, so you reuse the data that's already there and keep one source of truth. Those systems are great but hard to change, because they're built to stay uniform, so this extends their footprint. If you're looking for a system to digitize your processes, make sure it can talk to your existing systems.

Rebecca McManus23:29

This is how we identify the current state of a process, using a process canvas. You pick your first process and capture who needs to be involved and at what stage, what needs to happen, and what information you're trying to capture. That structure becomes the template for every process after it, so you can ramp up and build momentum.

Shay O'Connor24:19

This was born from years of creating processes for organizations. A uniform way of gathering information gives everyone a clear, step-by-step guide to the questions to ask before they start building: the steps, the data, existing databases, the rules and the outputs. When someone asks for something to be digitized, they fill out the template first. The information gathering can even be a process in itself, and with that foundation, your ramp-up time is far faster.

Rebecca McManus26:24

Some customers run quarterly innovation labs, using templates like this to collect the problems different teams have and decide what to automate next.

Shay O'Connor26:42

Others hold a monthly meeting, only an hour long, on which processes need changing and which to add. It's the sharing of information between the process owners and the creators.

Rebecca McManus27:15

When you get started, pick a process that's really obvious. All processes built in a solution like FlowForma have a similar look and feel, and that familiarity helps with adoption.

Shay O'Connor27:40

We use a step bar, which shows the process as it stands and educates people on what's involved. Someone who submits a materials requisition can see it's an eight-step process and that it's at step five, sitting in stores before the order. That visibility reduces the anxiety. The first couple of processes get you across the chasm, and if the ones that follow look familiar, people just know what to do.

Rebecca McManus29:11

You could start with a two-step process to get going.

Shay O'Connor29:18

Absolutely, two or three steps, depending on the impact: permits to work, safety observations, or something more involved like onboarding.

Rebecca McManus29:34

You need a solution that empowers your workforce to drive innovation and automation. With FlowForma, business process owners can build and be responsible for their own processes, and that responsibility is really important.

Shay O'Connor29:49

A single interface helps a lot. People only go to one place to create the process, rather than tying this to that. We're updating it all the time, with the creator and the end user in mind: how straightforward it is to create processes, and how readily they're adopted.

Rebecca McManus30:29

Downer is an engineering, infrastructure management and construction services provider in New Zealand and Australia, and one of our clients. Shay, you've worked closely with them.

Shay O'Connor30:55

Downer recognized they needed to digitize, and they decided to go first. They had pushback from IT, who wanted to take it slowly and code everything, but the business said they needed to take control, because they wanted to move rapidly and knew the impact it would have.

Shay O'Connor31:34

Downer did a full analysis comparing low code, which is still coding, with no code. The figures were only released last month. They concentrated on two projects, which had 15 processes between them, and saved over 2,000 hours on those two projects over the year. The development time saved compared with a coded version was 126 days. That was with just over 100 users.

Shay O'Connor32:53

These are broken down per process: half an hour saved per person on certain processes. That doesn't sound like much, but if you do the process four or five times a week, you're saving hours, and over the weeks it adds up to days. These aren't our stats; we had no visibility of them. It was Downer's own analysis.

Rebecca McManus34:01

The fastest way to digitalize is a 100% no-code solution with business-led capabilities, and our customers have always been supportive of that. Cameron Hyndman, Digital Engineering Lead at Downer, said that what took four weeks with Power Apps they could do in less than a week with FlowForma.

Shay O'Connor34:25

They all wanted momentum behind a new initiative. Being on a no-code platform means you can turn processes around faster, and when the numbers and the use of the processes increase, there's a huge impact.

Rebecca McManus35:01

Another customer, a director of corporate services, highlighted saving time and seeing a rapid ROI, again because of the no-code capabilities.

Rebecca McManus35:19

As important as speed is a controlled environment: designated business users creating processes through a vetting procedure. Sandbox environments are best practice. Processes are created in a sandbox, go into user testing, then go live and are distributed to different sites.

Shay O'Connor35:57

Our governance feature gives you that control. If IT wants visibility of what's going live, you can set that up easily: distributed sandboxes, UAT, and other layers if you need them. In the live environment you might have 100 processes, while each site only has the 20 or 25 it needs. Governance controls not only the creation, but the promotion of processes up to live.

Rebecca McManus37:10

We also have pre-built process accelerators for construction, such as requisitions and permits, to shorten the time it takes to get started. With a 100% no-code solution, you can collaborate on your first process in just a couple of weeks, scale across the company, and see a significant return on investment by the end of the first year.

Shay O'Connor38:16

Once an initiative starts, you want momentum, but controlled momentum. Getting the first process live with high adoption is so important, because everything escalates from there. The first process takes a few weeks, but after that we've created processes within a couple of days.

Rebecca McManus39:05

Bear in mind the first couple of weeks you're learning a new solution.

Shay O'Connor39:12

And by the end of the next 12 months, how many processes you could be live with is in your control. Lastly, there's our buyer's guide: the QR code takes you to a complete buyer's guide and checklist.

Rebecca McManus39:43

We have a few questions. Does it work seamlessly with Microsoft 365, Procore, Viewpoint and SharePoint?

Shay O'Connor40:03

FlowForma sits on Microsoft 365, so it's part of that ecosystem. It sits on top of SharePoint and uses it mainly as a data repository. It also integrates with Procore, Viewpoint and many other systems, with direct integration support.

Rebecca McManus40:41

Is it easy to bring in governance after the fact?

Shay O'Connor40:49

Yes. Governance is there from day one, but because most organizations go live with one or two processes at the start, you can apply the governance features afterwards.

Rebecca McManus41:03

Does every employee in the company need a license, or just the people building the flows?

Shay O'Connor41:18

FlowForma inherits your users from Microsoft 365. When someone clicks a link, they're added to the user list, whether they're an administrator or a general user. Licensing is in user blocks: within a block of, say, 250 users, you can have as many processes as you like, then move up to the next block. It's not done on an individual basis, and importantly, you're not charged based on consumption.

Rebecca McManus42:17

Does it meet federal work security protocols?

Shay O'Connor42:26

I'm not sure exactly what that refers to, but it's an environment for creating your own processes, and because we sit within Office 365, all of the data is held in your tenancy. A lot of government and European agencies use FlowForma. From a security point of view, the main question is where the data is, and that's within the Microsoft environment, unless you have your own databases as well. We never have the data.

Rebecca McManus43:25

Another asks about implementing the required controls to meet the minimum security requirements for the CMMC program.

Shay O'Connor43:33

I'm not familiar with that, so I'll take it offline and get an answer to the audience.

Sarah (CIF)43:55

Thanks very much. If everyone has asked their questions, we're finished, giving time back. There's a short two-question survey at the end. Thank you so much for taking part.