How construction firms should prepare for the future with process automation

Selina Mosley (Oliver Kinross)00:01

Hello everyone, my name is Selina Mosley, and on behalf of the organizers, Oliver Kinross, I'd like to welcome you to London Build Online, and thank our sponsor for today's session, FlowForma. We'll start with a presentation from FlowForma, followed by a discussion on how construction firms should prepare for the future of construction by adopting process automation, moderated by Ursula Cullen. Submit your questions at any time. I'll now hand over to Paul Stone.

Paul Stone00:59

Process automation is becoming a strategic imperative for construction companies. There's a race to digitization: every construction company wants the productivity and return on investment that digital solutions bring. But there's a myriad of solutions out there, from BIM and 3D and 4D modeling to big data and the internet of things, and with limited resources it's difficult to implement them all and get a return.

Paul Stone02:04

Process automation is increasingly a cloud-based technology. It's easy to implement and to get started, the investment is low, and you see the return quickly. It also knits together the investments you've made in other technologies. It drives the human activity on a project: it gathers data that can be used for analytics, it drives the tasks in a process, and it manages documentation and communications, so the right information reaches the right people at the right time.

Paul Stone03:42

Typically you can automate a process within about a six-week time frame and start seeing an immediate return. It connects all the parties involved, wherever they are: head office, site, suppliers and clients. All of that information is tracked, so you can monitor what's going on. The benefits are very real: better data quality and better productivity.

Ursula Cullen05:02

Thank you, Paul. A real focus today is digitization and process automation, a key area where a lot of construction organizations struggle to kick off a project. Paul Stone is the Product Strategist at FlowForma, and we're joined by two panelists: Lubomir Popoff, BIM Digital Construction Manager at Sir Robert McAlpine, and Kai Nelson, Digital Construction Lead at AECOM. We have seven broad questions to pose to each of our panelists.

Ursula Cullen06:34

Topic one is process trends for construction in 2022. Across the globe, construction organizations are rapidly looking to digitize, as so many processes are manual, paper or email-based. Paul, what trends do you think people will see for the rest of 2022 and beyond?

Paul Stone07:13

We've seen a big pickup in interest in process automation, and it's rising up the agenda because people have seen solid results. On every project, big and small, digitizing processes gives you a very obvious end result: you can quickly see how much time and money you're saving, and that helps drive the digital transformation in your company. We see it across clients of all sizes, from very large civil projects around the world to home builders and specialist contractors.

Kai Nelson09:01

Construction is catching up, but there's still a long way to go. There's a real move toward cloud, integrated, all-in-one solutions, which are often expensive, so you have to pick your battles, and at the moment adoption is more important. Clients now expect it: big government clients put it in the scopes and the tender questions. On the ground it's easier said than done. The frameworks and the economics of construction projects get in the way, and training and retaining staff with digital skills is a battle. But I think the UK is leading the way.

Lubomir Popoff11:40

Client involvement is a trend that will only increase. As more processes get embedded, clients see the value and start to request it. Upskilling project members is another. I was part of an apprenticeship myself, and the beautiful thing is that process automation applies to every role. Everyone on the project can find something to improve in their day-to-day workflows, and you don't have to be a computer scientist to make small improvements. Even email categorization is a form of process automation.

Paul Stone13:07

We deal with clients all around the world, and the UK is seen as a leader by people in other geographies, particularly in digital skills. Upskilling is slow, but it's happening at pace, and some of the larger players in America are running their own training programs. It's a trend across the board.

Ursula Cullen14:30

Lubomir, you mentioned low code and no code. New hires don't have to have a computer science or development background to improve their processes. Is the no-code route trending for 2022?

Lubomir Popoff15:08

In our company, I've introduced team members to simple applications that gather categorized information very quickly. We moved from pen and paper, copying from paper to Excel, to a structured form with structured information we can analyze. For example, we use it to track engineers on site and working from home: instead of signing in on a piece of paper at the gate, you scan a form and submit it. It's a very simple way of digitizing something that gathers a lot of good information.

Ursula Cullen16:14

A lot of organizations probably don't take into account the cost of their manual processes, of paper and of moving paper between sites and head office. Will people start to compare what they spend on manual work with what they'd save by automating?

Kai Nelson16:55

They're definitely taking it into account. It's just difficult to show the ROI once you deploy. People say it's great, you try to quantify it, and it's difficult to measure, which is an issue with process improvement in general. It helps to get a qualitative assessment: talk to people, pull together quotes and user feedback, and build a coherent, credible argument for why you should stick with it or how it needs to improve.

Lubomir Popoff18:21

The weight of the transition is very much at the beginning. There's a learning curve, and it's hard to start, but as the implementation gets into the fabric of the company, the returns only increase.

Paul Stone18:54

The first process you automate is always the hardest, and then it gets easier and easier. Once enough people are trained, they help each other and you can accelerate. It also helps if the system tracks the activity in the organization, so you can measure the improvement over time and report on it. At the end of the day, you only get further funding if you can measure and show the benefits.

Kai Nelson19:56

It doesn't have to be exact. You can make estimates, use averages to guide your thinking, and not get bogged down in whether you saved three minutes or an hour. Call it half an hour each time, err on the side of caution, and take away 20 percent.

Lubomir Popoff20:21

It's about the compounding effect. Once the process is set up and automated, you don't need to modify it, and the benefits keep compounding month after month, especially when lots of people are passing things back and forth.

Ursula Cullen21:01

Topic two is common construction challenges and how to face them. Put yourself in the place of someone kicking off a digital transformation now. Lubomir, how would you advise them to address the challenges, and should particular job titles or departments lead?

Lubomir Popoff22:04

Step one is to understand which tasks can be automated: what's repetitive in your day-to-day work and how you can improve on it. Then reach out to the community. The problems you're facing aren't new, and plenty of people are asking how to automate so they have more time for work that needs their expertise, not copying from Excel to Excel. There's untapped potential in every company that needs to be uncovered and built up from the ground to the board.

Paul Stone23:33

A lot of our customers come to us with one small problem, a pain point, and we put together a business case to show what they'll save, which they present to an approver or board member. Then the initiative solves that one problem. A few enlightened people want to do it at scale from the start, but most start with one problem. We always propose getting that solution in place and adopted as quickly as possible, so you can measure the return and use it to justify further investment.

Paul Stone25:07

Construction companies don't come to us with the same problem every time; different projects have different gaps. The common challenge is simply that construction companies haven't digitized enough. There are some common areas, like contractor onboarding, labor requisitions, materials requisitions and the supply chain, but you have to get it right at a detailed level the first time and use the measured return to build momentum.

Kai Nelson26:46

From my perspective, IT skills are the big thing, especially in main contracting. Engage with your staff: find out their levels and comfort zone and how you can support them to upskill. Accept that some people near the end of their career aren't interested, and make room for younger people who are keen to innovate, try new things, fail and learn. Creating that culture is difficult in a high-pressure environment where you're always worried about money and program.

Kai Nelson28:30

The change management is really important. Often the expectation is: you're the digital engineer, digitize the project and tell everyone what to do. That doesn't work. Speak to their issues: what holds you up, what you spend time on that you'd rather not. And listen to objections. There's always a nugget of wisdom in them, because they're the ones doing the work, and it leads to a better solution in the end.

Kai Nelson30:24

Finally, make people self-reliant. Don't just show them one thing; teach them the principles. Have you ever drawn a process diagram? You don't have to get it 100% right, just put it on paper. Teach a man to fish, rather than sweeping in as the hero and solving their problem for them.

Lubomir Popoff31:20

Who do people go to with objections, and who proposes better ways of working? Some projects have a project analyst who handles information management and process setup. Scalability is very important: ideally a solution can be reused. Each project has its peculiarities, so it's hard to automate at a large scale from the start. Start small with one problem, then you find many projects have the same problem, so you scale the solution. There's a snowball effect that starts with one simple problem.

Paul Stone33:38

One of our clients, the A14 project, implemented a solution for permits to dig. It was their first big process automation solution, and they faced a big problem with digital skills, so adoption took a long time. They pushed out a draft solution and got feedback from the workforce. The feedback was niggly little problems. As an IT person you might say it's just the name of a field, but it matters to them. Making quick fixes and showing people you'd listened won the workforce over, and the project was a very big success.

Ursula Cullen35:13

What I take away is that every organization is different, but you all agree you need to listen to your people. And Lubomir's point about speaking to others in the community is key: the construction industry is really taking on process automation, and a lot of people are in the same boat.

Ursula Cullen36:27

Topic three is empowering digital adoption. Kai, is there anything you'd add?

Kai Nelson36:59

Getting it right means creating lasting change. When teams take ownership of automation and digitization, you get a lot more traction, because they can solve their problems more readily than you can by sweeping in. Despite the perception that construction is behind, people are really willing to change as long as it works for them. I find framing change around reducing waste gets really good engagement.

Kai Nelson38:18

Keep your expectations realistic. Don't boil the ocean, and don't expect everything to change overnight. Accept that you're on a journey, and don't get discouraged by where you think you are compared with where you think you should be. Stay positive about the right things.

Lubomir Popoff39:33

A positive approach is easy to mirror. Framing automation around reducing waste is a powerful message, because we're reducing the waste of our own time and focusing on what actually matters in our role.

Paul Stone40:37

Encourage ownership. If people own the digital solutions, so they don't reside in the IT department but with the people using them in the field, it helps a lot. That's what we try to do at FlowForma: you don't need IT skills to build solutions. The people in the workforce know best what the process should be, and it's their teams that use it, so they're adopting their own process. And if you own something, you want it to succeed.

Lubomir Popoff42:26

It also builds confidence. You start with something small, you succeed, you scale it, and that gives you confidence to look for further problems to automate. It's a positive feedback loop.

Ursula Cullen43:45

Our next topic is improving productivity, a trending topic in construction. Lubomir, how can process automation and digital transformation improve productivity, on site or at headquarters?

Lubomir Popoff44:39

Productivity is linked to communication, between people and between people and systems. Process automation reduces the risk of human error, so when we reach for information, we know it's been checked and is accurate. Then there's the time it takes information to travel. A health and safety manager writing down the risks for different areas used to mean Excel and emails. At Sir Robert McAlpine, we've tried a low-code, no-code hub: the manager inputs the information as he goes around the site, it's structured by the form, it goes to the project BIM manager, who uploads it to the models in the cloud, and it's immediately available to everyone on site. From capture to informing people takes five to ten minutes, instead of a day or two.

Kai Nelson46:33

That's the waste reduction, isn't it? Nobody's waiting, and you're not delivering something to someone who isn't ready for it.

Kai Nelson46:49

Moving away from email and Excel really is the way we need to go, but it's a sticky problem in construction. The big players in the UK are moving toward data-centric approaches, but because of the shortage of people to support them, the focus is often on the back end, on finance, HR and project reporting. On projects, you might have the ambition and even the funding, but can't get hold of the right person. And as digitization picks up, there are lots of platforms that don't talk to one another, so we end up back on Excel, CSVs and SharePoint.

Lubomir Popoff49:40

As an industry, we'd ideally move away from tool-led projects to data-centric projects, where we send information to the tools rather than the tools generating it. The biggest obstacle is that each project is different, and it starts with the client requirements. As clients get educated and reach out to construction companies and designers, things will change fast.

Paul Stone51:29

On site operations, at the coal face, you find the hardest challenge. Programs focused on back-office systems like HR and finance are relatively easy. On site, the same company uses different systems on different projects. What we bring is a standardized interface you can reuse across projects, with a common collection of data, so it can all be consolidated into a data warehouse or data lake, analyzed, and fed back to the project in near real time for decisions.

Paul Stone53:29

Data is very important, but there's process around it. Those processes have to be executed efficiently, and they gather the data that feeds the decision-making tools.

Lubomir Popoff53:47

Absolutely. Data is nothing without a properly set up process around it, one that feeds the correct information to the people who need to see it at the right time. Then we have data-driven decisions, and it's very hard to argue with data-driven facts.

Kai Nelson54:43

Another issue is that the amount of data is getting too big. It's so easy to provide more than is necessary and end up with a mess you can't make sense of. Only collect what's useful, and know how you'll use it toward a desired outcome.

Paul Stone56:03

In oil and gas years ago, old North Sea rigs were plastered with IoT devices gathering vast quantities of data, but nobody knew how to find insights in it. You need to gather the right data at the right time to make the right decision, not data for data's sake.

Ursula Cullen57:12

Our next topic is data. How can organizations realize its benefits? With so much data available, how do you knuckle down on the areas where you can improve future projects?

Kai Nelson57:58

At AECOM, we've just launched a data academy to train our staff to use data better. Tools like Power BI have democratized analytics that used to sit behind high license fees: you put it on Excel, get an insight, and realize you could do it at a much larger scale. You train people on a project, come back a year later, and they're dashboarding everything, which is really good to see. The benefits are visibility, better decision making, health and safety, quality management and compliance.

Kai Nelson59:03

Be careful, though: analytics can help you find where to look, but it may not show you the full picture. Use the dashboard as a guide to dig deeper and find the full story. Analytics is the 'study' part of plan, do, check, act, and that puts you on a continuous improvement cycle.

Lubomir Popoff61:01

I can relate to dashboards everywhere. It's easy to get lost in the data, death by a thousand dashboards. A company needs a framework for how data can be used and which data can be used, and cybersecurity matters as you gather data from third parties. It starts with analyzing what has happened, then what is happening and why, and then predicting what will happen.

Paul Stone62:45

Real-time analytics is very attractive, but it's garbage in, garbage out. Unless the quality and relevance of the data is good, it's not much value for decisions. If you tie the data to the business processes being executed, which by definition relate to business goals, that gives the data structure and value and helps people prioritize it.

Kai Nelson64:05

A tip: when you're collecting a data point or a KPI, be mindful of whether you're measuring the input or the output, a leading or a lagging indicator. Numbers can be manipulated, and people will behave to hit a number. Look at examples from sectors like IT and software development, which have worked with this for a lot longer than construction.

Ursula Cullen65:18

Our next topic is customer experience. Paul, how can process automation improve the customer experience, when customers are demanding ever faster and cheaper projects?

Paul Stone66:15

Customer experience hasn't been high on the agenda for construction companies, which have focused on productivity and financials, but it's rising, mainly for competitive advantage. In a world where everything gets a Google review, you want happy customers, and you want to track that. Process automation improves productivity, and the productivity the customer can see. One of our customers digitized over 40 processes and saw a 50% reduction in customer complaints, which made a real difference to how customers perceived the service.

Kai Nelson69:13

Sooner and cheaper has always been the case in construction, and safer and happier is moving up the agenda, though the economics haven't caught up. User experience has traditionally been exceptionally low with a lot of our tools; construction is being dragged along by other industries.

Lubomir Popoff71:02

Process automation allows a greater intimacy with the client. We let them be part of the process, rather than building a wall and showing glimpses. That transparency increases trust between construction companies and clients, which can result in future work. Even report automation, so project teams aren't pulled away to produce yet another KPI summary, makes the whole experience better.

Paul Stone74:14

FlowForma is an award-winning, no-code process automation provider. Traditional BPM requires lots of technical skills; our tool doesn't, so people in the business can automate processes themselves without IT resources. We have over 200,000 people using us across the globe, and construction is our biggest sector. The solution drives workflow, passing work from one person to the next, collects data in electronic forms along the way, and manages documentation and communications. It's a build-your-own system, not tied to any particular process.

Paul Stone75:53

Here are some construction processes, accessed through a web browser. I can kick off a field change request, see processes awaiting my attention, and see a report on materials requisitions. Let's start a safety observation. It opens as a form with the tasks across the top and the details below. The form pre-populates information, validates what you enter, and gives built-in help you configure yourself, which helps adoption on site and in head office.

Paul Stone78:01

The workflow is dynamic. If I say a follow-up action is needed, it adds a task to the workflow. Everything entered is saved to a central database for reporting. This form was designed for mobile, so you can capture photos from your camera, and on an Android phone it looks deliberately similar to the desktop, so people use a common interface wherever they are.

Paul Stone80:07

A field change request is a very different process, but it looks and behaves the same way: a series of steps, details to capture and a design document to upload. Each step can be assigned to different people. Because everything is stored centrally, you know which processes are running, where they are and who owns them, so you can spot bottlenecks and improve.

Paul Stone81:20

This is the field change request in our design tool. It's key, because it lets people who don't understand IT build solutions themselves. Each process has steps, each step has the details captured on screen, and the right-hand side shows what the end user will see. I add an approval step, drag it to the front, add a yes or no question, make it mandatory and add help text, and it appears on the form immediately, ready to test.

Paul Stone83:06

This particular process was created in less than an hour. And going back to Kai's point, you don't have to get it exactly right. Draft the steps and the data, run it past the people who'll use it in the field, and quickly add the missing step or change the label. And there's a full audit trail, so you know how long every step took and where the bottlenecks are.

Paul Stone84:27

Finally, our governance application lets you control how solutions built by your business process owners are released. They can innovate safely in sandbox areas, then request promotion to the live environment. You can create a live environment for every project, set up a template of your company's standard processes, and let each project modify its copies to meet its own requirements. It's well suited to construction, where every project is slightly different.

Ursula Cullen86:26

A couple of quick-fire questions. Someone asks: can Power BI work alongside FlowForma?

Paul Stone86:42

Absolutely. All the data collected in FlowForma can be routed out to a SQL database, and Power BI can pull that data for your real-time dashboards.

Ursula Cullen86:57

Someone from the US says they're having issues promoting digital transformation and process automation there. Any tips on how to progress it in their organization or the wider industry?

Lubomir Popoff87:27

There's no magic solution; everyone has a different approach and a different level of enthusiasm. I've found presenting case studies helpful: if people can see a problem they face being solved, it's easier to visualize the solution. And find out what the actual issues are and address those specifically.

Kai Nelson88:01

I'd approach client groups and try to get adoption of the BIM standards. I can't guarantee it will work.

Ursula Cullen88:30

As a startup, how would you advise taking on a process automation solution?

Lubomir Popoff88:45

A startup has the benefit of a clean slate, so you can set the strategy for process automation at the highest level. Find the most common manual tasks, tackle those first, and set up a wider strategy for going forward.

Paul Stone89:15

With a cloud solution, you can start small. A startup's resources might be limited, but with a no-code solution you can build something quickly that makes an impact, and roll the snowball we talked about earlier.

Ursula Cullen89:37

We have to leave it there. Thank you all for a brilliant discussion. A copy of the recording will be sent to everyone.

Selina Mosley (Oliver Kinross)90:08

Thank you, Ursula, for moderating, Paul for your presentation, and Lubomir and Kai for joining as panelists. A big thank you again to FlowForma for sponsoring the session, and to everyone who tuned in.