How digital processes are improving construction productivity and delivery

Ian Hawkins (PEX Network)00:00

Hello and welcome to How Digital Solutions Are Improving Construction Productivity and Delivery. My name is Ian Hawkins, and I'm the editor of PEX Network, the community for business transformation and process excellence professionals, with more than 160,000 members worldwide. The world our members work in is changing fast, driven largely by technology, and we guide them through it with case-study-driven content that helps them improve the efficiency, agility and profitability of their organizations.

Ian Hawkins (PEX Network)00:38

Today's session explores a changing industry. Construction has traditionally relied on manual processes, from payroll to permits to dig. There's a real opportunity for construction firms to use tools like BPM to work smarter, saving money, time and, in the case of the major project we'll discuss today, the kind of disruption that can affect a whole region. Hosting today are Paul Stone, solutions expert at FlowForma, and Shay O'Connor, senior vice president at FlowForma, who has over 25 years' experience in the technology sector.

Shay O'Connor01:08

Thank you. First we'll talk a little about digital processes in construction. My colleague Paul is going to explain how processes are actually being implemented in construction at the moment, and we'll look at the challenges construction faces. Paul, why would you start digitizing your processes?

Paul Stone01:55

If you look at construction, it's full of manual processes, and manual processes come with risks and inefficiencies. In an increasingly competitive market, they're causing project delays and lost data, and that adds up to more risk on the project as a whole.

Paul Stone02:26

A lot of areas are hit by inefficient processes. Reporting is one: because you're losing data, you can't report on it, and you can't drive your project forward. Governance is another: you can't be sure processes are carried out the same way every time.

Shay O'Connor02:50

Excessive paperwork and manual processes must have a big impact on day-to-day work. What sort of impact is it having on the construction industry?

Paul Stone03:04

It's really causing delays. That's the biggest risk. A process depends on pieces of paper, and paper gets lost, in which case the process stops. Inaccurate information gets captured, which introduces project risk, because when the paper is passed on to the next person they don't have enough to complete the job, so it has to be passed back again.

Paul Stone03:35

Paper is a very inefficient way of communicating between the different people in a process, whether they're on the construction site or in head office. It doesn't just make the process slow. It makes the process loop around, because the data isn't right the first time.

Shay O'Connor04:00

Construction is probably the greatest example of an industry where time really does equal money. The quicker you get things done, the better. So when you digitize, what kind of benefits would you expect to see?

Paul Stone04:31

The key thing is that the handoff of information between the person on site and the person in head office is much, much faster. There's no paper involved, so it happens essentially instantly, and that results in faster processes.

Paul Stone04:54

You also end up with better data quality, because it's captured in a digital format and recorded in a database. You can validate the data as it's captured, record it exactly and report on it. Ultimately you end up with a better functioning system that you can track and monitor in a very predictable way, instead of depending on external registers, the old way of doing things.

Shay O'Connor05:43

From a challenges point of view and a benefits point of view, it's a simple picture: you move from a really inefficient environment to a really efficient one. Speaking of specifics, can you give us an example of a project where you've seen this impact?

Paul Stone05:51

The one I'd like to talk about is the A14, which I've been closely involved in. It's one of the largest construction projects in the UK at the moment, about £1.5 billion of spend, run by a joint venture of Costain, Skanska and Balfour Beatty. It's a road construction project, and it's expected to finish in 2020.

Shay O'Connor06:23

How many people were working on something that big?

Paul Stone06:31

About two and a half thousand people were working on the project.

Shay O'Connor06:44

A lot of construction projects, especially in civil construction, are joint ventures. Here you're dealing with three separate companies, and presumably contractors and subcontractors as well, so I can imagine the challenge of organizing all that.

Shay O'Connor07:07

So on that project, what was the impact? Let's get down to specifics.

Paul Stone07:14

If you look at the detail on a single process, one of the first inspection processes, they estimated 3,800 hours saved over the lifetime of the project. That's quite significant, and it came from moving from a paper-based process to a digital one. And that's just one single process.

Paul Stone07:39

Using FlowForma, the A14 was able to automate about 75 processes in an 18-month time frame, so these savings add up significantly. The first one is often the most difficult, but once you get the snowball rolling, it adds up to a very significant saving across the project.

Shay O'Connor08:04

Seventy-plus processes is quite a large amount, all implemented over 18 months, with the first one going live within a few months. And as you say, the first one is the most important from an engagement point of view.

Paul Stone08:36

Absolutely. In construction, adoption is the biggest challenge. Getting people to use a digital system over and above paper is the challenge in itself, and FlowForma was a solution that made that challenge easier to overcome. Getting the first process in place is the hardest part. Once people are used to the system, it's relatively easy from there.

Shay O'Connor09:08

Did you get any pushback?

Paul Stone09:17

For sure. When people start to use it, it's very much a snowball effect. You have to push hard to get that first process not just automated but adopted. Getting it automated is easy enough. Getting it adopted is a much bigger challenge: pushing it out to the business and getting people to put aside the paper. Once that's done, the rest is much easier.

Shay O'Connor09:51

So if you want any level of scalability, the adoption rate on the first one has to be high, and you need that positivity flowing at that stage.

Shay O'Connor10:00

I know the initiative for the A14 came from Highways England. They wanted the joint venture to find savings, and I presume they had a set of requirements beyond simply saying, save a lot of money and become more efficient.

Paul Stone10:33

Absolutely right. Highways England commissioned the A14 project, and they wanted whoever won the bid to show they could work as an integrated team: that the joint venture partners could work together. To do that, they had to use a common platform for processes and for collaboration. SharePoint was selected early on as the collaboration platform, and they needed something on top of it to drive data capture, so data was captured the same way whichever partner was taking part in the process.

Paul Stone11:07

They also wanted common processes, so everybody followed the same rules and guidelines, and ultimately they wanted to cut paper overheads. Previous projects had been paper-dependent, and there was a clear opportunity to make cost savings. That's what Highways England really wanted to see.

Shay O'Connor11:31

On a job as large as the A14, when you quantify the time spent just collating data, assembling forms and putting reports together, item by item, there must have been months of savings in admin alone.

Paul Stone12:19

It was very clear that savings could be made. The challenge was simply to find a way of automating those processes quickly, because the project had a four-year time scale, and you start saving money as soon as you adopt a digital process. So the whole idea was to get the system in as quickly as possible.

Shay O'Connor12:45

Can you give us some examples of the processes that had an impact straight away?

Paul Stone13:00

Here are some of the processes the A14 digitized. They're all slightly different, and it's often hard, especially on a webinar, to picture what a digital process actually does, so I'll walk through three: the materials requisition, target risk, and something called the permit to dig. Materials requisition is first.

Paul Stone13:46

You always start with an understanding of your process. This is the materials requisition written down as a flowchart. Companies diagram processes in different ways, but you always end up with some kind of process diagram, and there are a lot of people, steps and actions involved. It looks complicated, so you'd expect a system that follows it to look complicated as well. That's not the case with FlowForma. Here's what the process looks like when it's implemented.

Shay O'Connor14:34

That looks much friendlier. There's no fear factor there.

Paul Stone14:41

That was key for adoption: something easy to use and easy to understand. FlowForma integrates the workflow side of the system with the data capture. At the top you see a step bar showing what's happened in the past, what's happening now and what will happen next. That's so important for business users to get a grip on where they are and what needs to be done to complete the process.

Paul Stone15:46

It's all stored centrally, so anybody can see, I'm on the fifth step and there are three more to go. And the big difference from the process diagram is that this includes the data. Each step has data associated with it, and the system integrates the data with the process, so on the first step you enter the materials request, submit it, and it moves on to the next person, who sees the data straight away and can act on it.

Shay O'Connor16:45

How big was the IT team on this big project?

Paul Stone16:52

About four people in IT, and they put this one together themselves. Under normal circumstances, building something like this in an engineered system would have been a project in itself.

Shay O'Connor17:29

With a purchase requisition, they would probably have had that taking months.

Paul Stone17:38

This was typically a two-week build for this kind of complexity. The materials requisition is a fairly standard process, so it took about two weeks, and as I said, the challenge then is adoption. The first one's hard, but the rest are much easier, because it sells itself in a way. Business users realize the data can be pre-populated, and they can select an item from a drop-down instead of typing.

Paul Stone18:26

Because you're picking from a drop-down, the data is more accurate when it's passed on to the next person, and the system does the calculations for you. Once people start using it, they get used to an electronic form instead of paper, and next time around they're looking forward to the next process.

Shay O'Connor18:56

What about target risk?

Paul Stone19:06

Target risk is a little different. It needed to be used in the field, so it's initiated by people on mobile devices on site. Once it's started on mobile, it's passed to people in head office, so there are different types of users: people who kick off the process on a mobile device, and people inside who take it further.

Shay O'Connor19:35

One point there is that it automatically creates actions. I've seen something similar in a hospital with interim life safety measures, which are also based on risk. Digitizing saves time on the process itself, but the actions had another big impact: when you identify a risk, you often have to notify people in different areas or disciplines, and those actions now kick off immediately.

Shay O'Connor20:36

I believe this is the process you mentioned earlier with a saving of about £77,000, and that doesn't even count the actions coming out of those reports being picked up immediately, which saves more time and addresses risks faster.

Shay O'Connor21:08

So it's not just one process being digitized. It's the knock-on effect afterwards: everybody's work is joined up and coordinated.

Paul Stone21:16

Absolutely. It's often misunderstood that the benefit isn't just the single process. It's linked processes, because many processes link to others, like the actions coming out of target risk. That's a very typical risk management process, and you see similar ones in non-conformance reporting and change requests. They all create actions that need follow-up.

Shay O'Connor22:03

One process on its own is fine, but as you expand that digital footprint and connect the dots, you save time and money, and in a risk area like this you could be preventing injuries too. All of that increases the savings and efficiency exponentially.

Paul Stone22:46

Definitely. And because you're capturing all the risks and actions, you can use them for reporting, so at any point you know your list of risks, the actions needed and their status. The big bonus for Highways England was that they'll get a database of all the activity on the A14 project to drive new working practices on future projects. So it's savings today, but savings tomorrow as well.

Shay O'Connor23:27

On mobile: when you create a process in FlowForma, it's automatically rendered for mobile devices. You don't have to go and build an app. You create the process, and the app is there.

Paul Stone23:42

That's right. It means you can digitize something quickly and get it into the hands of end users, whether they're in head office or on site and whatever devices they use. You get their reaction and then adjust the process to meet the real needs on the ground. It's a very effective way to build success quickly.

Shay O'Connor24:16

And the permit to dig?

Paul Stone24:24

The permit to dig process is very significant. The A14 won an award for this particular process. Digitizing it was one of the first times it had been done in the industry, and it saved significant amounts of money because of the volume of permits that had to be issued.

Paul Stone24:41

Many people on this call will know all about permits: you can't proceed with your work until the permit is issued, so getting it issued is so important. Yet the permit to dig was a manual process running on pieces of paper. A permit to dig allows you to break ground on, say, a three-meter-square area, and on a project the size of the A14 there are a lot of permits to issue.

Shay O'Connor25:19

And there are plenty of other assessments that need permits too, like hot works, where work can't start until it's signed off.

Paul Stone25:42

We live in an increasingly regulated world, especially around health and safety, and regulators require you to capture certain information, store it for a period of time and follow well-defined steps. The permit to dig is one example of many where you're required to carry out a process, so you want to do it as efficiently as possible. Digitizing it resulted in a lot of savings.

Shay O'Connor26:32

So you've given us three of the processes, and all that information is now collected. People will also want to see the status of the project.

Paul Stone26:49

Right. If you don't have your permit, your work stops, whatever the permit type. The A14 built a permit report dashboard that shows the status of every permit across the entire site at any point in time. Using it, they can see if any permits are being delayed and chase them. It's regulatory compliance plus a management dashboard, so you see the status of everything at any time and keep the project on schedule.

Paul Stone27:38

It massively reduces overall project risk. That's a key point: digital processes make everything available for reporting, and with that reporting you manage risks a whole lot better, and the costs, because risks have a cost if they turn into problems.

Shay O'Connor28:09

So to sum up, Highways England's initiative was about efficiency. When you bring companies together, they need a common way of doing things, and the best way is digitally, working off the same platform. The inspection example alone saved 3,800 hours, and they went to the bother of showing the return on one process.

Shay O'Connor28:41

How would you get the ball rolling on a project like this?

Paul Stone28:55

My tips for getting a project off the ground, certainly reflecting what happened on the A14: first, find a champion. You need an internal salesperson who will help with adoption and convince people to move away from paper. It has to be someone who knows the process and the resources, and who can demonstrate the system to end users and get them on board. Usually, once you demonstrate value, the end users themselves become champions of digital process automation.

Paul Stone29:44

That's why we always say target the obvious. If there's an obvious pain point, a process everybody complains about, that's the one to digitize first, so people can see straight away that it's easier and gets results.

Shay O'Connor30:01

I imagine finding the champion is the most crucial part. If you don't have someone leading the charge who can see the impact digitizing your processes will have, you'll find it tough.

Paul Stone30:25

Absolutely. And the champion isn't a particular role. You might think it's an IT person, but not at all. It's often the business process owner, someone who's been around, knows the company and its structure very well, and takes it on because they can see the potential benefits. Champions aren't necessarily the people you'd expect.

Paul Stone31:13

Once you have that champion, we recommend setting up a center of excellence. On the A14 a small group of IT people acted as the support center for the rest of the company. Other FlowForma customers use a mix of IT and business resources, but the idea is a small group who coach everyone else in digital process automation, react quickly to feedback from users, and train people to help themselves.

Shay O'Connor32:02

So in this case, FlowForma was selected, supported by Highways England's initiative, to automate processes, and the A14's own team created them, which was easier because of the no-code environment.

Paul Stone32:19

The main reason they went for it was that they needed a no-code solution. People were used to working with paper and didn't have development skills, so they needed something easy to adopt that would work with the skills and resources they had. They needed a short time to value, because the project time frame was fixed: the quicker you get the benefits, the more you save overall. They needed something to remove the risks of paper, so the improvements would be sustained for the whole project lifecycle.

Paul Stone33:00

They also wanted a system that could engage with external parties like suppliers. The A14 has a form external suppliers use to register their details, so people outside the organization take part in the process. That's a really useful feature for bringing in third parties, though it applies in a more limited number of cases.

Paul Stone33:44

And they needed a low entry point. You have to cost-justify the investment, and the smaller the startup cost, the easier it is to get going. Once you get going, you can grow into more and more processes.

Shay O'Connor34:15

From a product point of view, FlowForma has three big takeaways. The main one is no code. That's especially relevant in construction, which hasn't had a lot of automation or digital presence: a platform that doesn't need specialist coding skills. You basically need to know your process.

Shay O'Connor34:49

It also sits on Office 365, so the infrastructure is already there. FlowForma sits on top of it and doesn't take your data: all the data stays in your Office 365 environment or your own databases, including integrations. And it's much faster to build processes in FlowForma than in a legacy system, with your own people doing it, so you save on professional services too.

Shay O'Connor35:42

These are a few of the customers using FlowForma. They're in different industries and they all started for different reasons. As Paul said, they targeted the obvious: a process that would have an impact. Then, because they got buy-in from the rest of the organization, they could expand their digital transformation.

Shay O'Connor36:23

Digital transformation can seem like a really big elephant, but you eat it one bite at a time: target the simple processes, get buy-in from your supporters and from the people who used to do the process manually, and then expand. One of them is the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, whose finance department told us it had gone paperless.

Shay O'Connor37:13

For the A14, the main win was time and money, because the project has a fixed budget and you hope to come in below it. For organizations like LSTM, which aren't working on projects as such, it's about efficiency: doing more with what they already have. Either way, you save money or do more with what you have. Thanks for listening.

Ian Hawkins (PEX Network)38:06

Thank you very much indeed. We're down to the last few minutes, so please keep your answers brief. First question: I like that FlowForma is no code. Typically, how long would it take to automate a process with this product?

Shay O'Connor38:28

It's a bit of a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string question, because it depends on the size of the process. But for a five-step process with around a hundred fields, attached documents and automatic document generation, the net time would probably be about five days, because you need agreement from people as you go. Our onboarding program is around five days too, and customers get their first process up and running in that time.

Ian Hawkins (PEX Network)39:19

Speaking of customers, who do you think is the best person in an organization to roll out a digital process automation journey?

Paul Stone39:27

That comes up quite often. It can be IT or the business. IT can support, but the best person is the sponsor we talked about: someone driving change in their department or organization who wants the benefits of digitizing their processes. They're the ones who need to be involved, with the people around them working together. And IT is always involved at some stage, because it has to fit with what they already do.

Ian Hawkins (PEX Network)40:13

That's all we have time for. If you'd like to get in touch, you can download the A14 case study from the panels below, book a live demo with a process expert, or register for a FlowForma free trial.

Ian Hawkins (PEX Network)40:38

Before you go, a few quick questions: did you find this webinar useful, does your organization use Office 365, and would you like a free trial, a free proof of concept or a free one-to-one demonstration? If we didn't get to your question, we'll pass it to the team and they'll get back to you. Thank you very much for your time, wherever you are in the world, and thank you for joining us.