How Sullivan Engineering went paperless with no-code process automation

Ellen McCurtain00:00

Good afternoon and welcome to this webinar, How Construction Firms Save More Than 700 Hours a Year on Repetitive Tasks, with Intelligent Workflow and Automation. This event is brought to you by Engineering News-Record and sponsored by FlowForma. I'm Ellen McCurtain, custom content editor at Engineering News-Record and your moderator for today's webinar.

Ellen McCurtain00:21

In 2022, process automation and digitization tools will continue to soar as manual processes are digitally transformed. Today we'll hear how Sullivan Engineering is using process automation to overcome its manual processes, and we'll discuss the growing uptake of digital process automation in construction and engineering as organizations look to operate efficiently, keep overheads low and stay competitive.

Ellen McCurtain00:58

Leading today's discussion is Shay O'Connor, head of solutions at FlowForma. Joining him from Sullivan Engineering are James Monahan, principal building envelope systems consultant, and Anthony Ngadimin, senior building envelope consultant. Shay has significant experience providing clients with analysis, design and implementation of business solutions, particularly with the no-code FlowForma process automation tool, and has worked closely with FlowForma customers across the globe.

Ellen McCurtain01:40

Jimmy started his career in project management and building envelope consulting at Sullivan Engineering in 2016. He oversees numerous building envelope restoration projects in the New Jersey and New York markets, focusing on construction administration services, FISP inspections, building envelope surveys and leak investigations. Anthony moved to New York in 2020 and joined Sullivan Engineering, where he leads building envelope restoration projects and has expanded the company's services in Massachusetts. His passion for automating processes stems from a desire to empower people, and he has automated some of the firm's key processes.

Ellen McCurtain02:30

I'll rejoin our presenters at the end to answer the questions you submit in the Q&A section of your webinar console. Now I'll hand over to Shay.

Shay O'Connor02:50

Thank you, Ellen, and welcome everybody. First, I want to introduce the current digital state of construction. Last year we surveyed over 300 organizations across the globe, and the reality is that most aren't engaging with full digital process automation. They leave manual pieces in their processes, they lack visibility, and the upshot is that their data isn't normalized. As Forrester would say, when there's a manual item in a process, it's considered broken.

Shay O'Connor04:07

The Sullivan team came across this too. Jimmy and Anthony, your goal was to become paperless, and you realized you had to start somewhere. A lot of people feel they're not in that position or don't have the skill set, but you decided to go first. Jimmy, can you tell me about that?

Jimmy Monahan04:45

With an expanding team working in multiple locations across the country, and the pandemic meaning everyone was working remotely, putting something in place was an absolute necessity. Not everyone has the same printing capabilities, and you can't share prints with teammates who aren't in the same office. Digitizing our processes was a must-have.

Jimmy Monahan05:15

There's also a major cost saving, because printer ink and paper are expensive overheads, and there's the environmental impact. We'd had the goal of going paperless for about five years, but it's easier said than done when you're used to doing things the same way for a long time. The pandemic forced us to move quicker, and FlowForma was one of the ways we were able to do that.

Shay O'Connor05:40

That backs up what Forrester found when they interviewed a lot of companies across the globe: the respondents leaned heavily toward needing to digitize more. They weren't fully up to speed with the digital concept, especially for day-to-day job management. Anthony, I know you have a passion for digitizing in a way where the organization doesn't skip a beat.

Anthony Ngadimin07:02

It's certainly a scary process. Like Jimmy said, we debated whether to do it. Every company has a diverse set of skills; some people are more tech-savvy than others, so you have to be mindful of that, and there's always going to be resistance to change. We made the decision to rip the Band-Aid off and digitize, because it's do or die. Things are moving fast, and we've got to adapt.

Shay O'Connor07:38

Just to give everyone online an idea about you, Jimmy, can you give us some background on Sullivan Engineering?

Jimmy Monahan08:04

Sure. Sullivan Engineering started around 12 years ago, and we focus on building envelope consulting. We oversee design, inspection and project closeout for projects related to roofs, facades, sidewalks and parking garages, so the work on the outside of the building. A large portion of our work is in the New York City metro market and Boston.

Jimmy Monahan08:34

New York City has a very robust facade ordinance, which requires buildings to hire firms like Sullivan Engineering to perform inspections and oversee repairs to make them compliant with the law. Leak investigations are another big part of our business, where we find the source of a leak and design the repairs. We also provide a lot of project management services: we bid projects out to contractors and go from filing all the way through construction.

Jimmy Monahan09:15

During construction, some of the more robust tasks are project oversight: generating field reports, holding weekly meetings with contractors and producing deliverables like punch lists, change orders and RFIs.

Shay O'Connor09:35

So you have a lot of activities going on at the same time across a lot of projects. You have to report on all of it and make sure every job follows the correct steps, and since you can't be everywhere at once, you have to know everybody is working to the same standard on every site.

Jimmy Monahan10:24

Now that a lot of people are working remotely and aren't sitting next to each other in the office, what's been very important is our turnaround time on reports. We promise our clients we'll deliver them in two days. To make sure we provide the best product, we needed a process that keeps the company's branding, so all our field reports, meeting minutes and leak reports look the same. We were able to do that by digitizing those processes.

Shay O'Connor11:07

That leads perfectly to the next question: your motivation to digitize. Anthony, can you tell us more?

Anthony Ngadimin11:25

For me personally, I'm an engineer, so I don't want to do the same repetitive things over and over. I used to be the guy resizing and formatting reports to make sure the margins looked the same from one report to the next and across projects. As a company, like Jimmy said, we measure report turnaround time as a key performance indicator. Field reports and meeting minutes need to go out within two days, because construction moves fast; in a week, things might have changed. We wanted something easy to use that would help us strengthen that guarantee.

Anthony Ngadimin12:16

Efficiency and productivity matter too: the faster we get reports out, the happier our clients are and the more projects we can take on. Then accuracy. FlowForma wasn't our first reporting solution. With the previous one, we filled something in on an iPad app, then went into Excel to track quantities and budgets. It was messy, and we wanted everything to live in one space. FlowForma allowed us to do that.

Anthony Ngadimin12:56

Lastly, empowering our own team is a big personal driver for me. With the Great Resignation, people are moving companies and aren't happy in their jobs. I used to drag my feet on reports after a full day on site, and with our previous solution, things would crash or go missing. We wanted something reliable that lets our team do more of what they love, not mundane tasks.

Shay O'Connor13:36

Jimmy, for those listening, what did you look for when you went searching for a process automation tool?

Jimmy Monahan13:55

Anthony, a few others and I spent basically three months researching platforms. We were looking for something to streamline and digitize what we were doing in multiple pieces: we'd write the draft in Word, store the photos on a server, mark up a PDF and a drawing, and send it all to our project coordinators to compile. We wanted the consultant to be able to compile it in that first iteration, which would save our project coordinators a tremendous amount of time in peak season, when the weather warms up and business really starts to move.

Jimmy Monahan14:54

As you grow, you also need to start documenting your processes, including internal ones. In a small company, a lot of processes live in a handful of people's minds, and they relay that to their teammates. When you scale and people work remotely, that's hard, and people stop following the same process. Digitizing forced us to put our process into a digital form, a centralized place everyone knows. Once it's digitized, it's documented.

Jimmy Monahan15:53

And things are never perfect the first few tries. If we decide we don't like the way something looks, or we get feedback from clients, we change it in one spot and the rest of the team gets the update the next time they open the app or go online. It saves the headaches Anthony mentioned. I don't want to spend my time talking people through parts of the process every day.

Shay O'Connor16:28

This is a biggie for most people. Everyone knows digitizing will be more efficient and cleaner, but you have to get support from stakeholders, both those making the final decision and those who'll operate the processes. Anthony, what advice do you have on getting buy-in?

Anthony Ngadimin17:02

The process needs to work early and often. We'd tried different solutions before, and we didn't want teammates thinking this was just another solution to learn that would crash again. It had to be reliable. It also had to roll out easily and seamlessly. Construction is a busy industry, and nobody has hours to learn new software, so it had to be easy for every team member, regardless of technical experience.

Anthony Ngadimin17:56

We run leak investigations, building envelope surveys and field reports day to day, so it had to adapt easily to all of those. And nothing's perfect; we always hit snags. When we do, we want support from a team that can get to the issues quickly, so resolving issues with speed was something we looked for too.

Jimmy Monahan18:48

Branding has always mattered. When Brian Sullivan started the company 12 years ago, the rule was that everything goes out looking the same. If a client gets a report from someone who hasn't been at the firm long enough to know the process by heart, and it looks nothing like the standard report they know and love, it's a bad look for your reputation.

Jimmy Monahan19:34

The other challenge was the higher-ups making the decisions. When we first looked at solutions years ago, the attitude was 'I want it to look exactly like this.' Sometimes you have to adjust your processes to the technology that's out there, and we actually streamlined our process in ways we'd never thought about.

Shay O'Connor20:03

The big thing we always find before the first process launches is adoption, from everybody in the field and in the office. It's all very well having a great idea and the right tool, but it's no use if people don't adopt it.

Jimmy Monahan20:30

We learned from a previous solution. It crashed, it was very limited, and it only worked on an iPad, so for people who didn't use iPads it was incredibly difficult. When you're working a long day and writing your report becomes a challenge, people resort to the way they know works. They stopped using it and went back to writing everything in Word and Excel.

Jimmy Monahan21:13

So when we started with FlowForma, we knew we'd need a beta test period. We picked individuals with different levels of technical savviness to try it, got their feedback and tweaked it accordingly. We also rolled out a simple process early, which let the team ask questions on something less critical to our operations.

Shay O'Connor21:54

So you have stakeholder buy-in, you've chosen the tool and done your testing. Which processes did you start with?

Anthony Ngadimin22:06

We started with the easy one, which will hopefully be a distant memory: our COVID checklist. Every team member had to complete it every day to confirm they weren't sick, and that let everyone get used to the interface. FlowForma works on the desktop and in the mobile app, so people could sort out the initial issues, like how to log in, before we rolled out more complex processes such as our field inspection reports and leak investigation reports.

Anthony Ngadimin22:47

Our bread-and-butter work is construction administration, where we go out to site and write field reports based on our inspections, so that was the biggest thing we wanted to tackle. People would observe things on site, come up with punch lists and quantities to track, and record observations, photographs and descriptions. We digitized that and created a template in FlowForma, and it kept everything in one spot, using lists, basically a big database that holds all your information. We didn't have to move between Excel for budgets and word processing software.

Shay O'Connor24:18

I'd imagine the field inspection and leak investigation reports used to involve a lot of handwriting and marked-up PDFs.

Anthony Ngadimin24:30

Our senior PMs used to mark everything up by hand on a printed copy or a PDF, and people can't read my handwriting. With FlowForma, we create the field report and it generates both a PDF and a Microsoft Word document. People go into that document, turn on track changes and make the changes they need, and everything lives in one document. Document control is seamless; we don't have multiple versions flying around.

Jimmy Monahan25:30

It makes things easier for everyone: the project coordinators checking grammar and formatting, and the senior PM and technical reviews. Track changes has changed my life quite a bit as someone who reviews a lot of reports. Clicking in Word is much friendlier than trying to free-write on a PDF with a stylus, and my handwriting is actually worse than Anthony's. The coordinators are much happier reviewing our products.

Anthony Ngadimin26:20

One other key thing: if we need to change the template, we don't have five admins making the same change over and over. We change the master template once and it applies to all our reports.

Shay O'Connor26:45

A general question everybody would like answered: what benefits has Sullivan Engineering seen since you started digitizing?

Jimmy Monahan27:01

There's satisfaction across the whole team. Doing more on the front end saves time, and I think it cuts our project coordinators' time in half, because instead of uploading the photos themselves, we're doing it at our end. That huge time saving leads to cost savings and lets them take on almost twice as many deliverables.

Jimmy Monahan27:31

It's also great for training. When multiple people mark up field reports by hand, it's hard to track and learn from. With track changes, the original author can see what tech review and the admins changed, which has been very useful for our training program.

Jimmy Monahan28:02

We've doubled in size over the last few years, and when you're bringing people on, you don't want to train them on multiple processes for the same deliverable. We rolled FlowForma out in probably a fourth of the time of any previous solution, and new team members now learn what we want, not old software that was going to become obsolete.

Anthony Ngadimin28:52

During onboarding, we looked at our field reporting process from beginning to end: the project manager putting the report together, the admins making changes, a different person on tech review. The question FlowForma posed was: how do you want it to be? Don't look at your current process as it is. Think outside the box about what can be done. No solution is perfect, but it made us think about how to make our process work in FlowForma.

Shay O'Connor29:46

Digitizing gives you that opportunity, especially once you get feedback and results from the data. You can see the end result you want and work back to get there quicker, better and easier.

Jimmy Monahan30:15

We're using three processes right now, and Anthony and I will keep building more. The field reporting process took longest, because it's our most robust report. But we built the COVID checklist in less than a day. The leak report took less than a week, and I mean an hour here and there, not a week of work, because it has a similar structure to the field report. Now that we have that skeleton, it will cut the time in half when we build another report type, like a roof survey.

Anthony Ngadimin31:12

Building on that, we don't have to code anything, and that's what drew me to the solution in the first place. I used to automate processes in Python, but you have to learn the programming language and it takes months. FlowForma still uses logic, but you don't have to learn any code or syntax.

Shay O'Connor31:42

That goes back to the idea of empowering people and becoming self-sufficient. Many organizations know they want digital, automation and better data, but don't come to the table knowing what they want. Wanting to be self-sufficient means you don't rely on programmers, or face the long-term effect of someone leaving and nobody knowing their code. I used to be a programmer, and every programmer who takes on someone else's work says 'I wouldn't have done it that way.' With FlowForma, you're just dealing with logic that's straightforward to change.

Shay O'Connor33:01

What takeaways would you share with the audience so far? Jimmy, I'll go to you.

Jimmy Monahan33:13

We had our end goal, but we probably only took the field report 50 to 75 percent of the way, because we had a lot of work coming in and we were hiring. Instead of trying to make it perfect, we decided to take off this one huge bottleneck. We'll eventually put the review process into FlowForma completely, but we used it for data collection and document generation to make our project coordinators' lives easier. The team was frustrated with the old solution and training was becoming difficult.

Jimmy Monahan34:05

We rolled it out and, knock on wood, things have been going well. From a reviewing point of view, it's cut my review time tremendously. Opening a Word document and dropping in my comments has made life a lot easier.

Anthony Ngadimin34:43

Building our solution wasn't a one-person show. We needed a strong, diverse team, with strengths that cover each other's weaknesses. Mine is wanting everything 100 percent perfect, but if we do that, we won't have a solution. What's the minimum viable product we can get out, and then make small changes, rather than trying to achieve perfection?

Anthony Ngadimin35:33

Keep it simple, which makes the rollout easier, and don't overthink it. You'll always get bugs, but you can tweak as you go. You can also roll out in stages, to a smaller pilot team before the whole company. That helped us sort out the initial issues: instead of 40 project managers ringing me with the same question, one small team asked us questions and we tackled those problems first.

Shay O'Connor36:28

As they say, perfection is the enemy of progress. Get something out there, get feedback and make the changes, and since you can make the changes yourselves, you can turn them around quickly.

Jimmy Monahan37:02

That was crucial for us. With FlowForma, the logic is easy to follow and set up. One big issue with our previous solution was that we couldn't make any changes on our end; we relied completely on the vendor. When there were major glitches, or a report printed across two pages, we couldn't move quickly to fix it. With FlowForma, we sometimes bring you in to help, but Anthony can hop in, see the issue and fix it, and we're back up and running.

Jimmy Monahan37:57

At one point it took months to get the previous company to fix something, maybe because we weren't a big enough fish, or because the person we dealt with had left. FlowForma gives us the opportunity to help ourselves when we need to.

Shay O'Connor38:15

It's also great for adoption. When people give feedback and see the results come in pretty much on cue, they buy in a lot quicker. If changes take weeks, people say 'I asked for this weeks ago and nothing's happened.' Adoption improves when they see feedback being applied.

Jimmy Monahan38:52

We set up biweekly meetings for a FlowForma team. If an issue comes up in our regular team meetings with project managers and senior consultants, it goes to that team and comes up every other week. If it's an emergency, we go outside the meeting, of course. Either way, it's not going to take months or years; we can react quickly.

Anthony Ngadimin39:29

It's good to separate what's essential from what's nice to have. If an issue is critical and affects our day-to-day operations, we get on it quickly. If it's nice to have, we can tell FlowForma it would be good to do this or connect to that.

Shay O'Connor39:53

That leads perfectly into the last question: what's next on the agenda?

Jimmy Monahan40:01

Roof surveys, building envelope surveys and proposals. I'd love to get our proposal process in. We have a million templates, and budgets differ by project type and location, so it gets confusing whether you're in New York or outside it. The goal is that someone can answer a series of questions and the correct budget charges, contracts, riders and standard scope-of-work language populate automatically.

Jimmy Monahan40:47

With a manual proposal process, your rates change every year, or legal wants new clauses added. When lots of people work on different templates, or someone saves a template on their desktop instead of a central location, they could put together something the company no longer accepts, and you're relying on people's ability to review. Digitizing that will be a long haul, but it will speed up our proposal turnaround, make everyone's life easier and thrill our clients.

Shay O'Connor41:46

We also talked about how the forms you create don't have to show everything on screen at once. You can put controls in the form: when you select this, that happens.

Anthony Ngadimin42:06

The logic is really nice. We can set parameters to show things only when they meet certain criteria, which keeps the form lean, so people only see the essentials they need. It's also easily adaptable: a report is a report, and the architecture is the same, so we can reuse what we built for field reporting and adapt it to a leak investigation, a building envelope survey or a roof survey.

Shay O'Connor43:06

Jimmy and Anthony, thank you for answering all these questions. We'll have a Q&A in a moment, but first a small bit of information: FlowForma is an application that sits on your Microsoft 365 environment. All the data is retained in your tenancy, so we never have your data, and we use the infrastructure you've already purchased.

Shay O'Connor43:46

Our takeaway for anybody looking to digitize is to just go for it. Jimmy and Anthony knew at the start it wasn't going to be a cakewalk. The reality is that everybody will be digitized in five years' time. The difference is that people who digitize now will have five years' worth of data to work from, and they'll have improved their processes, worked more efficiently and improved their margins.

Shay O'Connor44:21

You also have the ability to become self-sufficient, and once you have a supporter in the organization, you can achieve anything. We'd always encourage you to take a trial: don't just believe us, give it a go. These examples come from customers who reported the impact of digitizing to their management, and you don't see anything but positivity. I don't know any organization that has digitized and gone backwards. They keep progressing, and like Jimmy and Anthony, they always have the next thing ahead. With that, I'll hand over to Ellen for questions.

Ellen McCurtain46:03

Thank you all, that was great information. Please take a few moments to complete our webinar survey. Our first question is for Shay: as part of the digital process, are you gathering data and performing data analytics and BI, looking for new non-intuitive insights, and can you use predictive analytics to predict outcomes based on historical results?

Shay O'Connor46:33

That isn't machine learning, but education through the accumulation of your data. FlowForma has the mechanisms to collect data, find the bottlenecks in your process and derive different scenarios, so you can make decisions based on that information. It won't make those changes for you automatically, but it provides the data to make the decisions. It will tell you when something is late, send notifications, tap people on the shoulder to do their work, or move it on to someone who's available.

Ellen McCurtain47:38

Another question for you: any advice on how I can improve communication and engagement with suppliers and contractors in my processes?

Shay O'Connor47:54

Something we didn't touch on is that you can include external people in your processes. Processes are broken down into steps, and you can decide that certain steps are performed by externals who aren't part of your Active Directory or your Microsoft 365 environment. They only see what they need to see: they fill in their step, attach documents and submit, and it's seamlessly part of the full process. Some companies use this a lot, especially with subcontractors and suppliers.

Ellen McCurtain48:54

This question is for Anthony: what challenges have you seen with adopting new technologies, especially with a distributed workforce?

Anthony Ngadimin49:00

Resistance, mainly. People are used to doing things the same way. But we have to be mindful that whatever change we make, we make with our team in mind. We want to empower them and not repeat the mistakes of the past. We'd used different solutions that had issues, so we want to gain their trust by rolling out a solution that's reliable.

Ellen McCurtain49:47

This one is for Jimmy: you mentioned you're not tech-savvy yourself. How have you adapted so fast, how have other non-tech-savvy people adopted it, and can you speak about the learning curve?

Jimmy Monahan50:04

When I talked about tech-savviness, I meant the people creating the processes. For the rollout, as Anthony said, the key was cutting out the noise: small steps where minimal information is entered. If you open a process and there are 35 questions right off the bat, people can jam up or not save properly, so we added lots of small steps. The biggest headaches were making sure everyone knew their passwords, signed in and downloaded the app, and that was pretty easy.

Jimmy Monahan51:00

You need a little more savviness and patience to build the processes, and Anthony has the patience for that. But if you have 100 people, you won't have 100 people creating processes. You'll compartmentalize it so you keep the branding, and nobody changes a process without approval from whoever oversees the operation.

Anthony Ngadimin51:35

It's also good to have a strong team behind you that understands the solution. Sometimes I'll think about a bug for days, then discuss it with my colleague and she'll suggest a simple solution. And during onboarding, the FlowForma team walked us through the language FlowForma uses, like steps, processes and the logic behind them. That let us communicate within our own team and solve issues ourselves, without involving FlowForma too much, so we could be self-sufficient.

Ellen McCurtain52:38

Also for you, Anthony: since switching to FlowForma, do you find staff are more satisfied?

Anthony Ngadimin52:48

Absolutely. Every time we get a bug, I ask how this process compares with the others. Nothing is perfect right off the bat, but it's about making small changes. Our team members no longer have to resize photos, which is mundane and boring, so they get to do more of what they like, whether that's going out on site, learning a new skill or walking the dog. With people moving between companies right now, keeping your teammates happy is key.

Jimmy Monahan53:44

One example was very noticeable early on. The old way, we'd tell our coordinators which photo numbers we wanted in the report and what the captions should be, and during review we'd find a photo was wrong or damaged. Now that it happens on the operations side in FlowForma, we catch problems earlier, in drafting. Instead of my review saying 'change this, this and this,' it's already been caught, and we get the report out in a day instead of two.

Anthony Ngadimin54:37

Some of the best feedback we get is from the admins, who probably benefit most. Say technical review comments that the margins in a report aren't right. Admins work with about five project managers who each send out two reports a week, so the same change multiplies quickly. Now they call us, we fix the master template in probably less than five minutes, and they never have to deal with it again. The change is permanent.

Ellen McCurtain55:36

Our final question is for Shay: is it possible to build reports and dashboards from the data collected in business processes?

Shay O'Connor55:50

The quick answer is yes. You're now collecting normalized data consistently across all your processes, automatically as the process runs. You can fill SharePoint lists or push data to existing data sets, and because FlowForma sits on Microsoft 365, you can push the data out to Power BI, Excel or whatever you like. The big thing is that you can stand over your data, because you put in the rules that govern how it's collected.

Ellen McCurtain57:01

Thank you very much. We're just about at time, so please join me in thanking Jimmy, Anthony and Shay for their presentations, and our sponsor FlowForma. If you have any additional questions, click the email us button on your console and we'll share them with our presenters. Thanks again for your time today, and have a great day.