The power of process automation: improving productivity with a connected workforce

Ellie (Oliver Kinross)00:00

Hello everyone, my name is Ellie, and on behalf of the organizers, Oliver Kinross, I'd like to welcome you to this session as part of the USA Digital Construction Online series. Thank you to our sponsor for today's session, FlowForma. Submit questions for the speakers at any time in the box on the right of your screen.

Ellie (Oliver Kinross)00:25

Our panelists today are Shay O'Connor, Head of Solutions at FlowForma; Cheryl Vang, Senior Process Excellence Manager at Mortenson; KiSeok Jeon, Vice President and Director of Digital Transformation at STV; and Alex Zeines, Chief Technology Officer at JRM Construction. Our moderator is Ursula Cullen, Digital Marketing at FlowForma.

Shay O'Connor00:48

Welcome, everybody. We're always keen to hear direct experience from the construction industry. According to McKinsey, construction is lagging behind other industries in its digital evolution, so hearing from people who are on the front line of these projects is important. The way we progress is by sharing what we know.

Shay O'Connor02:07

Organizations come to digital from different starting points: data, drones, the internet of things, business intelligence, process automation. They're all valid. What matters is that everybody shares a common goal, and that once the green light is given, which isn't easy in construction because you need senior sponsorship, these areas pull together. Our expertise is process automation: workflow, forms and document generation.

Shay O'Connor04:39

Everybody wants to be mobile and everybody wants an ROI, whether that's money, time or environmental. Above all, you want people using their skills for what they were brought in to do, not hemmed in by admin and trying to find out who to give something to.

Ursula Cullen05:42

Thanks, Shay. Over the next hour and a half we'll deep dive into process automation and digital transformation with some key influencers in the US. If you have a question, use the Q&A box and we'll get through as many as we can.

Ursula Cullen06:42

Cheryl, construction organizations across the globe are looking to digitize rapidly, and manual paper and Excel processes seem to be a thing of the past. What process trends are you seeing for 2022 and beyond?

Cheryl Vang07:06

Most of the world has been operating in what some might call the microwave era. A microwave represents speed: we want our food hot and quick, and that expectation is true in construction today. The biggest trend I see is having the right tools at our employees' fingertips. Many of our people are out in the field, and very few sit in a trailer behind a computer.

Cheryl Vang07:53

Most of our employees carry a cell phone or an iPad, so we've enabled tools on those mobile devices so they don't have to walk or drive to a trailer to do their job. We use SharePoint and Teams for collaboration. If a superintendent transfers employees between projects and needs to notify HR, we've moved away from paper forms to Microsoft Forms and SharePoint lists, and we automate where it makes sense, from Power Apps to robots that do our layouts.

KiSeok Jeon09:20

I agree. I've seen a lot of use cases out of the Power Platform recently. It's all about automation that connects different users and databases. Integration is the other hot trend: once technology stacks open up to integrate with other platforms, that's where we see much more collaboration. The whole idea of the digital twin is integration.

Shay O'Connor10:33

Construction is at the bottom of the digital transformation graph, because it's been neglected for a while. The bonus is that the technologies that arrived in the meantime let organizations make a better choice. They almost have too much choice. Instead of arriving at a corner shop with limited options, they've arrived at a big supermarket with options down every aisle.

Shay O'Connor11:44

The organizations we've seen do well focus on their direct needs, the skill sets they have in house and what they want to achieve as an organization. And because there are so many options, a lot of organizations aren't making decisions: we'll do that next week, or after this project. Once you start, keep the momentum going, because if it stalls, people say they've done enough. I don't know any organization that has reversed out of digital transformation.

Alex Zeines13:29

It can be very difficult to implement solutions when you don't have strong partners in the organization. It's a challenge I deal with daily: we're at the last mile on a lot of these problems, but the business isn't ready to say that's the right solution for them. Right now everyone's so busy that they don't have time for new process and change.

Ursula Cullen14:40

That moves us on to bridging the gap between technology and people. Alex, how do you advise organizations to address these challenges, and who should be heading up the strategy?

Alex Zeines15:18

As the lead technologist, I spend most of my time making the business a partner on every project. The stakeholders you're building these processes with have to be involved and have a voice in how it gets improved. I also advocate for people and process before technology. Unless you clearly understand the information flowing from point A to point B, and everyone involved and why, it's very difficult to create the right solution.

Alex Zeines16:28

Ultimately you want to get away from clerical activities that are monotonous, duplicative or error-prone, and move people to monitoring the process for quality control, whether that's safety, insurance or contract management. Elevate the people in those parts of the workflow so they can do their job better.

KiSeok Jeon17:30

My title has digital transformation in it, but it's not really about technology. It's about people and process, and technology is a subset of that. I explain my role as supporting people in achieving what they need to do, so it's more of a cultural or behavior change than a technology change. People transformation comes first, and then technology becomes a support. The successful deployments I've seen involved people in the process, rather than saying here's the tool, go and use it.

Cheryl Vang19:05

How you package the communication is also really important. The message hits differently when it comes from your frontline leaders rather than your senior leaders, and without their buy-in, it's hard to trust the message. Identify your decision-makers and your doers, because the doers are closer to the work and have the knowledge you need to build a sound process.

Shay O'Connor19:45

More and more, organizations realize it's people first that makes the difference. Many have been through the pain of forcing a system on people. When you feel ownership of a change, you go along with it. We describe process as knowledge transfer: your knowledge has to be part of the technology. It's like lifting a couch: it's a lot easier with two people.

Alex Zeines21:40

One strategy I use to get buy-in is to find a champion in operations, an early adopter who is more willing to accept the tools. That person can say to a foreman or superintendent: look at what I'm doing, and how much better it's making my life. That lets you get enrollment laterally.

Shay O'Connor22:27

That's the lighthouse approach: go to the department that wants to do this and show everybody else. Early adopters are gold dust, because they're part of the organization. If they say it's good, people listen.

Ursula Cullen23:32

What characteristics should people look for in that initial champion?

Alex Zeines23:47

Usually it's a person who already has a voice in the organization and is respected. They need to be well known, or senior with some authority. That's a hard box to check, because senior people often hear about the technology from people who are younger or more in touch with it.

Ursula Cullen24:27

KiSeok, beyond adoption, what other challenges do organizations face with automation, when deadlines and budgets are tight?

KiSeok Jeon24:58

It goes back to willingness: the right message from the right people at the right level, whether corporate or project, and the willingness of the people doing the work to follow it. When the pandemic hit, I worked on an alternate care facility. The message from the top was: let's make it work. Everyone was open, communicating and transparent, and in three months we had a temporary facility up and fully operational. In construction, that's amazing.

KiSeok Jeon27:01

Automation was critical, because in the first week designers were working from home and had to communicate with people in the field. It was little pieces from every component that added up, whether Bluebeam, SharePoint or Autodesk. It didn't matter what the tool was, as long as we got the right data across. Now, a few years into the pandemic, I see people going back to how they used to operate, and that willingness is going to be one of the most challenging parts of our industry.

Shay O'Connor28:06

For me, a lot of pushback comes from people who have been in the business a long time: we've always done it this way, I pick up the phone, or I write it on the back of a piece of paper. You're changing the way people operate. Instead of shouting at somebody 17 floors down, you now have a device to request sign-off. The biggest challenge is hearts and minds. Once you have those, there are plenty of technologies you can use.

Alex Zeines29:57

We operate mostly in interiors, and a short interior job can carry as much overhead as a large infrastructure job. We do on average four or five hundred projects a year in New York City alone, and the volume of paperwork, processing and risk analysis is extreme. Where a large contractor might have one person doing contract risk analysis, I'd have to hire five or six. Automation becomes critical for companies in this space to scale without tripping over themselves.

KiSeok Jeon31:52

Before STV I worked for a global organization, and the message I try to get across to larger corporations is that automation needs to come from the strategy level and flow down into projects, so processes and data collection are streamlined. Instead, it happens in silo pockets within projects, the knowledge stays contained, and we reinvent the wheel on every new project.

Shay O'Connor33:14

At a recent seminar, innovators said digital transformation is the worst term for this, because senior people say: we're already digital, we've got PDFs, laptops and iPads. The point is to organize processes efficiently, so you're not rooting around your inbox for a PDF to find the status of something. You're getting efficient to provide a better process.

Ursula Cullen34:19

Our next topic is turning paper into data. Construction has always had piles of paper moving between offices and sites, and COVID taught the industry to reduce it. KiSeok, how has your organization used data, and what tips can you share?

KiSeok Jeon35:30

I start from the lowest-hanging fruit: inspections. If we capture field inspection data the right way and bring it into a common data environment, we can learn a lot. It could be as simple as today's weather, associated with performance on the job. Collect that by region and location and you gain knowledge we're currently missing out on.

Cheryl Vang36:46

Data adds meat to your claim. It supports your storytelling on why your organization is good enough, or why it needs to be better. On paper, it's harder to create transparency and prove you needed additional resources. When data is digitized and accessible, and you can measure metrics, it's easier to prove your point.

Ursula Cullen37:43

That reminds me of a customer in engineering who had their processes in Excel. Once they digitized, they could prove to their clients they could turn jobs around in one day instead of two, and guarantee it, because they had the data behind them.

Shay O'Connor38:37

Data provides the fuel for so many decisions. The organizations collecting it now will, in five years' time, have five years' worth of data over those that wait. And on KiSeok's point, if it was wet that day and the work took 10% longer, you know that if wet weather is forecast for that operation, you need to plan for it. The data has to be collected accurately in smart digital forms, normalized, not free text.

Alex Zeines40:47

Data is becoming a necessary tool for businesses to adapt and stay competitive. Other industries are effective at it, but in construction we're not collecting quality data at the intake, so it's junk in, junk out. The first process I re-engineer is the intake process, so we get quality information from every source.

Alex Zeines41:34

Next, the information needs context: over time, in relation to other activities and specific projects. That's how you get to actionable decisions and the key performance indicators you want to drive change with. I'm working with every department head to identify what's important to them that they can't quantify today, and working backwards to the data quality.

Alex Zeines42:23

A big one right now is project progress, which is entirely subjective. New scanning and modeling tools let us say we're at 78% completion across the whole project, with the status of every trade, with around 95% confidence. We're seeing it across every business process: safety, inspection and quality control, punch lists, and supply chain risk with subcontractors.

KiSeok Jeon43:44

Shay's point about normalization is critical. At STV we have design, construction management and asset management, so we look at the whole life cycle of the built environment. What's missing in our industry is a standard way to flow the information. That's why the silo pockets happen and everyone invents their own way to use the data.

Alex Zeines44:32

Everyone has their own naming convention for the same piece of information. Even Procore struggles with it, because every construction company builds its own classification for these processes. There's almost no standardization, and it creates chaos.

Ursula Cullen44:58

Topic five: improving risk management. Alex, how can digital process automation improve risk management?

Alex Zeines45:13

Probably on the machine learning side. I'm piloting automatic text extraction and analysis tools on contracts, certificates of insurance and purchase orders, to find the risk factors that matter to us, such as punitive damages or onerous indemnification clauses. People can only do that so well, and things fall through the cracks.

Alex Zeines46:13

Sometimes we're on a job and don't have the right insurance in time. General liability is fine, but maybe the job is within 50 feet of a railroad and needs railroad protection insurance, and nobody thought about it until the work started. Now we're 100% liable. It's very important to catch this early.

Shay O'Connor46:55

Risk is where senior stakeholders raise their eyebrows. It can be as straightforward as a project initiation process where every item is checked off, and if something's missing, it kicks off another action. You can't go past a step until those things are done, so later in the project you know you're covered.

Cheryl Vang48:42

When you digitize, you create a single source of truth. You're not running to multiple places to work out who has the most accurate information. You can control who has access to which folder or document. And if a tornado wipes out your building, the files in the filing cabinet are gone, while data in the cloud is spread across data centers.

KiSeok Jeon49:48

Cost, quality and schedule, as simple as that. There's a lot of labor effort required today, and if we automate those components, there are a lot of risks we can prevent.

Shay O'Connor50:18

Hospitals introduced checklists decades ago: you do all of these things before the next thing, and someone checks it. Construction needs that.

Ursula Cullen50:43

Shay, can you share examples of organizations that have successfully integrated tools and solutions, and the benefits they've seen?

Shay O'Connor51:14

Most organizations already have core systems in place, such as finance, HR, personnel and logistics, and they'll keep using them. When they add a layer on top to get more efficient, that layer has to talk to those systems. Otherwise you get silos, people re-keying information they looked up, and data spreading through the organization that's worse than useless, because it leads to bad decisions. Have a consistent layer that talks to everything, and one source of truth.

Alex Zeines53:36

Data integration requires a special set of skills. Plenty of tools offer plug-and-play integrations, but you need to understand what each solution needs, what it can take in and what you want back, and often you have to transform the information. I recommend a data warehouse or data lake as an intermediary and one source of truth, orchestrating everything across environments, paired with a strong integration partner. That keeps you agile as things change.

KiSeok Jeon55:51

Our industry is unique: there's corporate-level data, project-level data, and every solution has its own information. Data governance for construction will be unique to what we do and how we deliver, and it's the key component we need to start addressing.

Ursula Cullen56:46

Alex, you mentioned low code and no code. Is that the route for construction right now?

Alex Zeines57:03

It's one of the more common and accessible ways to approach things. It depends on the resources you can acquire. If you can bring on software developers and fund that life cycle, there's value in that. But if you're working with people closer to the business process, at the analyst level, low-code and no-code tools are ideal, because you can rapidly prototype things for the organization to test, in some cases almost in real time.

Alex Zeines58:17

For data governance, I pretty much only use no-code and low-code tools. They're very quick for master data management of projects, vendors, subcontractors and cost codes, which almost no product includes as part of its platform.

Shay O'Connor58:57

The one advantage construction has is that what's available now is pretty neat. Low code and no code weren't so great six or seven years ago. I was a developer and an analyst, and when no code came along I didn't want to believe it. The reality is it achieves a lot, and for construction it's an opportunity to catch up quickly.

KiSeok Jeon60:26

Ideally, with a minimum level of governance around cybersecurity, we should distribute these tools widely to the people in the field and in the office who will use them to innovate continuously. If you give people the right tools, innovation can happen everywhere.

Cheryl Vang61:10

I came from financial services, which is highly regulated, with an IT structure covering every role you can think of. Construction isn't regulated in the same way, so IT departments aren't staffed like that, and knowledge gets lost. That makes low code and no code ideal for construction.

Alex Zeines61:56

I'll reinforce that. I've been able to do software development in-house, but it isn't practical for most.

Ursula Cullen62:19

Topic seven is delivering customer experience. Customers now demand quicker closing times and granular insight into projects. KiSeok, how can process automation support the customer experience?

KiSeok Jeon63:08

I go straight to the digital twin. We think of it as 3D, but the data is what drives it, and that's where process automation comes in. Take a field inspector on site: what they go through to collect information, and how we capture and process it, so next time we cover their safety issues and their efficiency. That can only be told by the data collected; otherwise it's just storytelling.

Cheryl Vang64:27

Process automation improves the customer experience because it sets the expectation. Customers consistently get what they expect, which removes a lot of stress. It also creates transparency. Your customers are sometimes the people within your organization, and you can see where the bottleneck is, what the processing time and cycle time are, and get better over time.

Shay O'Connor65:31

Cheryl took the words out of my mouth: standardized outputs. One organization wanted its brand to include how it supported customers, so everybody saw the same reports and terminology, no matter who was entering data or how people moved in and out of projects. Accurate and standardized data builds trust. And if customers can take part in the process themselves, even better.

Ursula Cullen67:36

That concludes our panel discussion. Thank you to our panelists. Please pop any questions into the chat. Shay, over to you.

Shay O'Connor68:03

We've worked with construction companies from New Zealand to the west coast of the States for years. FlowForma sits in Office 365, and it's a no-code platform, so you can create your processes without the need to code. You can give sandboxes to individuals and promote their processes through UAT before they go live, so innovation keeps going.

Shay O'Connor69:45

In a no-code environment you can create things quite rapidly. When your internal clients ask for changes, you can make them fast, and when people see their feedback acted on, you get a lot of buy-in. It's a domino effect.

Shay O'Connor71:01

FlowForma is an app in Microsoft Office 365, and all of your data stays within your tenancy. You can connect to your databases, but FlowForma never holds the data. This is a typical landing page, with general information, a news feed and links to different processes.

Shay O'Connor72:05

Forms are created automatically, and the steps in the process are always shown across the top, sequential or parallel. A customer told us a byproduct of using FlowForma was that people got educated in their processes, because they could see what's involved. This concrete pre-pour process looks different from the first one, but it has the same familiar look and feel. That's on purpose, for adoption: buy-in for the first process brings buy-in for the second, third and fourth.

Shay O'Connor73:27

In the designer, a single environment for everything the process needs, the steps and data are on the left, a preview of the form on the right, and rules in the middle: how the workflow moves, who sees what, data integration, emails, document creation, barcodes, QR codes, PDF conversion, alerts and reassignments, all with no code.

Shay O'Connor74:41

Because it's no code, you can make changes really quickly. I add a required yes or no question, 'Are there safety issues?', and move it to the top. The form builds itself on the right, and there's a visual form designer if you want to change the layout.

Shay O'Connor75:44

Next I add a step. I can create a new one or reuse an existing one, so I copy in a safety observation step I built before, make it the second step, and hide it by default, because FlowForma follows lean principles: you only see what you need to see.

Shay O'Connor76:50

Then a hide/show step rule called Safety: if 'Are there safety issues?' equals yes, show the safety observation step. In the preview, answer yes and the safety observation details appear straight away. Forms expand and contract based on your logic.

Shay O'Connor78:21

This default landing page holds lots of processes, which can also be distributed as links, and every process is automatically rendered for the mobile app as soon as you create it, so people are mobile straight away.

Shay O'Connor78:55

As KiSeok said, to empower people to innovate, you can give them sandboxes to try their ideas. A governance area promotes processes to a QA environment, where they're validated before going live for everyone. The easiest way to find out more is to try it: you can get a trial at any time, set up in your environment or ours.

Ursula Cullen80:16

Thanks, Shay. It's great to see a demonstration after talking about the different solutions. Our specialists can give any organization a personalized demonstration, so follow up with us after the webinar. This slide is part of our construction infographic, in the handouts, which takes you step by step through kickstarting process automation, and there are construction success stories on our website.

Ursula Cullen82:05

Shay, someone asked: is it possible to build reports and dashboards in FlowForma?

Shay O'Connor82:20

Yes. It comes back to collecting normalized information. FlowForma stores your data and can also write it into your separate databases. You can create dashboards per environment, and because it sits in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, connect your information to Power BI. So the quick answer is yes, and you can do it in many ways.

Ursula Cullen83:08

Cheryl, when you started your digital transformation journey, how did you decide which process to automate first?

Cheryl Vang83:24

I ask my customers: what's your critical function? If this doesn't get done, is the world going to end? That identifies very quickly what needs prioritizing. Working on those critical things, you find sub-processes that bleed off them, and you eventually get down to the day-two items.

Shay O'Connor84:05

Some organizations start with a complex process because it will have a big impact. But back to hearts and minds: start with something tangible that can be turned around quickly, so people buy in, then move to the complex ones. Walk before you run.

KiSeok Jeon84:53

I lead digital internally at STV, and we offer this as a service to clients. The first thing I ask is: do you know where you stand? A digital maturity assessment, through us or anyone else, tells you where you are, so you can set priorities for what to improve.

Ursula Cullen85:32

Thank you very much, everyone. We're coming up to time. Thank you to all our panelists for joining today. Ellie, back to you.

Ellie (Oliver Kinross)85:49

A massive thank you to our moderator Ursula, to all our panelists, to our sponsor FlowForma, and to everyone in the audience. You can download the handouts next to the question box, and you'll receive a short survey after the session. From all of us at USA Digital Construction Online, thank you and goodbye.