What the Industry is Really Looking For

Struggling with disconnected data in construction? This episode is your guide to unifying and automating data flow for smarter projects. Fraser Gallop and Steve Gross tackle data silos and manual reporting, revealing how ERP integration can transform tracking, cost control, and forecasting. Learn to build intuitive dashboards and gain real-time visibility to maintain margins and manage change orders effectively. Perfect for executives and project managers ready to harness data as a competitive edge. Listen now to streamline your systems and improve decision-making.

Learn more about Steve’s work with eCMS Cloud Construction ERP Software at  Computer Guidance Corporation or Fraser’s work transforming construction data into actionable insights at Onware.

Transcript

Fraser Gallop 0:00

Okay, welcome to episode three of Hard Hats and Data Chats. Uh, I'm Fraser Gallup, and I'm here with Steve Gross. And today we're going to talk about what the industry is really looking for. So, Steve, um, what's coming up on your calendar?

Steve Gross 0:17

Well, top on our minds, Fraser is our customer focus event in July. We're changing it up a little bit this year. We're holding it at uh the Four Seasons Resort in Scottsdale on very scenic uh venue. And uh we're really excited to uh meet with our customers and provide them with insights on how to optimize the use of our ERP system ECMS.

Fraser Gallop 0:46

That's I'm gonna be attending as well, and I'm I'm really looking forward to this event in in July. I think you guys do like one of kind of the the best user conferences, uh, best user conference experiences. Uh, one of the the really I think great things about that event, um, having attended like a few different times now, is just like the community uh spirit that that is present there. And I think one of the you know the the nice things about about your um customer focus event is you get the same people coming year after year, and they they kind of form these friendships so that they can ask, you know, a colleague in a different company a question if they have one on their systems. And you know, it's so much more effective than you know randomly googling stuff on the internet to to have your buddies from from the user conference that you can rely on for help and support.

Steve Gross 1:43

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm looking forward to seeing you there, Ferrasia. What about you? What do you got going on other than our event?

Fraser Gallop 1:50

I I've got uh Tableau conference coming up in two weeks. Um so this this is gonna be my 11th Tableau conference this year. And uh I've I've including the two years for COVID where it was a virtual event, but I'll I'll count otherwise I'd lose my streak of 11 streak conferences, so I'll I'll count the two COVID years. Um, and then this is gonna be the second year that uh I've been asked to present. Uh so I'm gonna be talking about um executive KPI dashboards, um, which is actually kind of related to our theme and what we're gonna be talking about today. Um, you know, more around like what the needs and expectations of the the modern construction leaders are and and what they're trying to get um from from their data.

Steve Gross 2:39

Yeah, that's a great segue. Absolutely. Uh very uh apropos topic.

Fraser Gallop 2:48

Where I I kind of wanted to kick things off is we often kind of talk about sources of truth. Um, you know, whether it's like one big database or consolidating stuff across finance operations and the field teams. That's not really the reality of things. I think between you and I, like we're talking to lots of different customers and and they don't really have the one source of truth. It's it's there's many different sources of truth. I'm actually kind of going through this exercise right now where we're kind of setting up data warehouses and we have to kind of do this analysis to say what are the different source systems that exist in in a construction company. If you take up the different source systems, you could have scheduling, time cards, payroll, HR, CRM, estimating, ERP, project management, all in separate databases. Yeah. That's uh eight different systems right there. And you may have an ERP that can do your payroll and your time card systems, but there are tools that are out there for that. You're you're obviously more focused on the ERP side, but how how often do you kind of come across companies where where they do have eight to ten different systems?

Steve Gross 3:59

All the time. You know, uh construction companies can tend to be a bit decentralized. There's um a lot of managerial talent in the field running jobs. And sometimes those individuals may tend to manage their work from a spreadsheet or their own tools that they developed throughout their career, you know, as opposed to uh something that's within the ERP system. And that that's fine, except that they're suddenly managing the job on one playbook and the finance team is managing the company on another playbook. And those two books are may not have the same data or they might not be as current, maybe not as of the same date. So it's really difficult to manage the entire team if everybody's not on that same playbook.

Fraser Gallop 4:50

So yeah, it's it's like one of the red flags when we're talking to people is you'll have this PM that comes along and says, Oh, yeah, I downloaded an app to do some task, right? And it's like you're creating this island of data that only you have access to. And if that app goes away, where does that data end up at the end of the day, right?

Steve Gross 5:10

Right. Absolutely. And you know, certain individuals may have certain capabilities and talents, and you don't want to diminish that in any way, but there has to be some consistency. And, you know, whatever the secret sauce is that they're using to maintain margin on their project, you know, that those results need to flow in to whatever reporting tool you're using so that everybody's on that same page. So yeah.

Fraser Gallop 5:41

And that's where like we we were, I think we're both hearing from the leaders that they want to have more real-time visibility in into what's happening on the jobs, that they don't want to wait until the end of the month. Um, and so they're looking for those dashboards and that access to data in a way that they they haven't um wanted in the past, right?

Steve Gross 6:01

Yeah. You know, it's it's like a lot of things in life, leadership is all about messaging and uh stressing what's important, what metrics are important, and and getting that message out and those metrics out to all the people under you so that they're all operating under that ecosystem or those those rules. And this is really part and parcel of that whole problem, reporting and and uh getting everything in one in one place on one set of tools.

Fraser Gallop 6:33

Yeah. And we've gone and and done projects where they'll say high priority is that we we need a labor dashboard. We need to like look at our labor productivity and and build a dashboard. And then we'll follow up on that and hear, well, we're not really getting great adoption on the labor dashboard. And it's like you've identified a need for this tool, but then the leadership is not necessarily using the tool. And the accounting guys made sure it was correct, the finance guys validated all the numbers and everything. But um, because leadership is not pushing everybody else in the organization to take advantage of this great tool, it kind of falls flat. So having buy-in from the top is is is super important, I feel. Um, you know, when we we started doing um Tableau and working with analytics, you know, 10 years ago, it was more of this like grassroots thing, just like the PM that downloaded the app on their phone and to do something cool. The dashboards were were that kind of grassroots movement. Um, but to to see it make a change and impact at an organizational level, you do have to have the leadership on board from from the start as to you know what they're looking for and what those those indicators are going to be.

Steve Gross 7:40

Yeah, absolutely. That's that's very important. It's part of the strategy, part of the approach to run an efficient organization. Um, the other thing I think that's important, not only does it pull this information together, but you know, I mentioned briefly earlier uh the timeliness part of it, that the statistics or the metrics that you're using, that they be as late as current as possible so that it affords the management team with time to react to any problems that have raised their head, you know, to identify those problems, I guess is what I'm trying to say, to make them noticeable so that you can take action and corrective action in time to recover from a margin perspective is another part of what we're talking about, I think, for sure.

Fraser Gallop 8:27

Mm-hmm. Change orders is is a great example of that because you you could be using your ERP for doing your change orders. You could be using like a third-party PM system, but getting visibility on those as as soon as possible is something key to telling the whole story of the job, right? If you're not including all that stuff that's potential and you're seeing your margin is is um kind of being eroded on the job, you you want to include that extra information because then maybe there is a push to get some of that stuff uh finalized and approved, right?

Steve Gross 9:01

Absolutely. Yeah, getting it approved and uh those are change orders are cost events. They're a form of a cost event. So is it in scope or out of scope? Hopefully it's out of scope so you can make some money off that and keep that margin uh percentage where you want it to be. So yeah, the the that kind of uh those kind of field inputs, the information that happens day to day really needs to flow in in some in some fashion so that the dashboard you're looking at reflects those those items.

Fraser Gallop 9:34

One of the things in in terms of the the dashboards, I think is to kind of take the approach that you want to get something that's intuitive and and not overwhelming. We've kind of gone through this exercise many different times where we'll build an initial dashboard and then have to kind of go back to it. Sometimes it's over the course of years, like we're going back and keeping changing the KPIs and the things that are being shown on the dashboard as the organization uses that and decides these are the things that we care about today. It's not something that you just build it once and say, this is the dashboard, we're never gonna touch it again. Um it it can be an iterative approach to say, now we don't need these anymore, but we have these three new things that we want to start looking at. Yes. Um and the approach of like having the dashboard in place and making sure that the team is reviewing that dashboard and working from that dashboard and getting that in place is I think the key thing uh to improving as an organization, right?

Steve Gross 10:30

And and the and the training on how to use it and what it means to your job or what what you're doing for the company. And I like that the comment you made about the iterative process because I think in reality, what happens is once you come up with a dashboard, which is great, something, some metric is being presented that is deemed important, often what happens is users find, okay, now that I understand this, what I really need is this. I need that same information with a little bit more.

Speaker 2 10:58

Yeah.

Steve Gross 10:59

And then we're really, you know, that's the uh, you know, that's really what we need. So so I think it's it's one of those kind of things where you, as as people get accustomed to using the tool, often the they uh tweak or adjust what it's presenting once they understand how they can benefit from it.

Fraser Gallop 11:21

Steve, last time, I think, uh, or the time before, we had talked about you had done some work to collect quantities data as part of the timekeeping um with one of your customers. And uh you want to maybe just recap kind of what you did in the in that uh in that use case?

Steve Gross 11:40

Yeah, well they they were uh you know looking to do some really good productivity reporting and they were uh had the discipline, the reporting discipline going to report man hours weekly, but they also needed the quantity as well. So what's a good way to capture quantities? Why don't we just put it on the timesheet? So we added columns for that on the on their electronic timesheet that the you could enter the quantity next to the superintendent's name or something like that that was leading that activity, and it really looked out nicely.

Fraser Gallop 12:11

And and then you you've kind of gone from just reporting on you know, this is how much time we spent on the job this week to this is how much we accomplished on the job this week. Exactly as well.

Steve Gross 12:21

Adding a whole other dimension to their reporting on these actions.

Fraser Gallop 12:26

Yeah, and that can tell you lots of of information. But what would be the next stage after that? So if you want to do an analysis using the schedule, because we we did 100 units this week, but we had planned to do 300, how are you seeing people would would do that kind of analysis today?

Steve Gross 12:43

Well, they take those quantities and they and the quantities draw at percent complete. So they either take the quantities and put put push them into the schedule, or or they compute the percent complete and push that into the schedule, which you know is a major piece of information from a scheduling perspective. What percent complete are we on this task? Helps you forecast the timeline and so on.

Fraser Gallop 13:08

And and you've probably seen the same thing. I can remember one analyst uh showing me how they accomplished that. In their schedule, none of their tasks or none of their cost codes actually aligned with what they had in the ERP. So they they had this kind of gargantuan task of like taking all the data out of the ERP of what they've accomplished and trying to realign that back to what they had in the schedule. Um, you know, being a very manual and labor-intensive task to do that analysis. So if you're thinking about the data from the beginning and that you want to be able to report on that and an understanding of that productivity, you're gonna take action to make sure that your cost codes are aligned across the board from estimating to your schedule to your actual ERP, right?

Steve Gross 13:53

Yeah, absolutely.

Fraser Gallop 13:57

That kind of leads into some of the takeaways that we wanted to come to at the end here, what the industry is is looking for. And I think one of the things is integration is key. Uh if you're if your ERP has a place in the database to consolidate the data from maybe some of these third-party cloud services that are more likely to change, look at doing that integration and moving that data into your ERP's database. Um what would be another another thing to kind of improve that that you would see, Steve?

Steve Gross 14:30

Integrating systems is is so important, and there's so many pieces to the puzzle and running an efficient construction company and and winning at jobs and maintaining your margin and uh you know, tying them all together is is key. And you need as much information as possible. And your example about what impact does the quantities have on the schedule, big time impact, you know, and another another example might be you get into this productivity reporting for your crews. You know, labor, labor is such a big thing these days, availability of workers and so on. I think a lot of contractors are having to outsource some of their labor, subcontract out some things, but they may want to still track the productivity of those outsourced workers. So applying that same timekeeping discipline and quantity capturing discipline to subcontractors is is like the next thing. So that you can be m monitoring that component of your labor as well. So there's another example where if you could integrate and capture time for the subcontractors' forces as well as the units they've completed, that you can manage them like you can manage your own forces in terms of what they're accomplished in someone.

Fraser Gallop 15:48

And and moving from just capturing it on a piece of paper or in uh some kind of island of information and doing the import of that is kind of going to be a key part of that that process, right? So that it does enable and unlock that real time visibility and warnings.

Steve Gross 16:05

Absolutely. Yeah, it's all tied together, that's for sure.

Fraser Gallop 16:11

Bringing things together and giving that uh clarity and confidence in the data versus more spreadsheets is a key thing to uh give you that source of truth. Like we said, it's probably not one source of truth. There may be a few, but you know, identifying what those are and trying to consolidate them as as much as possible will help really help to improve improve the process, improve the data visibility, and overall give executive the numbers and the dashboards and the KPIs that they're looking for.

Steve Gross 16:37

Absolutely.

Fraser Gallop 16:41

Well, great. I think we're we had planned around six episodes. We're keeping pretty good here with our our weekly cadence and doing a recording and getting that out. So that's that's been great. And this has been really fun because it's a learning experience uh for us too as we kind of go through this and doing the the first podcast. So it's been very fun and uh I look forward to speaking to you in in a week's time here for for the next episode. Uh for for people that that haven't already, go ahead and and hit the subscribe button, and we'd love to have you along with the journey as we go here and and continue uh to talk about uh data in the construction industry. Great. Well, talk to you again, Steve, soon and uh have a good weekend. You too.

Speaker 2 17:25

Bye bye.

Fraser Gallop 17:26

Okay, bye bye.