Dee Davis (00:00)
Good morning and welcome to Management Under Construction. I'm Dee Davis.
Brad Wyant (00:04)
And I'm Brad Wyant and today we are talking about everyone's favorite subject to complain about, construction management software. Does anyone out there not have a love-hate or perhaps just all-hate relationship with their construction software? I know that I could never have gotten as much done as I did in my career without Procore and CMIC, but those softwares It's mind-boggling the extent to which they're so frustrating to use.
in this 21st century world of Apple's user interface and other great softwares out there. How is it that these softwares are so frustrating, so slow to use? Dee, what have your experiences been like with construction management software?
Dee Davis (00:41)
Well, I got to tell you, I've had a much longer experience than you have. And I would say that my reaction is a little bit different because I was there at the dawn of construction management software way, way back when construction management software first started. It was so much worse than it is now. so much worse.
some of the options that we have now, I think are vast improvements from where we started. However, we're still not there. There's absolutely no doubt that we're still not where we need to be with this.
Brad Wyant (01:14)
Well, there's a big reason for that that I found in my research for this podcast. The construction industry only spends 1 % of its revenue in software. And according to a source I found, The financial services industry, on the other hand, spends 4.4 % at the 25th percentile of spending and 11.4 % at the 75th percentile. Manufacturing, which is one thing a lot of people compare construction to,
spends about 1.4 % at the 25th percentile and 3.2 % at the 75th percentile. So almost a quarter of manufacturing spends three times what we do in the construction industry on that. And even 75 % of the manufacturing industry spends more than we do on software. So now we have chicken or egg question.
Does the industry spend less on software because the software isn't useful? Or is the software not useful because the industry isn't willing to spend on software? Dee, what do you think?
Dee Davis (02:12)
we've talked about this before where there's such a wide. berth of things that are encompassed in the construction industry. So you can have a teeny tiny, residential build. You can have a big residential development. You can have a small strip mall being built. all the way up to a data center or a campus being built.
So when we talk about the construction industry, it encompasses all those things. So what is going to be useful in a multi-building residential type of thing where you're building phases and different plans that's going to be radically different than what's going to be useful when you're building a data center or research campus or something like that. I think that's one of the challenges with construction. It's not a one size fits all.
like many things that we've talked about, it's not a one size fits all. So what's useful in building a residential complex is not useful in building a large manufacturing plant. They're two radically different types of construction.
don't know any residential builders. I have no idea if they're using any kind of construction management software or if they just skip it and they do it the old fashioned way. But a lot of the smaller stuff I would imagine doesn't utilize construction software at all because it's too expensive. The licensing for using platforms such as Procore, ACC, CMIC, things that we use in larger construction,
there's no way that you could afford to use that in smaller markets. if you're building a Jack in the box, you might not be using anything because you're gonna finish and start so quickly in comparison to a job that's gonna take 14 months to five years to finish.
Brad Wyant (03:56)
Yeah, I don't know. I've worked on some residential towers and they used Procore and all the rest. have friends that have worked on Starbucks and other things like that on the real estate side and they say that there's Procore and there's other softwares that the GCs use for those. But I hear your point that perhaps the software needs of a really technical campus for research versus the software needs of a jack in the box.
are widely different and perhaps there's some optimization that needs to be done there. We're trying to cover those with one size fits all and perhaps that's what's preventing the widespread adoption. For me, I think it's the issue of construction companies not wanting to spend on software period just because they view it more as a cost center than as a source of value. I've worked for companies that working on a version of a software that was two generations out of date.
simply because it was what everyone at the company knew and because they had spent money whenever that version was new to create dashboards that were specific to the firm where all 80 projects that an office of the company in some region was working on could be reported up to in a very automated fashion and they would look the same. they would look the way that that company wanted them to look. We have an attitude in construction of if it ain't broke don't fix it.
There's a lot of things in construction that haven't changed in 50, 100 years. So we're less prone to seeing value in paying for the next version of something. We're much happier living with the tools that we already had because everything else in construction changes so often. The job site's changing. The safety changes with it. The contractors that are on site change. So the next version of the software changing as well is all of those things.
is a lot for somebody to ask of their project team to deal with in addition to everything else that goes on in the business. let's review a couple of different needs that I was able to cobble together in sort of a list and all the different softwares that meet those needs. in the design world, we have Revit for architects and engineering. People use AutoCAD for the most part. There's a little bit of overlap between those, but for the most part,
That's what people in my experience have talked about using. And when it comes to publishing those drawings, there's a lot of management softwares like CMIC and Procore that enable that, Bluebeam, what everyone really read drawings on and does markups in. But then you've got PlanSwift for doing takeoffs for estimating, and other PlanSwift adjacent softwares for doing takeoffs, even though you can do takeoffs pretty well in Bluebeam.
if you didn't know there's a spreadsheet export tool that you can get pretty handy with if nobody gives you the license for something like PlanSwift. Clash detection, we do that in both Revit and Navisworks, although I've never seen it done in Revit. I know that you can do it, it's just that everyone does it in Navisworks. Do you ever seen people use Revit for clash detection or is it all Navisworks?
Dee Davis (06:45)
No, I think part of the problem is that the people that are doing clash detection are not the people that are using Revit. So the designers use Revit. And I'll tell you, if you have long talks with designers, especially on the mechanical side, Revit really is more of an architectural structural kind of thing. And it's being, for lack of a better term, rammed down the throat of the other disciplines.
where they don't want them using CAD anymore. They want everybody working in Revit. Well, Revit doesn't work as well on the design side. I just had a long discussion with a designer about this the other day. We have an existing building and we have existing systems and I was asking them, to make
the new stuff bolder and make the other stuff lighter. And they're like, yeah, they're making me use Revit. It's not as easy to do here. And it takes a lot more work on their part, I guess. I've never seen anybody use clash detection because normally the people that are doing that are trades people. So it generally falls to either the GC or the mechanical to go in, make a federated model and do clash detection. Those folks don't have Revit licenses generally.
Brad Wyant (07:50)
Makes sense to me that definitely clicks with everything I've seen in the industry. Let's talk about RFIs and submittals, procurement tracking, contract management. Most management softwares like Procore and CMIC do that pretty well, varying degrees. mean, CMIC for RFIs, the user interface of the version I used was terrible. RFIs and Procore are a lot easier. You can attach photos easier.
Accounting, the other hand, CMIC includes a lot of accounting features. I've never had Procore accounting. I don't think there is a Procore accounting add-in. there is.
Dee Davis (08:24)
Yeah, there actually is.
Brad Wyant (08:26)
Alright,
there we go learning in front of you.
Dee Davis (08:28)
I knew it existed, but I'd never seen it until about a year ago. I'm working with a client who has gone all in on Procore. so they got all the modules. And one of the things that they asked for was help in understanding how to best utilize the accounting module in Procore. So I had to go learn it so that I could help them best.
forecast and use the other tools that are available in that module.
Brad Wyant (08:54)
What do you think? Did it work pretty well?
Dee Davis (08:56)
It's okay. this is where I get a little bit old school. It's honestly so easy, to utilize many tools just as easy or easier, especially when it comes to accounting. Most companies are still going to have an outside software that they're using in their accounting department.
So this is the push when it comes to accounting software. It's like, well, we're still using this thing because we have to pay all of our bills and run payroll and all these things in this other software. So then you have to hook up Procore with that software to pull the job model in and sync that information on a regular basis so that with a project management team can see real-time information in Procore.
Brad Wyant (09:41)
That's very interesting. The rest of the world runs on QuickBooks or other accounting specific software.
Dee Davis (09:42)
Yeah
Peach Tree, there's a million accounting softwares out there that companies are using. they're not using project management software to run their accounting department. And they're never going to. They're never going to.
Brad Wyant (10:00)
By the way, doesn't make sense.
And we're to get into this a little bit later. What's great about a lot of industries outside of construction is that accounting. Uses accounting softwares that are common to the industry and are very similar to each other. It's like a Ford and a Chevy. They both have a steering wheel. They both have turn indicators in the same place. They both have a gear stick in the same place. So somebody who's a professional accountant who has gone to school for that, who
has done that their entire career is going to be able to jump from that Ford to that Chevy if they move to a different company and interact with it right away. There's going to be so many commonalities that when you hire an accountant they're going to have a lot of literacy there. as we all know, the CMIC to Procore, it's not nearly as easy to dictate. It's like riding a motorcycle versus driving a car. There's a lot.
bigger differences, but we'll talk about that in a sec. I don't want to get too far ahead of it. there are various non-industry specific softwares that get used on projects if you have a project accountant on site, but for the most part, projects are using a CMIC or a Procore, it seems like, to do their project specific accounting. And there's that time lag for projects that aren't running it as well as that project was that Dee was just talking about where you may not get
the invoices that your main office batch assigns to your project right away. Things don't quote unquote hit your job in real time, which is.
Dee Davis (11:24)
it depends. mean, honestly, being an old school project manager and having to do this before we had a lot of this fancy software to use, what I would do is I I would log into the accounting software and I would pull a report, and I could dig around in there and get all the details as needed. I would run
the monthly accounting of the project and forecasting and all that. I would just do it in Excel. It was not hard to do it that way. And it's one of those things that you're thinking to yourself, are we trying to fix something that isn't broken? If I can easily go extract that information from my accounting software, plop that data into an Excel template and do my forecasting,
Was it broken to begin with? What am I trying to fix here?
Brad Wyant (12:07)
And that's where we get to this question of, the project teams that are running these Frankenstein monsters cobbled together suite of their version of the modeling practice, their specific modules they'd like to use for the management software, PDF editing, and the suite of Microsoft Office products they want to use. When we ask people to standardize and run things a certain way,
so that the higher ups within the company can see it or so that the client can see it in their dashboard? Are we just creating unnecessary added work?
The thesis I'm going to propose later on in this podcast is that if there were a one size fits all, covers everything software that does everything that construction management needs, then maybe we wouldn't have so much communication failure, have so many missed connections in the world of construction. I'm open
to having this be a discussion where Dee and I end up disagreeing. Just to finish my list, scheduling P6 and Microsoft Project, as far as I know, do not plug into Procore or CMIC. They're just totally separate things with their own separate data streams and separate worlds. And one of the things that I was brushing up on as I was preparing for this new job that I started recently, when you go to create the first schedule for a project,
There's no automated system that allows you to take the project model and input that into a schedule. You have to do it manually. You have to say, OK, well, there's a foundation, and that's going to take these many days, and I'm going to assign that with this sequencing. And then there's going to be a finish start relationship with this next thing, the slab on top of the foundation. There's a software that's been out for seven years now called Alice that was developed at Stanford.
by some brainiac people that's artificial learning in construction engineering, ALICE being the acronym. And the idea is that it does that. It creates a schedule using a 3D model by trying to say, OK, there are obviously columns here. And the thing that goes on top of those columns is that the next floor. So there's obviously a finish start relationship between those columns and the next floor. And then it applies that same logic to every component of the model.
and tries to spit you out one of six million schedules that's the best schedule that you can use as opposed to having somebody manually go through and create that Microsoft project schedule or create a P6 schedule that is inflexible and doesn't adapt as design changes and requires so much manual input. It hasn't caught on. There are companies that are being contracted by Alice to
consult with big companies to try to adopt it. And there's a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence in every market, let alone construction, but it hasn't caught on yet because we're slow to change and because it isn't very user friendly. I used it back when I was in grad school and it's good. It's got a lot of unique features, but it just isn't to the point of being a useful tool due to adoption, due to ease of use and due to
what it takes to get that thing running the way it would need to run.
Dee have you ever heard of Alice? What do you think of that idea as a concept? Do you think that there's a gap to be bridged where introducing P6 and Microsoft Project as a component or a plugin, some kind of interaction with management software, do you think that'd be useful at all?
Dee Davis (15:24)
Well, I've never heard of Alice specifically, but what Alice is, it sounds like, is the dream of 4D scheduling, right? Where we incorporate the model and the schedule together. we've been talking about this for, 10, 15 years that I can think of.
So it sounds like somebody is working on this, which is good news. I think we're going to run into the same problem that we run into in construction every single time. Every element is unique. Every interaction is unique
everything is so different in every type of construction. You would have to train that model for every single potential type of construction and material and joining method. And it seems like an overwhelming task, not that it's impossible, but it seems like it's a very overwhelming task. And then who's to blame when it doesn't work right? When it gives you the wrong...
information, the wrong output, I don't know. it's still going to take people to go in and look at that and say, this might be right, this might be wrong, this might not work this way because circumstances that you don't have programmed in. Because it only knows what you tell it. if it's going straight out of the model, that means every design nuance has to be modeled, which is not something we currently do.
Brad Wyant (16:41)
try and get an electrician to model conduit under two inches.
Dee Davis (16:43)
Yeah, my favorite example. Every nuance would have to be modeled and every change would have to be modeled. So in theory, would you be better off spending the time modeling and not spending the time scheduling? Possibly. Possibly. Because there's good ways and not good ways to do scheduling. I've been on huge jobs where the schedule person
is just a software person. They know how to manipulate the software. They don't know anything about construction. And so that person can do nothing without somebody hanging over their shoulder telling them how it needs to be built. So in that case, now you've got two highly paid people whose full-time job is now sitting there working on this schedule. That's pretty expensive.
Brad Wyant (17:27)
To me that sounds as antiquated as an executive having an assistant to type for them, like a typist. That's crazy that there would be that separation of expertise. And I've tried to use P6. I've taken the first step into building a P6 schedule. It's a complicated software. It's not user-friendly. It's not like swiping around on one of these.
you really have to know what you're doing to use that software. It's much closer to having to use a precise, precision tool of machine design or something than it is to doing something user-friendly, like using an iPhone So all this to say, this list and this review of how different softwares interact with each other, no one software, not even a suite of Autodesk products. And Autodesk has BIM 360, which covers punch lists. They've got
Revit, they've got AutoCAD. No one suite of softwares covers all the needs of a project. Most projects are running something that they decided to run because that's what they're used to doing. Between projects within the same company, there's no consistency in self-practice because a lot of people in our industry jump from company to company and from region to region regularly. We talked about this before on the podcast, work ebbs and flows within markets and people
move accordingly. So over the course of somebody's career, they might get used to their way of doing it and not want to bend to the new company's practices to meet their habits. They want to find a way to get their thing under the radar of the company's requirements instead of conforming to those requirements. I'm certainly guilty of this. I
developed a submittal log because I didn't understand the one in Procore. It was very difficult to read, very difficult to filter into what the client actually wanted to know. And I built something that had color coding and it was 11 by 17. It only had the things that the client cared about. And I just kept using that for the rest of my career because every client I worked for said, yes, this is what I want to see. And then I would go to somebody
at a new company that say, yeah, we have this practice that we're trying to introduce and be a quality manager, something like that. Somebody who had worked in projects for years, but for the past five years hasn't been responsible for their own project. And I'd say, yeah, that's fine. I don't want to do that. And I'm not going to, because my client likes this more. Do you have an argument against that? And they'd have to say, nope, go do your thing. So I get the plight of somebody trying to standardize things across an organization so that if a executive walked
from one job to another, they could instantly read the same format they see all over the company. Standardization can be useful for that, but A, the standards that I've seen among most companies I've worked for are not ideal, and B, it's so contrary to how our industry works. We, like we've been talking about, have our own, each project has separate different needs. mean, Dee, have you seen that across your experiences in the industry? Have you seen?
such and such big contractor has their way of doing it and I know their way, whereas this contractor has another way, or is it always different every time?
Dee Davis (20:23)
yes, there's contractors that have standards, but you're also right I've been guilty of it myself. the very first construction management software I ever used. Can't remember the name of it to save my life. Cause I only encountered it the one time and I don't think it exists anymore. It was bad. It was really bad. it just didn't work. And we were trying to fix things that weren't broken.
yes, we were doing it kind of a clunky forced way, but it worked. And I could produce an RFI in two minutes the old way. The new software way, it took me 10 minutes. I actually ran a study on it throughout a project to show my bosses, like this is how much longer it's taken me. And I have an average of this many RFIs on every project. And these are large projects. So there's many RFIs.
I'm wasting this many hours per month on the new and better way. it had stupid things in it because it was not really made by people who do it. In an RFI, I guess what punctuation mark I couldn't use.
A question mark.
It was insane. So did I continue to use the old way against the company's wishes? Yes, I did. And I just didn't say anything because it worked. And then I took my work product and I uploaded it to the new system. I copied and pasted it into the new system because it was just 100 times faster than generating it in the new system.
people will do workarounds. I say this all the time and I have a brand new client that I'm getting ready to work with and I just said this to them.
Announcing change and implementing change are not the same thing. And that's what happens in these organizations and all these different construction companies. Somebody at a high level who doesn't do this all day will decide usually based on cost and some salesmanship what software is going to be used, what procedures are going to be used.
They're the ones making the decision with no input from the people that have to do the work. then they announce the change. We're going to use software ABC. From now on, go.
I worked for a client that did this a few years ago, and this is a huge, huge company that had thousands of projects across the country. They announced change. Their rollout of it was the guy whose idea it was getting in front of a group of 30 people at a time, site by site, talking to about a thousand miles an hour. We're to do this. We're going to do that.
Okay, that's it. We had one hour. No questions. And we're all just supposed to go execute on this new software that we essentially knew nothing about. And these new procedures that we knew nothing about. And there was no support. The only person that understood it was the person whose idea it was. And they're an executive level and they don't have time to talk to anybody. So.
Part of the issue, I think, in all these different construction companies is that we are announcing change. We are not implementing it properly.
Brad Wyant (23:20)
perhaps in no other industry is the gap between the people executing the work and the people deciding how the work gets executed. So great.
the difference in the daily life in the interactions that executive has in a general contractor's office versus the life that that person who's a project manager or project engineer or superintendent lives is just enormous. I've met general superintendents who go from being that on-site superintendent to being the guy in the office telling other superintendents how to do their job. He's like, now I get it. Why the people that used to do this job to me suck.
because they have to suck. They're so far away from this life and from these experiences. it's so hard to build the empathy to understand the position that you're putting that person in and staying close to that group emotionally as well as practically is very difficult.
Dee Davis (24:15)
I've definitely seen people that go from the field into the office. They just get sucked into those office politics too.
Brad Wyant (24:23)
It's a very different environment and it's easy to get sucked into because it's the new thing that you're faced with on a daily basis. Who among us does not get influenced by the environment we put ourselves in on a daily basis? that's human. So speaking of environments, speaking of empathy and communication, how often do non-construction general contractor people ignore emails directly from a construction management software? I've had project managers tell me specifically,
Do not send emails through Procore or CMIC because architects, engineers, and owners that are managing multiple projects are going to ignore your email. Why do you think that is, Dee? Do you think that there's some reasoning behind that kind of instruction from a manager?
Dee Davis (25:03)
Well, yeah, especially if you're on any kind of a bigger project where there's a lot of activity, there's RFIs, there's submittals, there's just all this activity going on, new drawings being uploaded, new specs being uploaded, whatever. You might get 20, 30, 50 notifications through that system, a day per project.
And if you're working on multiple projects, yeah, you just either turn the notifications off, I know people who have it set up in their email to automatically send it to the trash.
They're not looking at it and I've been guilty of the same thing. I'll see the notification come through, but am I opening it up and going to that and letting myself get distracted by that thing immediately and going and reading it? No, because I'm getting 30 of those a day. If I did that, I'd never get anything done.
Brad Wyant (25:51)
I think another big factor in this issue is that they're coming from software and not a person. When an email comes from a person, I automatically associate that message with the person it's coming from and with their attitude and their care. There are certain people that I ignore emails from and there are certain people I always hang on every email they write because I know what they're writing me is important.
These emails from a software seem automated and were programmed to ignore most automated emails. They have a lot of excess formatting that takes a long time to get past a lot of images that do or do not download. And you have to weed through all that to get to the important information. In an RFI, for instance, most of the important information is in an attachment, which if well-written has everything that you need anyway. So getting an email notification that there's a new RFI from Procore, for instance,
Why? Who cares? If I get an email from such and such project engineer that there's a new RFI, I can assume if that engineer has made a good relationship with me, that that engineer chose to attach me to this email because it matters to me, because it's going to require some input from me, because it's going to matter to what I do. taking a step away from our industry and the flaws of our
Software implementation. Let's look at other industries Everyone in the financial industry for instance uses something called Bloomberg Michael Bloomberg is the person who owns this company he was the mayor of New York for a long time He had a presidential bid if you recall his name from the news But the thing that he made his fortune doing is coming up with a software called Bloomberg It achieved a critical mass that pulled enough people towards it everybody from the bond business to the
public equities, the stocks business uses it because it has a bunch of tools that all those people use. And it's made Michael Bloomberg a billionaire. There are hardly any professionals in the financial world who can say that they don't use Bloomberg. It's that ubiquitous and it's that crucial of a software to know. So let's move from financial to software sales.
Most people in the software as a service sales business world use CRM like Salesforce. And Salesforce is the standout leader in this field. Everywhere you go in any major city in America, there's a Salesforce tower So they've done some pretty impressive work in that area. And like we said earlier, most CRMs operate pretty similarly to each other if...
Salesforce is Chevrolet, there's a Ford and a Buick and a Dodge. People on this podcast are not going to know what Buick was, but there we go. We'll move on. Everyone in marketing uses Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube because those social media sites are where their customers are. They're ubiquitous. They use Google for search engine optimization because it's the most popular search engine in the world. No marketing professional
is going to put that they're great at search engine optimization on Yahoo on their resume because the percentage of users on Yahoo versus Google is nothing.
Dee Davis (28:49)
Do they still exist, Yahoo?
Brad Wyant (28:51)
Oh yeah, it's still a thing. Microsoft Edge has its own version of Google Bing and nobody's putting Bing on their resume as like a, really, you gotta hire me? I know how to use SEO on Bing. Accounting runs on QuickBooks or other similar softwares. Most database people use Oracle and that's why Oracle is one of the biggest companies in the world.
So all these industries and all these softwares have one thing in common. They do everything that the workers in that industry need. It's all in one place, even for people who don't interact with it on a daily basis. So if there's somebody who interacts with databases for part of their work, like a scientist, they know how to use that database software really well, even though the most of their work is doing their science, being in the lab, for instance.
Whereas in our industry, things are a lot more dispersed, like everything else about the construction industry. Architects and engineers mostly use design software. That's their core area of expertise, and it's the place that they make money. Interacting on software like Procore or CMIC doesn't make them money. They'll get yelled at for not responding to emails or to Procore and CMIC RFI requests, but...
Relatively speaking, those workplaces, that management software workplace is never their top priority unless they're an architect that specifically deals with construction administration. And how many of us have been fortunate enough to have an architect who's only doing construction administration work? I've never had that, although I've heard of it. Real estate people on the owner's side have to deal with email, contracts, change orders, tenants or occupant issues, all their sorts of problems. And most of those come through email.
or some of them come through different companies using different management softwares like CMIC and Procore that are very different to use. Subcontractors live in procurement and project management the way the general contractors do, but they deal with vendors through email because those vendors only deal with their own warehouses and purchase orders. Subs also have their own internal issues to manage like HR and accounting. So all the different companies that we interact with on a regular basis in the construction industry
have a different software suite and a single source of truth. Whereas the architects use Revit, the engineers use AutoCAD or wish they could use AutoCAD. Project managers use Procore and CMIC and a bunch of other things like Bluebeam. And then subs are using a little bit of Procore, but mostly their own thing. We're all over the place when it comes to the places that we want.
to naturally do our core business activities. And I think that that's killing our communication as an industry, as opposed to these other industries where an emerging, a dominant software has emerged. So my thesis in this podcast is that construction needs its own Bloomberg, a place where anyone that touches the construction business in a significant way can work.
communicate and be productive and trust that they're going to have a positive interaction.
As things like Bloomberg update, they update archaically and slowly, but when they do update, everyone complains for three months and then they're all back to work normally. CMIC updates at a different time that Procore does, at a different time that Revit does. So we're always in these different modes of change. We're always evolving the way that a different project works. There's no uniformity and there's no expectation that you can come to any given project with the way that you can.
in a different industry. And I think if we could develop a software that met all the needs of all the people that work in this business, we could have better interactions. We could work more efficiently. that's my argument, guess, Dee What do you think of that?
Dee Davis (32:19)
I love the dream. I love the idea of what you're proposing. I've had similar thoughts myself. it really boils down to productivity. I will be the very first one that will, probably complain about this on a daily basis. The number of things that I have to log into on a daily basis is mind boggling. One of these days I'm gonna count.
I have to log into Teams. have to log into my email. I have to log into ACC. I have to log into Procore. I have to log into Project site. have to log into CMIC. I have to log into this software, my website thing I couldn't even begin to tell you. I love it when people say, I just used one password for everything. That tells me that you don't log into very many things because every single one has different rules.
some of them will force you to redo your password on a pretty regular basis. That's one of my chief complaints about Procore I'll go to get in. I was just in there yesterday. Everything was fine. And I go today and I can't get in because I have to go reset my password and it, takes time and it's not necessarily the easiest thing to do. It's very frustrating. And then you add in the complication of
two factor identification for every single thing that you do. And so now you're not logging into things once you're logging into two or three different times just to get in and do a task, just to get in to see what the RFI is. Because you get that email and it says, hey, there's a new RFI. And now I got to go through all these gyrations just to go see what the RFI is. Is it user friendly? Can I download it easily?
Extract the information that I need. Can I answer it easily? I think ACC, which is auto auto desk. It's a auto desk construction. I don't remember what it stands for, something like that.
I don't know if it was developed by AutoCAD, but I think it was. or it was developed by somebody else and they bought it and finished developing it, something like that. They've attempted to do what you're talking about. They have different modules. They have modules they have one called plan. and that's where the designers do their thing and they they post their drawings. Now they don't.
draw in there, they draw in Revit or they draw in CAD or whatever they're using, but that's where the design is done. Then they have build and that's the construction management interface. That's where RFIs and submittals and punch lists and all that kind of thing are. And there's a couple of other modules too that I haven't used as much.
They have a procurement thing, but it's completely separate and it's supposed to be financial tracking for all your procurement and all that kind of stuff. So there's been an attempts, but here's the thing that I think is going to be our sticking point.
Developing for designers requires designers input. And to sit in that seat of that designer to make it work for them.
Developing for procurement requires to sit in that procurement seat and get input from them and do what works for somebody who's doing procurement. Same thing with construction management, same thing with financial, same thing with any of these other modules that you might need to make it all fit together and have a single source. that's very hard to do because those are radically different pieces of the business that have very different needs from one another.
I mean, you talk about like commissioning. There's all this different commissioning software that can be used. That has very different needs that should be incorporated into into what you're talking about too, because It's part of construction. It's just the end test and balance commissioning. All of it. Should be considered in all that, but again they have very very different needs than all the other pieces and in order to have a single.
thing where everybody's in the same space, it would be very arduous to develop. Not impossible, but to get it right, to do it well would take a lot of time and resources.
Brad Wyant (36:15)
And it's the kind of thing where you'd have to dedicate a lot of money upfront, not just to the development of the software, but then to the training and adoption of it. And it would be a long time before you saw that investment pay off because you would have to achieve that critical mass that Bloomberg, that Facebook did. And as anybody who tracks the Silicon Valley model knows,
these startups burn money. That's all they do. And it's not for years, sometimes decades before these kinds of endeavors really pay off. when they do, mean, Bloomberg has a messenger. So it's got a sophisticated way of communicating for people that work in the business, but then it's also got a way to attach the information about that particular bond. And it's got all these sophisticated tools for reporting out data.
I mean, people still use Excel on the side and people still email on the side in that business, like probably in any other business, but you could do all of the work that you needed to do if you wanted to in that software and the level of productivity that offers think about if you're somebody listening to this podcast who has ever onboarded to a new company or who has been responsible for onboarding new members, think about how long it takes for that person to get up to speed.
on how your project or how your company does things and how much money is spent on that. In the long haul, think that a software like this, an environment where everyone can work and share information and exchange work product would be more effective, but it's a lot of work to move to that next valley of efficiency. So I don't know how to do that kind of change management to evolve
industry like that but maybe someday
Dee Davis (37:57)
it's complicated by the fact that not every project has the same needs. if you're building a Jack in the box, it's substantially different than if you're building a campus. One of the really odd things that I noticed in Procore years ago was I was working on a job that had multiple buildings and the way the design team
opted to do it was they issued separate set of drawings and separate set of specs for each building. And I think it was phased. I'm sure it made sense on some level. Well, we had duplicate drawing numbers, which is the problem in any software. If you have an A201 three times, there three different A201s, how do you differentiate that? Well, in Procore,
You can have different plan sets. So you can say this is building A building B building C and it'll allow you to do that. What it won't let you do is have duplicate specs. So this building might've been an administrative building with one kind of set of specs. This building was a lab with totally different specifications. I thought it was interesting.
that Procore didn't have the option to have different specs, but you could have different plans. So that created a whole challenge for the project team to come up with a way of labeling and managing different specification packages.
in manipulating Procore to get it to work that way because they didn't offer that option. now is that a common problem? Probably not, unless you're doing, really big campus projects all the time where you have multiple buildings like that. But it's a problem to be solved. How do I solve it? I contacted Procore and I said, hey guys, this is the problem I'm having. Can you
create a solution, they said, we don't have that feature. Put in a ticket for it. And of course I put in a ticket for it. That was eight years ago, I think. And I still don't think that feature is available. Probably because it's not a common enough problem, perhaps.
Brad Wyant (39:54)
And for all the money that projects pay, you expect that they'll able to solve a problem that isn't even a common problem, that's still a real problem.
Dee Davis (40:02)
Well, I wonder if that isn't some of the issue you mentioned you were talking earlier about the amount of money that we spend as an industry on software. I'm wondering if some of the problem is that we don't have control. It's a third party and it's not the most responsive third party when you need something.
I remember back in the day there was this accounting software called JD Edwards. And I don't even know if it exists anymore. It became one world and then I don't even know if it still exists But almost all construction companies at one point in time were using it for their accounting. And I worked for a company that ended up hiring a JD Edwards specialist, somebody who was highly trained in that particular software.
so that they could go in and do on-demand changes to the base software to meet that company's needs because the overarching umbrella of software was unwilling to do that. It would take months or years and it would cost a fortune. So they just hired an IT person that had the certification, paid them some extra money, and that's how they solved it.
I don't know if that's an option with some of these other things. Do you have the ability, are there Procore experts out there that have the ability to go in and manipulate how Procore functions for your company? I don't think so because I think it's different. It's software as a service now versus when you bought it before you bought the suite and it was yours.
Brad Wyant (41:31)
Very well put, I think that the change in the model and the amount that we spend have a huge impact on our software experience as an industry. And that's something that it would take a long time to change. think for whatever reason, the subscription thing has become the profitable way that these companies do it. You subscribe to your phone now, you don't even own your phone anymore. it's all about recurring revenue for these companies and that's what
stock analysts want to see, fine. But for that recurring revenue, if I'm paying you on a recurring basis, I want the product to get better on a recurring basis. How about that? Maybe we just need to demand better as an industry.
Dee Davis (42:06)
Well, I can tell you that the phone makers have figured it out. there's so many phone updates, the phones are constantly updating. There's certain things that constantly update. Sometimes it's a good thing. Sometimes it's a bad thing. My phone updates and sometimes nothing really happens and other times it updates and everything just blows up.
nothing works anymore. I have to go back and redo all kinds of things to make it work again. It's kind of like getting a new new phone almost sometimes when that stuff happens. They're supposed to test this stuff before they roll it out, but I'm sure they're under time pressure. When they're doing these updates to get things out
I guess that's another point is that these things are web-based.
So we're not getting pushed updates necessarily unless you're using it like on a tablet or on your phone, then you might get a pushed update. But these are all
Web based software. So in theory, they'll notify you of major updates and there may be some outages and things like that as they go in and do some major updates, but. I love the the the beauty of what you're proposing of just a one stop solution for everybody involved.
It might be a pipe dream. It would be interesting to see if we can ever get there. I love the idea.
Brad Wyant (43:22)
Well, that's all I've got as far as trying to figure out what's wrong with software in the construction industry and what we could do to change it. I hope somebody else out there has a better idea than me, but if they don't, I'll be the first construction software developing tech giant in the Bay Area, maybe 20 years, who knows.
Dee Davis (43:37)
All right, well, let me know if you need any help developing that. can tell you what's wrong. I'll be your test monkey.
Brad Wyant (43:42)
spectacular. I'll take you up on that. If somebody just hands me a billion dollars tomorrow, I will take you up on that.
Dee Davis (43:47)
Right? Alright, thanks for joining us everybody. Have a great day.
