The world of construction, like everything else, changed dramatically in 2020. In March and April, many businesses closed to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. However, even though construction, like healthcare and the food supply, was considered an essential activity, the impact on companies and individuals in the industry was significant.
The companies that were considered for the Constructech Vision Awards for 2020 were judged on work they mostly did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. And while the pandemic has caused a lot of changes in how companies work internally and with their customers, the most successful companies didn’t wait for a pandemic to initiate changes. (Special thank you to our judges).
Our winner in the residential field, for example, started almost two years ago to transform field production by leveraging technology specifically aimed at its market segment. Even before COVID, labor shortages were a problem, and it saw the value in optimizing field labor, reducing risks, and automating processes where it made sense.
By implementing the digital twin concept along with appropriate technology, it reduced travel by project management teams. Instead of going to remote jobsites, it can now see the work done in Fieldwire, review it in OpenSpace, and collaborate on its field portal.
The result of the technology program is estimated to be a net of $1.4 million in hard savings by redesigning its processes while providing a more innovative solution to twice as many team members. That’s the reason the gold Vision Award for residential, AEC and design, goes to Power Design of St. Petersburg, Fla.
While true that many contractors are keeping busy, especially those involved in maintaining and building infrastructure, as they are essential to the economic recovery, what is sometimes overlooked is that public policy—the government’s rules and regulations that companies must meet—haven’t changed that much to compensate for the pandemic.
Performing public works often mandates reporting and compliancy requirements related to prevailing wages, apprenticeships, and certified payroll. This requires a significant amount of time pulling data, running reports in third-party tools, exporting data to spreadsheets, reformatting information, and submitting files.
After analyzing its current and anticipated needs, our next winner decided to work with its current supplier, Computer Guidance Corp., and implemented its cloud-based eCMS ERP. By using a cloud-based system, its placed the management, maintenance, and upkeep of its ERP (enterprise-resource planning) solution into the hands of the Computer Guidance experts.
The results, a 25% productivity gain in invoice approval and elimination of weekly reports, realizing a savings of $35,000 annually, plus a savings of $36,000 by not having to purchase new onsite IT hardware to run its system, led to the silver Vision Award for commercial specialty contractor going to Alcorn Fence Co., of Sun Valley, Calif.
Since the lockdowns, stay-at-home and remote work orders in the spring, many aspects of our normal life have become virtual. One of the uses of the term, virtual, was when IT departments went from physical servers to virtual machines—the VM movement—that provided expanded availability and capability.
Our next winner migrated to VM nearly a decade ago, but it became obvious that if one of its 43 VMs went down, the remaining systems would be over-taxed and performance would be degraded. The direction it chose was to implement Scale Computing’s HC3, combining servers, storage, virtualization, and backup/disaster recovery into a single appliance.
In the end, its IT department needed only 10 days to migrate and there was zero downtime during working hours. Additionally, it has increased storage capacity to 43 Tb, increased memory to 1.1 Tb, and upgraded processors to the latest architecture. For this reason, the silver Vision Award winner in the commercial builder/general contractor segment is M. J. Harris Construction Services of Birmingham, Ala.
Our next winner has been in business more than 75 years but growth over the last five years caused job backlogs, increases in labor, materials and equipment and administrative headaches. They found an expert guide by collaborating with Computer Guidance Corp., to review business-critical processes and implement automated workflows to avoid unnecessary administrative overhead and achieve heightened control.
One result was the automated import and processing of equipment data from HCSS HeavyJob and E360. Now field mechanics enter repair time and related information into E360 for automatic routing to Computer Guidance’s eCMS ERP payroll and equipment accounting applications. eCMS automatically calculates and processes per diem rates for each mechanic.
Verifying job costs—material, labor, and equipment—and calculating equipment utilization, reporting on job costs, and job status now takes less than 30 minutes per week. With savings estimated at more than $61,000 annually by automating time-consuming and labor-intensive processes and $90,000 annually by not having to hire additional staff to support increased administration, the results are impressive at Miller Brothers Construction of Archbold, Ohio, the winner of the Silver Vision Award in the Heavy/Highway General Contractor category.
Our next winner was involved in the restoration and remodeling of a Chicago landmark, the Old Post Office building. The $600 million project required the clearing of more than 1.2 million tons of crumbling infrastructure within the 2.7 million-sq.ft., buildings, entirely new mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, and repurposed floor plans.
There were inconsistencies in the three building that compose the old post office—they are of varying heights and number of floors in a historic 1920 era building. And a unique factor was that an Interstate highway, the Eisenhower Expressway, goes through the building complex and commuter trains heading for Union Station run underneath it.
The design team provided structural and architectural Revit models and the onsite team established a 3D model using Autodesk BIM360 so the infrastructure subcontractor team could collaborate in realtime design and review processes.
The result was the building’s core mechanical, electrical, and plumbing package, more than 70% of a $100 million plus contract, was completed in the span of a year without any significant subcontractor field conflicts. That, in turn, led to the gold Vision Award in the commercial builder/general contractor category for Bear Construction Co., of Rolling Meadows, Ill.
Companies that have been around for a while will have a wealth of organizational memory and knowledge stored in the minds of the employees and managers. It may also have technology experts, IT folks, who know how to put together all-important systems. After all, technology should be specialized to the industry, yet flexible enough to adapt to individual projects.
One winner found a way to use its employee’s expertise via internal software development. The company recognized the advantage: technology would be developed by employees who knew the industry and its needs, working hand in hand with project teams. Buildfore, an internal commercial software company, was the result. For developing its own solutions and making them available to others in the industry, the winner of the gold Vision Award in the commercial builder/GC category is Robins & Morton, Birmingham, Ala.
Although construction companies have always depended upon common building materials, such as brick and wood, today’s companies depend almost as much on the building blocks of data and information. Our next winner knows how to create custom, move-in ready data centers for hyperscale, cloud, and enterprise customers and it has embraced sustainability, efficient use of land, green energy, and water free cooling. But success caused it problems. Customers demanded faster and faster turnaround, often in six months or less from breaking ground to key turnover.
To meet those requirements, it depended on Procore and OxBlue. Procore is the repository for everything associated with the project: all drawings, site plans, schematics, and documentation. Meanwhile, one or more OxBlue cameras are located at every jobsite to record site activities at regular intervals during the day. Footage is routinely used by its construction teams to identify areas for improving processes and procedures. So for knowing how to use data, the gold Vision Award for land developers goes to Compass Datacenters in Dallas, Texas.
Since desktop computers became ubiquitous, independent developers have been creating specialized apps for every possible niche market. The problem was integrating all those applications so each benefited from the others. Our next winner, for example, relies on Computer Guidance eCMS ERP for its core applications but also runs some specialized heavy construction-focused third-party apps for business-critical processes.
Unintegrated systems in the field resulted in duplicate data entry, manual data processing, and clumsy workflows. So, it decided to partner with Computer Guidance to integrate the third-party applications. It automated, streamlined, and integrated the entire workflow of estimating, job costing, invoicing, reporting, and forecasting, eliminating manual intervention, human errors, and wasted time across all their critical processes.
Data flows easily between HCSS HeavyBid applications and eCMS in both directions. The initial annual savings is more than $174,000, equal to $1.50 for every dollar spent on the improvements. That partnering also resulted in the gold Vision Award in the heavy construction-civil category for Herzog, St. Joseph, Mo.
Our next winner created a BIM (building information modeling) group back in 2009 so it could get an advance on its competitors with the new technology. Over the years, it watched its technology investment grow as the company grew—60% in the past five years alone. It also found it had data silos, information was scattered and hard to access.
In response, it developed better workflow using Autodesk Assemble, Microsoft Power BI and SharePoint, and Oracle Primavera 6. This allowed it to track realtime work-in-place and progress using an interactive 3D BIM model.
Tasks that once required hours of walking around the jobsite, checking physical pages of notes, hand-marking updates, and then going back to the jobsite trailer to record all the information can now be performed seamlessly from a single software platform on an iPad, resulting in a 70% reduction in overall time spent tracking job progress. It also resulted in our gold Vision Award in AEC/Design going to Gray Construction of Lexington, Ky.
Cybersecurity was once the realm of tech geeks. Today, it impacts us all. So, when the next winner did an analysis of its email security and found that, out of 1.8 million emails it averaged every month, 38% were spam or phishing attempts, it partnered with KnowBe4, a security awareness and training company, to teach its employees how to recognize and avoid security holes, especially phishing attacks.
Every quarter, the company runs a phishing campaign, much like you’d run a fire drill to test employee reaction to an alarm. The first time it did, 15% of the employees failed, including some who entered confidential information and log-in credentials. Training was called for and everyone had to attend; new hires now take a cybersecurity course on their first day. By 2020, the failure rate during the quarterly test was down to less than 8%. For taking cybersecurity seriously and acting on its concerns, the gold Vision Award in the specialty contractor category, goes to Rosendin Electric of San Jose, Calif.
Success in construction is dependent on many factors, two of which are the right employees and the right equipment. When equipment is in the field, keeping track of it is essential; if you don’t know where it is, you don’t know if it is making you money—or costing you money. Inventory management is a key technology category.
Our next winner was having a problem managing its equipment inventory, particularly scaffolding, using a third-party software. Unlike most companies, however, it has an internal application development department, so it decided to build its own app.
The solution it developed provides realtime data from the field as scaffolds are built, using a mobile application that automatically generates billing transactions. Supervisors can perform crucial safety audits as well as know the precise location of every scaffold. It even uses GPS to pinpoint all of them, giving a complete up-to-date inventory.
All the data captured in the field allows the project team to receive advanced reporting, giving them an opportunity to schedule their scaffold builds, audit scaffolds, and track the status, use, and materials. Not only does it know where its scaffolding is, Turner Industries of Baton Rouge, La., also has the silver Vision Award in the general industrial contractor category.
Adapting to changing circumstances is a hallmark of successful companies and in 2020, with COVID-19, protests, and elections in the news every day, there has been a lot to adapt to. Our final winner has a track record of both adapting and success. A recent project shows just how it does it.
The challenge it faced was in renovating and expanding an existing hotel-casino without a negative impact on ongoing activities at the property. Oh, and building what is considered one of the most unique hotels in the world, along with several specialized buildings and facilities, all on a tight schedule. The budget was $1.5 billion for 13 individual projects across a 3.2 million-sq.ft. master plan—and the work was to be done while the existing hotel and casino continued to operate at 100% capacity.
One of the 13 projects was a 450-ft. tall, 36 floor, 638 room hotel tower with no repetitive floors—much more complex than a typical hotel project. The tower is clad in a custom pre-glazed curtain wall system with LED lighting in the design. The unique shape of the hotel, the exterior lighting system and other elements, including synchronized sound, light, and water shows, really raised the level of difficulty.
The team also had to plan for a temporary concert venue, seating 3,500 guests, without disrupting the construction or other activities on the property. And, just to add to the complexity, the project had a 30-month deadline, meaning constant collaboration among the many specialty contractors involved was absolutely necessary.
Our winner was represented on-site by 110 team members, from 23 countries—with 30% of them women. Technologies, like virtual design and construction, and immersive VR were critical throughout the construction process. In fact, the team went beyond typical 3D models and created comprehensive 4D, 5D, and VR (virtual reality) models that became critical decision-making tools. Total stations, laser scanners, and other technologies were used in conjunction with the models.
Management implemented a “plan and control” program that included weekly meetings with the hotel, casino, and property operations teams. During these meetings, the VR mock-ups were used to clearly communicate the impacts to the casino/property operations.
As a result of the extensive planning, crews were able to complete one floor per week of the hotel, with some taking as few as five days to finish. Overall, it took the team just nine months and one week from the time it poured the pile cap to the time it topped out the 36th floor with concrete.
Constructech magazine is proud to present the 2020 Project of the Year Vision Award to the Suffolk-Yates Joint Venture and managing partner Suffolk for its work on the guitar-shaped Seminole Hard Rock Hollywood Hotel and Casino in Miami, Fla.
Original Article: https://constructech.com/the-2020-constructech-vision-awards/
