Smart© Construction & Advanced Work Packaging

I think we are on the cusp of the “Golden Age” of information management, and I don’t say that lightly, I actually say that with great expectations.

So we’re suddenly using this smart construction as a project planning tool about three years ago and developed into a holistic project planning tool about one year ago where we started using it for engineering and procurement and not just construction. So we have got rid of that whole process of what we called managing the message. And so the contractors would manage their message, basically, they wrote their own report cards and, of course, that created surprises. You know that would if they had bad news they were always hesitant about letting it out and whether they should tell us or not, and now, of course, we own the news, we have Smart Construction which is the central point of all truth.

We have seen great benefit from smart materials and we know that because we, we had a project where we didn’t use it and of course the very best lessons you ever learned in life are the ones that you learn firsthand. so we had a project that was we’re basically trying to manage materials on in Excel and the guys in the yard were all well-meaning were trying to do a good job. They would unload a truck and store the stuff and then try to make notes on what, what they had and where they put it down, usually on the back of cigarette packs or napkins or and then that would come to the office and the lady there would put it into Excel and we tried to keep a record of what we had.

We got halfway through the project and we realized that we had a yard that nobody knew about, so that’s how crazy things can get, so we had a yard full of steel and pipe and valves and nobody on the project knew about it except these, these yard guys who knew that they were using that as an overflow.

None of that stuff had made it onto the Excel spreadsheet, so now we start reordering all of that steel and pipe because nobody can find it nobody knows where it is. So now we, we’re doubling the expense because we’re trying to get fabrication shops to build the stuff in a hurry and get it to us so we’re standing around on-site waiting for it. We’re paying the fab shops a premium to get it to us as fast as possible and when he gets there one of the guys like “hey we’ve got some stuff just like this over there”, so then we realized that there’s another yard.

So Smart Materials, when we apply it, basically gets us on top of all of that. We understand with absolute acute definition. What do we have? Where is it? What do we need? That’s actually really important, but of course, Smart Materials populated by Smart Construction and Smart Plant 3D tells you exactly what you need and then of course what you’ve got so you can see the delta between them, so a world of difference.

When you move Smart Construction to the cloud what happens is, it becomes, it moves from being a construction tool to being a project management tool, and we didn’t know that until we did it. And when you do that, you basically revolutionize the idea of data and reporting because now we don’t ask for reports, we tell people what they got done. Very simple. It’s just that the key is having the data in the first place so Smart Construction is 90% of that.

When we make Smart Construction work and we show people what it is their jaw drops on the floor and they’re like “I always thought this information was out there”, “I always knew that I could get my hands on it”. And, of course, that’s gonna become common, it’s not going to become, it’s not just a flash in the pan, it’s going to become the way that we do business