A Utility Contractor's Journey to Trackable, Reportable Progress & Billing Data

All right, good morning everybody. It is ten a. M, at least where I am here in Sugar Land, Texas. In fact, all three of our glowing faces that you see. We're in the Houston area. Welcome to our webinar. If you're not aware of this, we do webinars pretty regularly, and this particular series is focused on the utilities market. So today we're talking about a utility contractor's journey to trackable, reportable progress and billing data. I'm Frank Baumgartner. I'm on the product team here. I focus on the utility market, And today, we have a guest from Price Gregory International, Jean Crush. Jean, why don't you tell the folks who you are? I am Jean Crush, as she said, director of information systems. I've been with the company, oh gosh, let me think, for almost fourteen years. Been a journey from paper to where we are now that we're going to talk about. All right. You also see Emily Nabulsi on. She's going to be paying attention to what we're talking about and giving us some little nudges if there's some good questions and Q and A especially. So just a logistics note here. We've got some slides up. We're going give you a little intro to what we're talking about, but you'll mostly just be hearing us and watching us talk. Q and A, that's the way for you to interact with us. The chats are turned off, but you can ask us questions at any time. Everybody can see the chats that you're asking. Emily will be paying attention to that, and she'll jump in if there's something that looks like a good one for us to talk about live here. That said, let's jump in. Let's look at, first of all, what our takeaways are going to be today. So again, we're talking about Jean's and Price Gregory's journey from working on projects, really relying heavily on spreadsheets for the collection of data and some of the downstream analysis and workflows that you have to do with that. We're going talk through some of those real world examples of what using a bespoke spreadsheet built specifically for what they're doing, how that kind of breaks down at scale and some of the impacts that that's had on their business. That's number one. Number two is we'll talk about some of the changes that Gene has shared that actually put in place in order to make this data easier to work with. That's where we talk about it being more trackable, more reportable. And she has some cool stories about how she used AI to help with that. And that was particularly one of the fun things that I hadn't hadn't heard any of our customers give a good story about that, so I really want to hear more about that one. There's some learnings that Gene can share with us on their transition and what was easy, what was hard, some of the remaining challenges. Right? Probably not a hundred percent every time. There's still challenges out there, so we'll talk about some of those. You know, our goal here is for you to learn from that, for you to hear what was easy, low hanging fruit that you can maybe take away right away, and what was hard, and what you'll really have to to work at. And and then particularly, I love this story about executive support. For for going through a big change like this and getting the users in the field, the users in the office to adopt, what did that look like? And, Jean specifically told the story of how executive support was was really instrumental to that. So we'll talk about that one and kind of how they overcame adoption frictions. Alright. Again, a reminder, if if you have any questions, comments, or we think we're talking to you and you don't see us, give us a question on the q and a so that we know about it. I'm gonna stop sharing this for a little bit so that you don't need to see that. And let's see. Okay. There we go. Hey. I might have been sharing that the whole time. Was I not sharing that the whole time? Oh, maybe I Alright. Well, we're good now. We talked through it. Alright. So, Jean, let's, let's start off. You told me this story. Gene and I have worked together for, you know, a year or more and, you know, they work on these oil and gas pipeline projects and y'all work on gas distribution systems. You've done some data center work. And you told me this story about this giant spreadsheet that has all of this information in it that the field is using and, like, the downstream workflow. You showed it to me, it's massive. There's tons of tabs, and they just keep adding up. I would love for the people here to hear some context on what was the work that y'all were doing in this specific instance? What kind of project? And then let's get into, like, what was in that spreadsheet? Like, what were you doing with it? Right. So what you're referring to is our daily progress spreadsheet and what our operations had used for probably decades. And what that was is, let's say we had a six month large diameter pipe job And we would have let's say it's a January spreadsheet and it would have a tab for every day. So it would have a second, third, fourth, fifth day of January. And in that, it would start with, you're tracking your linear foot foot progress against what you estimated. You're tracking the materials used that day on the job. You're tracking some subactivity. Another thing I mentioned to you, we'd also track milepost station markers that meaning when you're going like the picture behind your head, you're going down this path. Well, you're working that path in a linear foot progress. Let's say down that path, there's water in the way and they can't continue clearing or grading, something like that. They might have to skip those little areas down that path. So we'd had to keep track of those skips. So there was just a ton of information on the spreadsheet. And then again, it was a tab for every single day, and then when you would get to February, you'd have a new spreadsheet with a tab for every single day. So it was just massive and not really collecting data in any job to date database style. So you're mounting up a tab for every day. Is each tab progressively keeping track of all the previous day's progress or is each tab kind of independent of the previous? So they had a macro that would at least copy forward the information for job to date to the next tab. However, the the issue with that when you're not using a database style, if you have to go back, let's say you're in January twenty eighth and you find out something wasn't tracked properly on January tenth, can't, it wouldn't do any value to go correct the actual day because it wouldn't carry forward on a job to date basis. There wasn't that ability to really see the actual day where things were happening when that actual man count and man hours was was doing the work. Alright. So you've got all this data in in various tabs. Go back and correct one of them. It doesn't necessarily update the the forward looking ones. And so now you've essentially got updates that aren't flowing into kind of your latest set of data that you're probably targeting reporting against that last tab. Right. Okay. And then you get to the project, and ideally, that very last tab is kind of the summary of everything that's happened in the project. That sounds about right? Right. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm hearing you, like, you've got you've got labor hours in there. You've got equipment hours. You've got, like, your cost quantities. It sounds like you've got your progress quantities. You talked about other things like your mile stations. So you've got all kinds of stuff in there. Why I guess talk through some of the downstream problems that drove you you know what? Let me back up for a second. You expressed that you had this big goal of getting off of this spreadsheet, and you set that goal as, like, a hundred percent. I wanna get off of this thing. This is the story that I remember you talking about. I wanna get off of this. I don't wanna use this anymore. I need to find a way to get all of this data out of that spreadsheet, answer all the questions. And so the question in my mind is why? You've got this spreadsheet. You're doing it. You're gathering the data. I think you're answering the questions, and yet you're saying, I've gotta get off of this. So why? What are the problems? Well, and I wouldn't say it was a me thing for sure. And that leads into to make changes when you've specially done them for decades. Especially on the operations side, you have to have that leadership support. Because it's changed. And we were using the older on prem heavy job at the time, and it really wasn't a situation Our foremen still were collecting everything on paper, so let's talk about that process. So you have your foreman in the field collecting all this progress data on paper, and then it's going into the office, the job site trailer, and you've got a project engineer and a payroll person that's putting all the data into whether it was the on prem heavy job at the time, now we're on web, or you have your project engineer filling in that spreadsheet. So you have all these little pieces that aren't just flowing from the point of when it's happening. It's happening when the foreman has the task that he has for that day. So it's just to streamline your processes, it's more efficient to try to get that data in at the very, very beginning when it's happening rather than handing it off and someone else or a couple different people are putting the data in. So to move past that, and you ask the struggles, like I mentioned, you have to have operations, but we're also creatures of habit. We get stuck in the ways that we do things, and we need to all step back sometimes and figure out if there's a better way. Just because you've done it for fifteen years this way, with all the technology we have, that doesn't mean that it's the best way now. So hopefully that kind of answered that question. Yeah. So I I mean, I I hear the struggles of you. You're putting stuff on paper. You gotta translate it over the spreadsheet. You've got these multiple worksheets, which can have kind of disagreeing data on kind of where you are today. I'm assuming I'm projecting on you, but I'm assuming that y'all have the typical struggles of you write it down, that's one point of data entry. You put it in a spreadsheet, that's the second point of data entry. You update that spreadsheet the next time, it's third point of data entry. Somebody else has to read it and do some of that's fourth. You're starting to mount up the number of times people are touching this data and putting it in different places. As you've talked about, it's not in the database. The whole thing about an app and a database is it's supposed to control all this stuff, control the data quality. I'm assuming those are some of the challenges you had. How does that flow into answers or questions you need to answer back in the office to run your processes? What are some of the critical reports, for instance, that you're having to run to answer questions with this information? So as far as the spreadsheet process, it would be a a matter of operations looking at things here and going back to field to answer questions. So outside of that, why something took so long or those kind of questions, you're still gonna get those whether you're using the automated process that we're doing now. Right. I think anyway, it just gives you a little what we're doing now, which I guess will I don't know if this is a good time to get into what we're doing now. Sure. Okay. So what we're doing now, we're doing this now on a pipeline job. And I should say we're also doing short cycle distribution work, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a little bit. But this particular project is a thirty mile pipeline project. And we moved over to Heavy Job Web and put iPads in the foreman's hands, and with that, all this stuff that we're tracking. So that's where it gets kind of interesting. So right now, a lot of times you just look at, in Heavy Job Web, you look at the quantity on the cost code of the time card, and so your quantity might be a linear foot quantity or a weld count quantity depending on what that activity is. But there's so much more that we have to track that's not just it might be cost code specific, but it's more than just a linear foot. So some of that would be, which has gotten very interesting, weld types, pipe gang welds, firing line welds. And we also track weld diameters. So we're using tags to do a lot of that tracking. We also track, as I mentioned, those start and stop stations, milepost markers. We're tracking all of those start and stops on a day for any given crew that's doing that progress for linear foot. There's so much more. And of course, our materials and subs. But using all that data, we're moving to Power BI. We're doing our daily progress using Power BI. So we can get into that too if you're right. Okay. So some of the cool things you talk about there, like, anybody that uses our software today or for the for that matter that doesn't, they're tracking hours at the very least. They've gotta pay people. It's typically number one for people, and that's a huge cost center. People will get into tracking equipment hours, maybe they're getting into tracking some of their cost quantities and materials and stuff like that. But you went into these other things. Like, first of all, tracking welds, I think, is super interesting. I wish we could show your report and spreadsheet, but, course, that's kind of business proprietary stuff, y'all can't see that. But I wanna try to, like, illustrate it in your head because you you've got all these diameters of welds that you're tracking that I saw, and you're tagging each time you do one of these so that you can count up the quantity of welds. And am I right that you're doing this because in your project planning and estimating, you know how many of those welds based on the plans that you're supposed to be as you progress linear footwise down the project, and so you kind of have that as a metric. It's not a simple progress metric of one thousand feet, two thousand feet, three thousand Right. All along that way progress is measured in not only weld counts, but weld counts of specific diameters. And then you got into other things that you mentioned, like your tracking. Like the mats. So you got that heavy equipment behind you. Those big mats that it has to sit on. So we have different feet in mats. An example of one of those was the eighteen foot mats that we're tracking that are rentals. So we had to track those as they were delivered. That starts a rental process. And then we also track when they're set, when they're picked up and returned if they're an eighteen foot mat, and then we have some owned mats. But all of that had to be tracked. And using for the eighteen foot mats, we're using the as they got delivered in the Power BI, we have something that shows the anticipated rental cost based on delivered versus when they get picked up. So it helps us track that rental cost that that we're expecting to see too. So these are pretty cool examples because, like, you had to kinda come up with a essentially a method for your field entering that stuff with tags so that you could then pull that stuff into HeavyJob from the tablet, and then you talk about pulling that into Power BI. So let's talk about Power BI for a second. So first of all, you're you're pulling all this data in from Power BI. Is all the data coming from HeavyJob? Yes. Hundred percent. Okay. So if you follow that chain, they've gotta put the data in the field into HeavyJob Mobile, into their tablet so they can flow into web so that you can flow that into Power BI. You've got all this data in there, and then, like, the question is, oh my god. I've got I've I've got all these progresses progress quantities for linear footage. I've got all these counts of welds, and they're being submitted by foreman in their in their daily time cards. Like, I've got all this data. Now what do I do with it? And you're adding all this stuff up day by day and tracking this as a metric and seeing, like, are we making our progress? How did you do that? How did how did you, like, build these report? Did you build these reports? Did somebody did you pay somebody to build these reports? What'd you do? Okay. So, well, I now will mention so we have the foreman in the field filling this out. We still have a project engineer that's checking and making sure things are entered properly. Because if you don't get it entered properly in heavy job, then things aren't going to be right on that progress that we're we're doing. So when I first started building out the Power BI, I tried to model it after what operations was used to seeing in that Excel spreadsheet that I mentioned. And that has grown because now that we're seeing it, Excel file is still considered like flat information. And now that we have the ability and we're tracking all of this, we have a much more dynamic dashboard and we're still developing, still massaging it, getting the way we want it to be. And I'll tell you who my best friend is here in just a second. But so it's grown into, like the first tab is a horizontal bar chart tab that just shows linear, it's focused mainly on the top part is linear foot progress. So if you have clearing, grading, lowering in pipe, it shows what we estimated the linear foot, and then as the job progresses, that top bar for actual activity keeps marching against the estimated anticipated linear foot progress. Then you can hover over that, and you can see footage per day, rain days, total progress today, a lot of little high level stats of each activity. And then at the bottom it shows little Power BI cards that show how many pipe gang welds or firing line welds or lowering in and all these stats, everything again coming from HeavyJob. So to who my best friend is, if I had tried to do this about five years ago before Claude came into play, I would have been researching some of these formulas that I had to do for probably days. I wasn't trained on DAX formulas. I'm good in Excel, but some of these formulas are like a screen size long that we're calculating. But I tell you what, all I would do is once I knew what I needed to see, I knew what operations wanted to see, but I wasn't quite sure how to get there. So I would take screenshots of tables and columns that are in the database from heavy job or HCSS data. And I would throw the screenshots into Claude and tell it what I'm needing. And I might have to do a couple renditions and it would spit out a formula and probably eight times out of ten, the first formula would give me what I need. So it was total game changer. This is so cool to me. So for those of you that don't know, Claude is, it's like ChatGPT. Right? It's it's a competitor to that. It's made by Anthropic. It's just a or Gemini if you use that, if you use Google and it gives you AI results. Right? It's just it's your AI helper. And so Claude's another one. And Claude's specifically very popular for developers writing code, and this is, like, kind of in that realm. And so what Jean showed me is she's in Power BI, in Power BI, you can see all the tables. If you go into HTSS Insights, you see a very similar thing. You see a big list of all the data that we provide in the Power BI reports, and they're in tables and columns, fields of data. But you look at that and you're like, oh my god. How do I use all this stuff? And so Jean showed me she's literally taking screenshots of some of these and saying, need this data and I need this, and she's, like, talking to it. And it can go and write formulas to essentially query that data and provide these counts of a twelve inch weld versus a ten inch weld. And so, like, you're building out all these metrics for tracking, and it's getting it right for you. And when it gets it wrong, you talk to it some more. That is so cool to me because I'm betting that other people on the phone or on the webinar are asking themselves like, oh my god, I would love to have reports like this. I'm not sure if I could create them, and this is how. Yeah. Were you already an expert in Power BI or, like, using Cloud or, like, writing code? Like, what's your background? No. My degree is accounting, so I definitely wasn't trained in writing code when you're in accounting. But my brain works like just I'm a process person, so I just think through things and want to see the end result. But I did have a lot of experience in Excel. And one thing Cloud will help you with a lot, but one thing you have to learn when it comes to some of the things you like power pivots in Excel is a very similar foundation to Power BI. You have to learn how to connect multiple data tables. So to mention, I'm not using insights. We're using direct access to the database, the HCSS data. And the reason why we went down that path is, as I mentioned, we've got some very complex measures that we're doing in Power BI, and I wouldn't have the ability to do that by myself in Insights. I think a lot of my foundation was knowing how to connect data tables, understanding that relationship, and that helped me with the foundation of Power BI. I'd already built some things in Power BI, but not to the complexity of what we're doing now, which has been I mean, I'm able to turn around when operations need something and I'm not sure how to do it on the fly real quick. I just, alright, Claude, help me. And then I can spit it out pretty quick. You know, I think that's that's part of why we named this webinar as a journey because it if you hadn't been using spreadsheets that you'd kinda cooked up, like, through your own little mini app, like, you wouldn't have gained the experience of how to work with that data in a spreadsheet. Like, people turn spreadsheets into these little apps. Right? And then that translated into you understanding how to work with data that you pull into your Power BI. For those that heard what Jean said, she's pulling that data directly from HSS HeavyJob via direct access. Direct access, if you're not aware, is basically a way of connecting your internal business systems directly to HeavyJob's data, you pull it in. You consume that data. And so rather than going into heavy job to create a report or view a report or into insights, HSS insights, you can pull that data into your own Power BI instance or into your other systems and do all kinds of fun things with it. Gene, you also talked about another example of these stations where I mean, obviously, your stations go from zero to, I don't know, fifty thousand, something like that on this project. In theory, you've got pipe the whole way, you've got right of way the whole way, you've got mats being laid down here and there, you've got welds the whole way, and you're keeping track of progress along these stations, but you talked about you hit these gaps for various reasons, and you're also needing to have kind of this custom analysis of when gaps happen and how do I know about that and do something about that. Can you talk about that problem and then get into, okay, again, an example in Power BI? It's something that a lot of times a project manager or engineer needs to keep up with. I have not tried to build this out yet, but this is one of the things I'm going to work on. That it's not been requested, but to me, it kinda makes sense. Those station mile is like on your project plan, let's say that the client will assign station markers, milepost markers as where things happen on the job just for tracking. You can see, it gives them the visibility of where things are, I guess is the right way to say it. Well, as I mentioned, sometimes you have these gaps. And if you have these gaps and let's just say it's a thirty mile pipeline. Well, that thirty miles is a long way. You have to be able to know where something had to be skipped, tracked. Hopefully that makes sense. So what I'm hoping to do at some point, if I can make it happen, is figure out some way to show those gaps easily on a dashboard. Why are you skipping why are they skipping parts? So, like, it could be a water. Maybe it rained really bad in one area. There's a low low area possibly where they can't go and do clearing or grading at the time. So that could be a reason that that would be a skip that they would need to be aware to go back on. Okay. Alright. Alright. So keep going. So you skip these areas. You're keeping track of where you actually worked, but now you're keeping track of what you had to skip where you didn't work. Then what? What are you doing with this? Like, why does that matter? Well, to keep keep track of what we skipped? Yeah. So how you what how's that flowing into your reports? Because I know you're tracking something about that. It's well, right now, it goes into it shows you take the start and stops. It also backs up your linear linear footage. So on the time card that foreman's putting in the linear foot complete. Then in the Power BI, we also have a table that shows those start and stops. So for example, on one day, they could have start and stopped three different stations. Then I'm using a formula to plus and minus those three different stations and add up what the station says our linear foot progress is, and that should match what the foreman put in on the cost code level quantity. And that can also raise questions. Okay, you gave me these start and stops, but it's not tying out to whatever that fifteen hundred linear foot progress you did that day. Why? So it's another way to, identify some not properly reported information to Okay. I'm with you. So if if they reported they worked a couple thousand feet today, two thousand feet today, but then their start and stop show that they only worked fifteen hundred. You're in Power BI basically doing the math and saying, like, we've got a we've got a discrepancy here. What did we miss? And so And then what want to add, then when you look down day after day, you should see whatever end station was should match your start station for the next day. And that's where some of these gaps might come in for various reasons. So when you look back, you shouldn't have wherever your end is for one day, your start should be another day. And if you have any of those gaps in between as the daily progress goes on, you have to question why those gaps are there. Okay. So I could like, just the math itself should be simple, but that's in your head. You start to put all this stuff in the spreadsheet day after day after day after day, and to your point, like, would have to go look at all these numbers and cells and figure it out. And and Right. Either read it or write formulas to do the math to figure it out, and I can see where that's a challenge. So what did you do to make this easy to report on in Power BI? So in Power BI, that's the where I'm using the table. So I have, like, on one of the the tabs is just linear foot progress activities because we have different activities like weld progress. I have one tab that's just based on linear foot quantities where we've set it as a linear foot quantity at the job setup level initially to put what we're estimating against. I have my Power BI just pulling anything that has a linear foot planned quantity. And then I have the different activities across the top that are buttons. So if they pick clearing or pick grading, it's gonna toggle the information at the bottom so they can look at grading and see those, well, various things, but can also see the start and stop stations specific to grading, which would help them if there is a gap to help them identify where those station marker gaps end so they can go back and review. That makes sense? Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. Absolutely. And so you're creating these little metrics that show you how much progress you made. You can see where there are gaps. And I think you had told me again, this is another place where you use Claude to help you figure out essentially how to write these these queries that would tell you, well, if you add up all the stations today and blah blah blah blah blah, this is the number and this much is a gap. Is it the same thing? Like, you literally just screenshotted some of these tables and told it like, hey. This is what I'm trying to figure out. Do the math for me. Oh, it's crazy. Yes. There's time it depends on what I and to mention too, when I first started doing, I used the same Claude chat thread for because it builds on what you've put in previously. So if I know I already put a table in where it can see the different columns, I could just say, look at this table and this column and this table and this column and or and multiple tables and columns, and I need this information because I've built it in the same chat thread. So that was incredibly helpful. But Okay. That's cool. Used Okay. So I wanna make a transition here and talk about some of the specific thing well, talk about adoption. You talked about how this is a big change. Tell us a little bit about, like, the people involved. Like, you know, we're talking about your former, you're talking about your crew. I don't know how many folks you've got out in the field, how many folks you've got in the office. Talk a little bit about, like, the adoption challenges. When you say it's an adoption challenge, what does that mean? Like what are the humans and their emotions and their opinions and their needs involved in this when you say it was a challenge? So I think one of the foremen, I went out to the job site that we rolled this out for pipeline and the one of the foreman just made the comment. Yeah, I'm one of those old knuckle draggers. So meaning they it's old school forever. They've just used the paper foreman time cards or whatever tools they had, and they didn't want to deal with the technology of it all. So to get them to adopt this, in my opinion, the only way is your senior management has to back it all the way through. You're just not going to be successful. You're a superintendent can want it, and if they get pushed back from foreman, it will you still have to have that senior management that and our president came on board and was like, yep, we're doing this. This is what we're doing. We're moving forward. Get on board. And so that's what made it successful, honestly. Okay. I'm gonna pause that conversation for a second. Emily, I see you got your hand up. Yes. We've got a couple of folks in the audience that want to see if there are any visuals that you're able to share, whether it's like Power BI reports or just where people are recording this data. Because we are talking a lot about it, but they're not. Kinda able to deal with that. I know. And I was wanting to share, but I just wasn't sure with it being pro pro if I could get that word out, proprietary. Little tough to be able to share the actual. I probably should have tried to mock something up. I can paint a picture pretty good, but, yeah, I couldn't I'm gonna let Jean off the hook on that one because, yeah, the the spreadsheet itself, yeah, is, like, very proprietary and internal for them. And we did talk about wanting to show that I'm sorry, not just the spreadsheet, but the Power BI report itself. So we can't show that. Now I see another question there about like, hey, can we see the PowerReport? No. I can't see that. But in HeavyJob, I know we've got a lot of HeavyJob users out there. A lot of the data so first of all, we're talking about time card data. Y'all are if you're a HeavyJob user, you're mostly familiar with that. But, also, the cost code tags is a lot of what Jean's talking about. They've created their own cost code tags. Jean, can you talk about what some of those just like the way you've actually named those and used those real quick? Yes. And I can tell you part of my because I'm learning as I go to, and I and maybe down the road and I should mention another thing that you and I talked about. We'll come back to that. Help me remember about being able to bulk update. But how I started walking down this path, so with Heavy Job, we are doing the business units. So we have our pipeline group in a business unit by itself, and then, like, our short cycle distribution work is in a separate business unit. So we went down this path because the overall job type is a little different. So I've mentioned that because at the heavy job, and I'm gonna say business unit for us, maybe you're not doing business units, but your heavy job system, manager system is is the first business unit if you're only one business unit. You have setup transaction tabs in your setups, and those will apply across all of your jobs. And then there's times where it's very specific to a job. So what we did is and it was like a learn as a go. In those setup transaction tabs, we focused on now we focus on what would apply across all jobs that would be pretty static. Like, we're using rain outs. We have to track rain days, and one of the tags would be rain outs. That applies across all the jobs. We have to track certain the mats being delivered applies across all jobs. So some of those things, just welds for pipeline, pipe gain welds, firing line welds, that's gonna be across all pipeline jobs. Where we go and do something different is at the job level, we tracked are you gonna show the job setup level maybe? I'm just gonna show the tags. Keep describing what you're doing, then I'm just gonna kinda point out some of the tags. Then at the job level, there's another area there for transaction tags. In that, we had very specific weld diameters. So we set up like six and a quarter inch, seven inch, ten inch, different well diameters we had to track as they do the progress that was planned. And again, those are at the job level. And then what I think you're about to show is where those go, whether it was set up at the master setups or specific job, and then it goes into the time card tags. Yeah. So, some of the things Gene's talking about. So in HeavyJob, if you go to job setup transaction tags, you can set up your own custom tags. You can see that these are these are custom named. And, like, there's one here for schedule, for instance, milestone day started or completed a critical path activity. This now becomes available for the field to add to a cost code on their time card that day. Then if we go in and we look at the time card, here I am on a sample time card. Here, let me close that one out and I'll show you. If you click onto that cost code, so this is a job, FGE0101. It's got two cost codes on it. I've got this one cost code that they work on, and if they come over to their notes for that cost code, I've already added this one in here. Here, I'll get rid of it and do it again So people see you can add a tag, and you see you get the same list of all the cost code or the cost code tags that are available. I can pick the schedule miles, the milestone day, hit okay. And then in there where you can start typing notes. And this is where, Jean, I think you're saying they were literally this one might, for you, be like a a start station tag, and then they're literally typing in the station number of where they started. They would have a yep. A start station, a stop station. It could have two or three of those start and stops. And then they could also have depending on what they're doing, they could have the welds in those same tags. So they do something like that, and then they could go add another tag, and they would have a star a stop station one. I'm making this one up because it's not actually called stop station, or it's actually schedule off, and they would do that one plus two fifty. And now you've got those two that are being pulled into your Power BI and that's what you're doing math off of. Right? Right. Alright. That's mention to mention just for people to under like, that does come in. This is important to mention, actually. Well, you can use the data query side behind Power BI to fix it, but that does come in like a text field. So when that data comes in in the database, you do have to do, I ended up copying a a formula or a column the column over and changing it to a a number field and making sure all alpha characters were removed. That way, I could do a count on it, but those do come through like a text. Okay. Alright. Alright. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of a view of exactly how she's doing this. One of the things in in HeavyJob that is powerful and with some of that power comes a little complexity is that tags are extremely flexible. You can create essentially custom data entry with them. It's like you created your own fields called start station and stop station, and they enter those values. When you pull those into reports or into Power BI, you can now do things with those. And in this case, you're doing math with them because the data they're entering is literally start and stop station numbers. They need a little conversion and they need a little interpretation of like, Power BI doesn't know that you wanna subtract, the higher station from the lower station to get the the actual distance covered or the linear footage covered. I see a question that can we see the HCSS export that's used in Power BI as a starting point? Jean, can you talk a little bit about how you actually get that data into Power BI? It is the direct access. So through HCSS, you can request direct access. They give you I guess what y'all do is have a copy over of our data periodically and refresh it. Like, we have it set to refresh a couple times a day, and then it's like direct access. I once they give HCSS gives you a login credentials to your own database, You log in and you can see all the data tables to be able to pull into the Power BI. Yeah. So to just to kind of help somebody see how they would do that, DirectAccess is literally a connection over the Internet hitting, our web services that we call DirectAccess, and it will pull data from the HeavyJob database into your own database. And then that database is what Power BI is pointing at and building out these tables. So that's somebody you'd probably get your IT team involved in in helping you make that connection. But if you're not doing that, you can also get to that same data in HTSS Insights. You can get to some of that data in reports. In HeavyJob here, there's cost code tag reports that you can pull and export those. But this method that Jean's doing is tightly integrated so that she doesn't have to go through the manual process of running a report and exporting it and then putting it into her external Power BI for reporting. Right. So that's that's kind of the most tightly integrated approach, which is, again, pretty cool that you all figured all that out. Jean, I wanna go back to this adoption story. We jumped in the middle of that because of some of those those good questions. Thanks for asking those, everybody. You were talking through let me stop sharing since you're just staring at that screen now. You were talking through those challenges of getting the field to adopt, and you kinda started getting into that story of executive support. Why did the executives get involved? Like, what's their motivation? Well, there's a couple of things. Better information, more timely is a factor. And then I've also seen there's more demand even on a client side to be able to provide better information more timely. One of the tabs, we couldn't give direct access to a Power BI to the client, but one of the tabs was also one that they could put into a PDF and provide to the client on a daily basis. So being able to get better information more timely. We ran into this with some Alaska jobs where we, before we're working down this path, we kind of just struggled to get good information that they were really wanting. The demand's out there. I mean, it's in our face all the time now. And with AI tools and advancement in technology, you're gonna I think we're gonna get more and more requests to give better information, better reporting, more timely. Okay. So, I mean, that's kind of the end goal. Ultimately, your customer is saying, need reports. I need information. I need more. I need faster. And that's kind of the motivation to go through this change y'all went through. Talk a little bit about, like, what you actually had to do to get, let's say, your field folks on board with this. And I and I know everybody here's probably experienced, like, you want your people to just be on board, but the reality is they're humans. They have their own opinions. They are working voluntarily. They're not always on board, but you got them on board. You talked about your executive support to get them on. What did you actually have to do to get them to do this with you? Oh, I mean, anybody that does know me, I'm just very passionate about processes and process improvement. It drives me crazy when I see us duplicating and triplicating our efforts when we could just streamline our processes and save our time and our energy by just getting good information in the systems from the beginning and then getting good information out at the end. Previous operations folks weren't behind it. I mean, it's a hard thing to change. We all like I said earlier, we're creatures of habit. I I can be that way too. Thankfully, usually adapt pretty easily to technology changes and things like that, but not everybody does. We're not all wired the same. That's good. But to get it to work, truly just had to I had to have our president's support because we definitely hit resistance. It's faster for me to do this in Excel or something like that. But the end result doesn't just because it might take one person in one area a little longer than what it used to take them, doesn't mean the end result isn't saving a lot of time and getting better information. When you say you really got behind this and you got your present support, what does that translate to as far as action? I'm trying to envision, like, if I'm a foreman in the field and I'm not on board, I'm trying to envision, like, what did y'all actually do? Was this a phone call? Was this company wide meeting? Are y'all going out to the field? Are y'all threatening people's jobs? I know it's not that, but I mean, like, what's the what is the change that we can I think so, again, definitely our president pushed it? He was ready for the change and and to move forward using technology, and then they did send me out to the job site to work directly with people in the field, and I think that also sent the message that we're serious. We're working towards this, and we want to make it successful. So work let's work together to make it successful and not keep doing it the way we've always done it because it's easier to stay where we were. So I think that sent a strong message for them to say, Jean, go out there, work with them. And it was a good three days of just building out more in the Power BI, looking at their spreadsheets that they're tracking, that we're trying to get everything in that Power BI. So it's a good process to be face to face and let them see that, look, we can make this happen. It can work for sure. Okay. I I feel like that's an important takeaway that you can ask people to do things. You can tell people to do things, but getting out there and actually literally meeting with them in the field and and working with them and them knowing that this isn't some random gene showing up on the job site. This is coming from the top that we've gotta work together on this. It sounds like that that creates some some cooperation. It definitely did. It definitely did. And then they also asked operations reviews the Power BI that's coming through, they're going back like, when something doesn't look quite right because this is the first big pipeline job that we've used it on. If something doesn't look quite right, they're going back to that they're not coming to me saying, why is this report not looking like we expect? They're going back to the field personnel and saying, hey, this doesn't seem to be calculating right. This isn't This doesn't match this. What's going on? And it forces the field to go in and fix whatever's not calculating right. They also learn instead of thinking that it should be me that fixes operations going back to the field, which is great. At first, I was thinking, why are they doing that? But honestly, you've got to fix it at the field, that's how people learn. Same like with your foreman. If your foreman aren't always putting it on the time card, if we continue to fix it for them, they're not going to learn. So going back and saying, hey, this isn't quite right. This is how you need to do it tomorrow, please, or whatever the case is. So just not always fixing it up in the teach teach people. You know, we hear that story constantly. Our our support teams, our even our salespeople, our our consultants, the people that work directly with the customers to really get going, especially the first time when they're using something like HeavyJob, they really push this message of like when the field submits stuff, if they get it wrong, it could be because they fat fingered something, they didn't know to do something, sometimes they didn't want to do something, send it back. And yes, it will be slower that first time, that second time, that third time. But if they learn to correct it, then that problem will slowly go away. I think that's an important point of like, they can't just go to Jean and say, hey, Jane, can you fix this data for us in this report? Or can some admin go fix the data for the formant? Sometimes it's faster, but this is a is a growing opportunity for everybody to ultimately make you operate better. Right. Right. That's a good story. So what we got about ten minutes left. I wanna help the folks hear some takeaways. One specific one is what was hard in all of this? What do you feel like were the hardest challenges that people should be aware of? Like, these pieces of this are hard, and it took some work to get through it. I don't know that I would classify it as hard. For me, initially, trying to the goal was what is what is the field tracking and whether it was the daily progress or other spreadsheets, what is the field tracking? Let me gather all that information. And then I had to figure out, okay, how am I gonna get this in heavy job? Because the ultimate goal was we wanted everything in heavy job. So finding all those little pieces here and there and the right way to get it into heavy job like, there's some things now that I'm looking back going so for example, just to throw out a learning curve example, it doesn't fit everything, but we talk about mats, the big mats. So we had eighteen feet mat foot mats, I think twenty four, maybe thirty foot mats, eighteen foot were rentals, the rest company owned, and we did use tags for those. And I started thinking that it may but it doesn't fit all the process. I started thinking maybe I should have used mats as a material instead of a tag and received and installed. The only hiccup is there hiccup there would be picked up. So there's another step that wouldn't fit materials. So working through those things and realizing you can mess up on this first job and you'll figure out a better way to do it next time. Definitely some of those areas were challenging. Just gotta find all the buckets and the right places to put things. And then, like I talked to you about this in all transparency, so one of the things is I mentioned on the daily spreadsheet, if you go back ten days and you have to correct something, then you want it to flow all the way through. And currently in a heavy job, it's very easy to go back on the time card quantities and go backwards and fix things. But we're using tags so heavily that it's not easy right now, but we're gonna work together on that to go back and, edit your tags. Currently, the only way to edit your tags is at the time card level. And we did have some where, the client changed the station markers after we had already been putting progress on those station markers, so we had to go back into a lot of time cards and fix those. But that's just part of you just power forward. You don't quit on it. You just figure out, okay, did I do it the right way? Maybe not. Let's do it different next time. And then if it's still not the best, say, alright, HCSS. Help us. We gotta do better. Well, this is this is important for the for the audience. Like, when we do these webinars, we want everybody to learn, but that includes us. So I fully expect, I I'm telling people that I'm learning, especially about the way you're using tags in kind of a complex way, and especially the way you're using it for doing the stationing method. That's something I didn't really grasp before. So, yeah, we we come into this and we learned too, we we have these takeaways. Well, okay. We could make that easier for people. And, you know, we position this as a utilities and oil and gas webinar because we fully expect that there's a lot of other people. We have a lot of other clients in that market that are gonna have the same challenge and needs as you. So, it's a cool story that we're learning from as well. And you talk about the challenges of using tags, you know, I mentioned earlier. They're they are flexible, but they can also be challenge to set up because you do have to go through that mental exercise of figuring out how am I gonna use them to make the data entry easy and then the reporting, and you figured it out. But I do want people to hear that that is part of the challenge. That's again why we have implementation teams that kind of help people through this because it's a challenge. I think that's cool to just be very open and honest about. What was low hanging fruit? What do you think was maybe something that everybody could say, like, oh, yeah. I I could go do that pretty quickly. What was easier? Well, that I guess, low hanging fruit. What We had to move off of the heavy job on prem, and we did start that progress. And we didn't get into this today, but the short cycle distribution work. So we moved because we are using the pay items to help them invoice, and I know we're running out of time. So we started with that group and moved them over to the web version. For us, moving the pipeline over because we knew we needed to get there for various reasons. The low hanging fruit was because we were already using the on prem. So even though we didn't have Foreman iPads, our office people were already familiar with what we were doing on the on prem. So that might not be the best example to ever give you, but it's not like we started straight out in heavy job brand new. But the web, we wouldn't in my opinion, I don't think we could possibly do what we're doing on daily progress if we did not have the web version. Okay. Since you mentioned that, I was just gonna give people the visual. First of all, you know, you've got a heavy job in the web. If y'all haven't seen it, you're looking at it. And she talked about some of the pay item entry. You can see below the time card here, you actually have this section. This is for unit price pay item entry. The field can see basically the same interface where they can directly enter their their pay item quantities as opposed to using the cost code quantities that drive pay item quantities. So they can have many of these on a cost code across multiple work orders. So you can see there's multiple work orders from a multi job time card that day, two different cost codes, and then multiple pay items that they recorded quantities on. And, you know, all that's set up. Here's a list of the jobs or work orders on that kind of short cycle work, distribution work. And if you go into here, you've got some setup of that over in the pay item screen where you can list out all your pay items from your contract and group them under cost codes, and that's how the field gets this view of the pay items that they can directly enter. Yeah. So just to finalize on that one, so for our short cycle work, the foreman, they like I said, they've been using it for over a year. They when they go out to the job site, they do pick their pay items that they did for that job. Then those pay items actually are coming in. We're using Power BI to not only get your field notes, your pay items, your manpower, pictures of the job, and they take the field for invoicing, take that data from Power BI to support the invoice. Okay. Cool. And that that gets directly kind of that that end process of, like, ultimately, you need to get paid. You need to get information in in front of the customer. Yeah. So this this is a nice little workflow that that helps make that a little easier. Alright. I'm gonna stop sharing that for a second. I don't know. What's let's kinda wrap this up. What's what's the sentiment from you and maybe your leadership and from the field now that kinda takes you into maybe the next project or the next product? How are y'all feeling about it? We are starting to roll out HCSS safety. With that, we'll start integrating those Power BI pieces also for reporting. So that was one section of the massive spreadsheet. They would report some of that safety stats for the day. They had towards the end of the job, they had all the stats for the job safety. With rolling out safety, we'll be able to integrate that also in for our Power BI to show what's happening on the job from that aspect too. Okay. Alright. So you take you're taking some of the lessons learned from kind of that transition from the spreadsheet to using HeavyJob, and sounds like you're gonna put some of those learnings in play and gathering safety data in the field. Yep. Okay. That'd be awesome. Very cool. Well, I think we're at about time to wrap it up. Jean, do you have any closing thoughts? Did I skip anything just majorly important? Got any shout outs to your family? I don't know. No. No. I just encourage you if you're wanting to make that change, you just gotta push forward. It's doable. Don't let people that are so set in their ways not be ready to adopt something new. Technology is moving. It's changing all the time. You can't can't stay stagnant, unfortunately, but Claude can help. All right. Well, folks out there, thank you for asking some of the questions. We wanna reiterate. I'll put up our, our faces real quick. There's my contact info. You're welcome to reach out if you have any questions about any of this. As Emily commented, y'all had questions about Power BI and Direct Access and how, Jean was actually using tags and getting that data out of HeavyJob. If you have any questions about that kind of stuff, reach out. You can reach out to me. You can reach out to if y'all have a contact already, you can reach out to support, and we will happily help you through that stuff. Jean, thanks for joining us. It was a great conversation. Navigate through you. What's that? If they have questions for me, just send you a message and I'll do my best to help answer. Absolutely. If you if you wanna learn anything from Jean, I can't guarantee she can tell you. But, yeah, route it to me, and and I'll connect the dots. I'll connect y'all. Yep. Alright. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Bye, y'all. Bye, everyone.