AGC webinar: How outdated processes are costing you time, money, and your future

Great. It is two p. M. Right now, so we'll get started. Thanks again, everyone, for joining us in today's webinar, How Outdated Process is Costing Your Time. And just a few housekeeping items before we get started. If you have any technical issues during the webinar, please submit a question in the chat on the right hand of the GoToWebinar here, and we'll get it troubleshot and see how we can fix that. If there's any question regarding the webinar content, please submit a question in the Q and A section on the right hand of the column as well. And all questions will be answered during the Q and A sections. At the end, we'll save about ten to fifteen minutes for the Q and A section. And today, we have Greg and Colby from HCSS. And with that, I'll hand it to you, Greg. Hi. Alright. My name is Greg Besman. I actually work for HCSS, a heavy construction system specialist anyway. I've been there a long time. So one of my what kinda makes me an expert, I guess, other than I've been there a long time. I have, you know, about eighteen years. I started in support back when we only had maybe three or three products, for for sure. Now we have a bunch more. But I've been through from support all the way through implementation, and visiting companies probably like yourselves, and implementing some digital solutions. So I have some background with that. And then I also have with me Colby Harrison, who is also helping with the q and a stuff and the questions. Colby? Yeah. My name is, Colby Harrison. Like Greg mentioned, I've also been working at HCSS for a little while. Not as long as Greg. I've been here five years, a little bit more than five years, and I also started in support and worked my way through support. And, now I'm a product specialist where I help customers kind of implement solutions, for business problems that they have. So Okay. So we'll just kinda jump in. Kind of the the format. I'm pretty much used to a class where I'm interacting with people with since it's a more of a webinar, we'll kinda do a lecture first and then ask questions, later. So once we finish, we'll we'll open it up, I think, about fifteen minutes or so, maybe maybe a little more for for questions. So, if you guys do wanna keep a question so you don't forget it, you can put it in the q and a, and then I think Colby can help organize and keep that straight. Alright. Who we are? If you haven't heard, we mentioned it at the top there, HCSS. It is heavy construction system specialists. But our our main goal is is, you know, as a company is to provide, or to help our customers improve their business through software, through our software, but through software. And oftentimes, it turns out to be through software in general, not just our software. One of the things I do like about this slide in in you know, when you look at it, you have the office, you have job site, maybe multiple multiple job sites, and they can break into utility things. And then we have plants and we have our shop. Anyway, these are all different areas and departments of the company that have information that when they make decisions could affect other areas of the company. So, so what I like about this is it kind of outlines, Hey, there's a lot of places that, you know, we have to have information, capture information to help us make decisions. You know, the job site, I may need to make a decision about a guy, you know, when my, Hey, this excavator needs to get repaired, but I can't slow down or what am I going to do? So you have to know all that kind of stuff, or at least be in, be aware of what's going on so you can make the best decisions in your, in your world. Office wants all the paperwork in and they want, they want to do the reports. So there's a lot of things going on. And in part of what we're going to talk about today is how we can, you know, you know, when you have a piece of paper and that piece of paper has to make it to all these different places, that's a problem. I mean, it becomes a problem. It becomes, you know, more of a costly problem, I guess to say. So did making going digital can there's some obvious savings and that could be some of them. And then I think what we'll try and point out is some not so obvious savings as well. Anyway, I I do dig that because it kind of shows all the the different areas. And most of you guys would have probably, you know, ten, fifteen, twenty job sites moving at a time. Alright, some of the objectives today uncover broader on savings. I mean, I'm going to try and point these out in some of the examples that I go through a little later on. But but, you know, obvious things are, you know, if you go digital, you don't have paper, you know, you you don't have to, you know, you get to save money, hopefully. Right? But that's not we found that, you know, that's not necessarily true. You know, a guy that does a time card still has to fill out a time card. So if he can fill it out in in a minute, well, he's still gonna have to be able to fill it out in a minute. So I don't know if he's gonna save that much time doing a digital time card. But later on, you know, when you're on paper, that data has to be, you know, oh, now I have to take it from the time card and decipher that and put it in a spreadsheet or wherever I put it, accounting or whatever I do. So so there's some savings there for sure if we can get that data out and integrate it. We'll talk about that, you know, not just the savings of being digital, but, you know, hey, down the line, don't have to double enter it. Use it for something else. That kind of stuff will I'll point try and point out in certain areas as we go through the presentation. There was definitely a lot of places to improve processes as we talk through this, right? So just kind of keep in mind, you know, I'll try and point those out as well. There's a lot of place to get, you know, to make a better process just by going digital and, and, and maybe not even by going digital. I, I work with a lot of companies that do this thing they've been doing because that's what they've done. And a lot of times they want to build their system, their digital system based on that, which is totally fine. But obviously, we want to try and improve those processes. So I'll try and point out things for that. Boosting collaboration. Again, you guys to me, you guys all do a great job of boosting collaboration. I mean, you guys are on the phone, you're communicating all the time, but this kind of makes it a little more seamless. So I think we can talk about how you might see some hidden benefits on on some seamless collaboration where, you know, you're already doing it. You have to to make a job run. So this might be, make that a little more streamlined, utilizing the data. This is probably going to be the biggest thing that we can help you with, or not we, or that you get out of digital. If you go digital, you have now you have access to all that data, or at least you should have access. So if you're looking at a system to go digital, make sure you can access the data the way you need it, or, and you may not even know how you need it yet. So so making sure that you can get to that data and do things with it to be able to make decisions, is super important. So having a closed system or or having it on a piece of paper makes that hard, right? So we have to we have to look, you know, look at that and I'll try and point them out. Digital solutions, you know, practical tips. I'm, you know, we've done that before. I can certainly talk about it. Not a lot in the presentation about it, but if you have questions at the end, I'm certainly glad to talk about how you might, you know, how am I going to train four hundred foremen to do a digital time card? There are certainly things that we could we could talk about on that on that front. So as I go through some examples from here, I will start to point, you know, where the where those things are are happening for us. What else on this? I think we're good. We'll go on. I was just trying to think if, you know, the life of a job is is, you know, for a project manager, the life of job is pretty tricky, and there's a lot of stuff going on. A lot of stuff you got to keep track of and a lot of stuff that everybody has to know. So that's where it kind of it all ties together. So we'll kind of bring that in here. Let me see. Go to the next one. All right. So using these tools from the start again, you know, there there are a hundred tools out there. There are a lot of things out there. You guys are probably using some from from previous, you know, companies or or just like, hey. We had this. We've been using it. We haven't had a better solution. Just a lot of stuff. So finding the right tools is certainly something worth shopping for. So if you're gonna do it, make sure that that that you do your homework. Right? You definitely wanna make it easier on on the end user if possible. Right? So things to be thinking about for the right tools, easier for the user. Hopefully, can take less time than the process you're doing now. We can make it more consistent maybe. Those types of things are things that I would be looking for. Getting, you know, if you're building a bid in in heavy bid, you gotta type out each line. Is there a way to kind of reduce that? So reducing the tedious entry, those are all all things that that, you know, you should be looking at if you're gonna pick the right tool for the right system. The the other big thing to me about about this and and not even talking about HCSS is what always has floored me is, man, I got this data on a time card, for instance. Now I want to put it in this system. So integrating the data in other places is huge because you might have it too. Accounting is the big I need that data in accounting. So, you know, getting it to integrate to accounting is a is a big thing. Or, you know, hey, if I make a budget, you know, in my estimating program, being able to have that budget be a part of the field life is an is kind of important so they can see, hey, I'm doing this work. Oh, look, the budget said I should have done this. I I'm, you know, losing. Hey, I can fix that or I can't fix it or whatever. We can talk about it and solve those problems. So those those are all things to me. The integration is one of the biggest keys, and that comes back to accessing the data, being able to get the data and do with it what you need to do. All right. So so keep that in mind. If you are, you know, if you come to us, that's a that's a big consideration. You should definitely challenge us with that. But if you're going somewhere else, that is also something you want to have that data and you want to be able to get to it. You might not even know you need it today, but but having a system that that that offers you the ability to get to your data, is super important. All right. I think other things here, I think, you know, we thought easily establish a repeatable system. Again, those are all benefits of being on a computer, right? It could be quick, quick, quick, select, select, do things quickly, send it out, done, that kind of thing and have consistency, you know, using, you know, the same cost code to record the same type of work all the time and then running reports later on. How much did it cost us to pour concrete across all our jobs last year or whatever it is? That information can be out there. Alright. We'll go to the next here. Alright. So we'll start with that. Right? I mean, I like the idea, you know, estimating, connecting, estimating with operations. I mean, if you think about it, I go to a lot of places, estimators in the in his own little office doing bid after bid, you know, going through it all and and, you know, not really you know, he does the estimate. And then what happens if he wins the job? Everybody's happy. But, you know, do do the does does the PM know how he bid the job or is it the same? Is it going to be the same way the PM wants to build the project? Sometimes I see, you know, I understand estimators are sometimes PMs. But so to me, when, you know, we're connecting the estimator with operations, it's important for us to be able to say, hey, this is what the estimator, which, you know, what he's thinking when he made this job. And that's a that's to me, that's a big deal to get to foreman. So that's a crucial thing to be thinking about connecting. Hey, I did my estimate. I did this. This is how I did it. If the foreman has that information or the PM, that's good information for them to be able to make their decisions on. Oh, yeah, then this is what I should do or whatever I'm going. So you got to keep that in mind when you're talking about that estimators as well. I mean, not only, you know, if they even if they build it in in in in Excel, we gotta, we gotta get that out. Right. And I've seen a lot of, you know, when you start a job, you get a big binder of, of all the information, the budgets in the binder, it goes in the form and every form and gets one or the PM and the superintendent, and they have these big binders that live in the office, and, you know, maybe get referenced once in a while, but it's hard. Right? You gotta stop and do what you I gotta go in and look at this and figure this out, and, you know, you gotta plan it all out. Whereas if you had that in in the system, if it kinda connected freely, that that would help you guys make better decisions. So keep thinking about, you know, how can we connect? Going digital would help connect you that in those ways. We mentioned in in our slide here, we're referencing the estimator notes and how we figured something out. That's all very cool. The other, you know, other things you might not see right off the top of the the bat, You know, if you if you estimated the job, you actually know what resources you need when you're doing the job. If you scheduled that job out, or at least exported that out to some scheduling system, you would be able to build, hey, I need this, this many excavators on these days. I need this and this and this, whatever it is. And you would be able to build like a, you know, hey, I can now see hotspots. Oh, I'm I'm gonna be short an excavator. I'm gonna be short equipment or short manpower if if we get and you can start to manage the schedule. So that's another big thing you can you can use estimating data for scheduling, right? Seth, especially on the jobs you win, your backlog of work, that kind of stuff. I might even had guys work through, you know, a way of here's the jobs we have. Here's the materials we need to order in the next year. Boom. And they get a list of materials that they need to order, you know, if if they stay on schedule for next year. So there's a lot of different things you can do to to to take that information out of estimating and and build it into schedules and what you're going to need later on. On the other side of that, right? So the last piece that I would talk about on the other side of, you know, sharing the estimator information, because a lot of people, I don't see that very often when I'm when I first visit a company, is, yeah, how is the estimator getting, you know, feedback on how well did they do that job we won last year or how well did they do that? You know, I did it to have a production of, you know, ten linear feet an hour. How well did they do seeing that production, and having the ability to get to that quickly is important for an estimator. You know, they're they're they're in there, you know, trying to build and and go through and build a job, but things change things. Hey, if this crew does it, hey, you know, this crew can do this kind of work faster than this crew so he can maybe make some decisions on how he's gonna estimate that thing and make make better educated guesses on how that's gonna work. So anyway, there's some really good information. So when you're looking for a system, back and forth is important, right? Having the ability to share information and then for the estimator to retrieve production information so he knows how they actually did compared to the job that he did last time or whenever. So those are all things to be you know, that are that could be benefits of going to a digital system. And and you may be doing it all right now. I mean, estimator connection points, PM, foreman, dispatcher. I mean, there's a lot of places that information can go, and I'm sure you're you're you're parsing it out. But again, if it was all digital, it could be easily managed and revised and changed, that kind of thing to make maybe make it more efficient and more, less time consuming. All right. All right. I keep wanting to say any questions, but we'll just keep going. Right. Leveraging accessible real time data to me, you know, here. I mean, like we just said, you want that production history data coming in, but this is a huge item. You want to know that, Hey, I want to know how they're doing. I want to see the crews. I want to be able to see what they did on this estimate, compare it to, to, to different jobs. That's all information that would be out there and able for you to do. And it could even make it beneficial for, you know, oh, here's what they did. We have to make this change order. Oh, let's do this and build a change order right out of that using information that you know from how they're doing things now. So in my mind, having this information or having the ability to get to this seamlessly, is super important. And certainly one of the best practices for leveraging data like we talked about earlier in the the objectives. Alright. Oops. Sorry. Alright. Powerful management. Project management. And project managers are probably one of the busiest people I've ever seen. They're constantly managing hundreds of things. It seems like just always, always busy, and having a place to manage all that from one place would be super beneficial. Now I'm not sure it all it exists yet. I mean, I hear a lot of things even on our software. Yeah. But but having a place for, hey, if I had a one stop shop to manage the job that right now, there's probably a shared drive. You got to go, hey, where's the budget? I got to see the budget. I got to go to accounting to get cost. I mean, there's a lot of different places you have to go to get information, and manage it. My change order log, my RFI log, my submittals log. I mean, there's endless lists that that that you're managing. So again, looking for a solution or, you know, becoming digital, just being digital doesn't solve that problem. Right? You don't wanna have a hundred different places to go to do things. I worked with one company recently and and they were all they were amazing. You know, we're one company and and I know we're big, but we have fifteen different systems to do fifteen different things. And that's that's a, you know, could be even more than that, right? You might have a different system for each thing that you do. Getting them all to tie together is where it really comes in, right? It really benefits you guys and because the cost saving and better, better, the better management of information gives you the ability to have better decisions. So so I think that's where, you know, where that where if I was looking for a project management software, it would be a place to be able to say, hey, can I manage my my job? Can I manage my submittals? Can I manage my my invoices, even my materials? All that kind of thing could be could be a powerful thing if it was in one place. All the things that you do. Right? In our world, we've got, you know, cut your time in half. Sure. That's reducing paperwork, all the stuff that you have to if you're a PM and you have to gather paperwork from different sources, you have to get it. This is the way making it digital makes it a lot easier for you to review, you know, mark it off quickly. Do it. You know, it's all about. It's all about being efficient. Alright. Here we're talking a little bit here, markups, thorough markups through communication. But again, if we talk about being digital and and collaborating with digital stuff, you know, plans is a huge is a is a big thing for that. That's really growing these days, right? I mean, when I started, everybody foreman would have plans in his truck. He'd bring them out and he'd have to go through it. But did he have the latest revision? We always had to worry about what was going on, making that digital and making that process where, hey, we store the the plans and all the revisions here. And when a guy has a a access through his phone, might be **** ** plans, but or an iPad or a computer, he can bring that information and and see that information and deal with it without having the paper, see the most up to date, maybe even make his own comments on the plan, which then go up to the cloud and and allow him to collaborate on specific pieces of a plan or a document. It could even be form that that you're that that you're communicating and working on without, you know, pictures and the whole thing without having to go into the office, sit down with the guy and work it out. You could possibly work it out through the field and say, here's what I think. Write your notes, make a layer, do all these little things that you could send it back and another person could read it and then respond back with you notes, even a phone call. I mean, I always tease folks. I mean, you know, I can you get rid of all your phone calls? I don't know if you'll ever get rid of all your phone calls, but you can certainly get rid of some of them, right? You could certainly get rid of some of them. I and I encourage you guys to to try that. There are a lot probably a lot of phone calls you don't need, right? Especially field guys. If they're calling, they could communicate things to you through the through the app all the same, and it's in one place. You have a record of it makes much more makes much more sense. Okay, so improving the processes here, I think for for you guys and PMs and plans, I think that that makes total sense. Again, I I'm not reading through all the slides. So so if there is something that catches your eye, make sure you bring it up. We can we can talk about it. I'm more talking about how it all works together. And plans is a really good way. We see companies that use a product like this not only for managing plans, which is great, but managing documents inside of the project, possibly even other things that people need access to all the time so they don't have to carry it around with them. Employee handbook is a good example. We didn't know about that. Somebody just put it in there and said, yeah, this this is great for us. Now we have an access to the employee handbook. The foreman has an access to the employee handbook. Matter where he is, he can bring it up and help employees figure out problems or whatever happens. That was something even unforeseen from everybody. Alright. But it does help with collaboration. Calculate with confidence. Again, we're talking about, you know, we've got some measurements in there down to the I don't know. Colby probably knows, but it's like down to, you know, less than a meter. You can actually see yourselves there. So, I mean, it's it's all very, very good. And and and, you know, knowing that, hey, that information's there and and right makes a makes a big difference to the guys in the field so they don't have to go back and try and recalculate something or, you know, the estimator did it first and we got to make sure, is that right? It doesn't look, you know, that kind of stuff. To me, it's beneficial. So you can you can throw away the doubts or at least try and clear up some of the doubts you might have because you didn't know how it was done. All right. All right. Safety meetings. All right. Again, if going digital, it seems like an obvious obvious way to help. Right? I mean, if I if if if if I, If I was gonna go digital for safety, this makes a good good point. For instance, I can plan safety meetings. Here's topics. I can send topics to my to my foreman for for here's what I want you to cover this week. I can schedule that instead of having to have it in their in in the morning. You can schedule it, they just pull it up on the on the computer or an iPad and and go and and go to it and record it, record the information. And you guys would be able to to to to have that information reported digitally and then sent to you to be able to calculate or do things, safety meetings and and be able to create, you know, elaborate dashboards about how you do against leading indicators for for certain things. So there's a lot of potential here for you guys to to share information, improve your process now for safety gathering, and and then share that information so everybody sees and knows they're a part of it. So it continues and and and basically grows the productive, a proactive safety culture. Right. And that's a that's that's a that's a really good thing. And when we talk about this, I mean, safety culture, you know, it's all about participation, getting the information, but also know that a lot of times, hey, for for for safety information, I gotta I gotta know information from payroll, for instance, I gotta know man hours on the job and maybe not just payroll, but also subcontractor man hours. Right? Because I may need to know total man hours. So so again, I have to be able to integrate data here so I can get that information to be able to to to run those reports, produce them on dashboards when it's digital. At least that possibility exists. It doesn't always exist in all solutions, but again, going if it's on a piece of paper, it's gonna be a lot harder to get it anywhere else. I'm gonna have to put it somewhere and then I'm gonna have, you know, I may have to put it in multiple places. So again, going digital and, and, and opening up that data, say, hey, I gotta grab the data from here from this place, maybe a different, you know, imagine our picture we showed at the beginning, right, where, hey, I got job data in the shop or I have I have data in the in the office. I have to grab that office data and be able to compare it to some safety data to be able to give me, you know, information on how many, you know, incidents we've had and how many man hours between or OSHA reports that that wanna know know how many hours of of safe work you've had and that sort of thing. So so anyway, to me, leveraging the data to produce these dashboards, to help people understand that they're at, you know, they're part of it also helps promote them doing a better job with it. So that's a good, good thing in bringing the field office and shop together, like, you know, like we talked about, it's it's all it it it's all separated. Right? The field guys, you know, I can't tell how many places I go to the field guys just know, Hey, I'm going to, you know, dig a ditch and, you know, they don't know, Hey, this, this ditch is, you know, how long it's gone. It's supposed to be. They may know what they're supposed to do, but how much has been done so far, what's going on. So there's a lot of information that, you know, if a guy is gonna jump in to take over for another guy, he may need to understand, hey, what's happened so far when we have it on paper, that's a lot harder to communicate other than, hey, I need you to go cover. And, you know, there's a lot of phone calls and talking and things like that. When if it's digital, I foreman might just show up and go, oh, let me see. And he can, you know, tap it up and and view information on his on his on his iPad to, you know, to be able to say, oh, yeah, this is what I need to do. He's good or, you know, and he can keep moving. So it makes it a lot more efficient. We've got some things here. I mean, you bring in the field, the office and the shop together. Like we said, we're trying to bring all three together, you know, estimate we got maintenance requests. A guy in the field could make a maintenance request and it could go to the shop. That's a great way because what what do you do now? Maybe fill out a piece of paper, turn it into the office or a phone call where somebody fills out a piece of paper anyway. So having it here means there's a record and then there's a record going on. What's the history of that? Is it getting handled? Did it not get handled? What happens to it? So there's ways to see all that. One of my biggest examples of here when, you know, bringing the field in the office together, and it is payroll. So a lot of times, hey, having a digital time card makes great sense. And like we talked earlier, well, you know, the foreman still needs to fill it out. So does it save the foreman time to have a digital time card? In my mind, it is a little bit easier to do a digital time card, especially if you take advantage of all the features, you know, digital stuff gives you. For instance, you know, I can talk into it and, you know, I don't have to type a bunch of notes. I can just talk my notes in. You know, I can I still have to pick people? I still have to I still have to put people on there. So it's still gonna take a format amount of time. A rule of thumb that I use is to do a time card in a digital system should be fifteen, twenty minutes. Obviously, you should have learned it and you should know it for sure. But fifteen, twenty minutes. And in most people, that's about as much time as it takes them to write it. Right? And if they have elaborate notes, it might even take a little longer to write it. So, again, fifteen to twenty minutes is the average time I would suggest, and that you you gotta count on a field guy taking that. But here's where it comes in. Now, once I have my, you know, I've recorded my time card, I, you know, send it into the office. Now it can be it doesn't have to be read. You know, it has to be reviewed, but it doesn't have to be reentered. It doesn't have to be entered into another system. It's right there. It could be reviewed, checked, then it can be ready for payroll, review, checked, and go go to payroll. So where you see a bigger savings when you go digital for a time card is payroll. I mean, payroll today on a nondigital system, payroll may take half a day, a day. I've seen it take almost two days to process where to get payroll figured out, gathered, entered, checked and double checked, and then then processed. Whereas, you know, going digital, I think the payroll still has to check things. They still have to be, oh, everything looks good, check for certain things, anomalies. There's always little exceptions. But once they do that, they could probably get that done in most companies when they're digital, do it in two hours, two or less. So I would certainly say that's a huge time saving in going digital just on payroll alone. Because I think second busiest person PMs are busy, second busiest person payroll, because payroll typically, hey, Monday, Tuesday is payroll. And then the rest of the week is kind of all fixing up things, new hires, blah, blah. And then right back to Monday, Tuesday, it's even rare for a payroll person to be able to take time off, which is unusual. So, making it digital, making it easier would help alleviate that. So there's a hidden benefit, Once I have it digital, I can consider it's easier to train. Here's all you have to do. Grab her this data, look at it, hit this button, boom, you're done. So there's a lot of ways that that you can going digital will help, not just in the obvious ways, like we would think. So anyway, I think that's a pretty good example of bringing everything together. If I if I go one more over, we're talking about your shop. In my experience, the shop is kind of like, you know, job and operations is going on and the shop's like over here in its own little area doing its own thing. And and that's, you know, I think that's hard. I I work with a lot of companies where, you know, utilization hours are are are a thing. Right? You wanna know how often a piece of equipment's being utilized and, shops over there and they're running their own reports. And then at the end of the month, they wanna allocate, hey, you you used it this many hours. Well, now we can make that all visible. Right? So now if yours digital, the you know, hey, the field guy can actually, you know, hey, I ran it. The meter can be you know, from the the meter can be transported to to the to the to the shop, and then they can have that information right there as well as to the time card where then they can and everybody can be on the same page. You can get rid of those allocation things that people that I didn't know I used, you know, I got, oh, you had that equipment for ten days, even though you didn't use it for eight, you get charged for it. That can all be managed now better by knowing better information. You still got to make some decisions with it. Don't be don't be, you know, there is some some decisions to be made and how you handle that, but it can certainly be a lot more transparent and visible and expected and then plant so you can plan with or around or or together to solve problems. So I think that's a to me a big a big a big boost. Obviously, going digital in your shop and having a digital work order system and time card, that all makes sense and ensure it would it saves time from doing it on paper and then transposing it from paper to digital, like we've been saying so. But the hidden benefits are that that data can now be available for the rest of the company to see and use to to be able to make decisions as well. Planning and scheduling is the next big thing. I mean, you know, if I get if I went in line, I think, you know, I don't know. I know PMs are super busy. I know that, you know, payroll is super busy. And then if if you have a full time dispatcher, that guy's probably pretty busy too. In my experience, those guys, are super busy. One company I went to is a long time ago, and we were talking about our dispatcher, our program for that. And and I went to visit this company and he was literally on this huge conference table and he had set stacks of paper around the whole conference table that represented each job. And then he had a piece of it. He was in the middle with knee pads on crawling around this conference table, but, oh, this activator, I wanna put it on this job. And he was, he was, he was divvying up or, or putting pieces of equipment and people to the job. Well, you know, yeah. Having a paper way to do your scheduling is I can't even imagine doing it without a computer or something, but that's it's just wild. Right? But so going digital for for for for for scheduling makes makes a lot of sense. Right? And then being able to use that information to give it to the foreman, to the to the project manager, to the superintendent, or having the superintendent be involved in in in making the schedule. But then going out, you know, two week look aheads. I know I hear it a lot, but again, you could go, you know, if you kept up with it, you could go four week look ahead, six week look ahead. You know, a lot of dispatchers stay in the day to day mode because that's, you know, they're so busy because, you know, I gotta do this. Oh, I gotta move this. I gotta do all that. But if I can get scheduling down, now I can start thinking about what we're gonna need in six weeks and start thinking how I can move things around, work in maintenance schedules, in a lot of other different things that that often fly up on you when you don't know it. So so going digital for something like this is certainly a good thing and bringing data in from other places heavy bit. So you know what's needed, right? The budget that that you that you want, you know, where where you're going. So that's another big, big thing that you would want to want to want to bring in. So I'm just trying to look through and I think that, you know, but to me, going through the digital scheduling is huge and being able to pull it all in. All right. So bringing it all together, how do we bring it all together? To me, integration is probably the key thing Currently, I mean, typically, the biggest one that you have to integrate with is gonna be your accounting or your ERP system. Right? So you definitely wanna learn about how can I get information into into that or possibly even out of that to my guys in the field? Right? So so and when we talk about pulling it all together, and there's a term you guys may have heard of before called business intelligence, but business intelligence is a thing. And and it's you know, there's programs out there, not HCSS, like a Power BI or Tableau. But this is the thing today where where companies are going in and they're they're writing their own, hey, I wanna grab data from accounting. I wanna grab data from the shop system. I wanna grab data from the safety system, and I wanna combine it all, run reports and share those reports with the people who need to know that information. BI is the way to do it. So making that making your data available to BI is huge. And if it's if it's on paper, it's not there. Right? So that's a huge thing is getting those in and and everybody, you know, the buzzwords today when you go, hey, we want dashboards and we want, well, those are all coming from from BI type things. And now we've got AI, which, you know, I think, you know, you you you'll start to be able to think on how AI can play into this. And AI will, you know, hey, according to this trend, you should it it might even identify trends for you later on to tell you, hey, we see a trend happening on this item, maybe telling you how you have to correct it or to at least look at it to see if it needs to be corrected. So to me, those are all things that we have to be aware of when we're bringing it in. And for you guys, being able to get that information, meaning have it mean something to you, not just spitting it out, giving you a bunch of information. We need to compare it to things, run trends, show graphs. Those are all important aspects that that until you get used to being digital, you don't really have that unless you're, no, I'm gonna make this graph by entering all this data in to make a graph. Now, if we have it digitally, we can use it and correlate it and start to compare it to things to help help you guys make better decisions. So so I think in the for the most part, I think we've talked about what I wanted to to go. I think we got a couple things for estimators and PMs, you know, again, referencing the estimator notes, that's a cool thing. But but it's all about sharing the information and making it available to the guys who need it, you know, empowering the the the the people in the field that use the software to get the information that they need to give you the information you need that empowers you to make your decisions to go on and on from there. So to me, it's just it is a it's a circle. But again, it's about opening it up, letting the guys in the field see what's going on. You know how you know how how how are we doing? You know, lot of people I go to when I'm when I'm going to a company just beginning with going digital, their guys just know that they're going out and digging a ditch. They don't know, you know, they know that. Oh yeah, they gotta, you know, they know the basics of what's been told them, but they don't really know how they're doing. Is the job profitable? Is the job not profitable? Are you know, what are the things that they should be hitting? Knowing that information empowers them to make better day to day decisions and hopefully catch things that you don't have problems with later on. Right? And and you guys PMs being able to review information like that and see it can also see trends and catch things. It's not about pointing fingers. It's about learning what's going on so you can make better decisions and fix them or or address it. Maybe I don't even need I don't know if every problem needs fixing, just addressing. Right? I mean, sometimes it's not really a problem. Just, you know, we just need to do this. We're good. So again, I think you gotta think of it in terms of, you know, making the best decisions, not in terms of, you know, trying to point fingers and doing things, which sometimes is what happens. So when we talk about practical, you know, implementation things, you know, to some foreman that's big brother's coming down, they want me to, you know, they want me to report every little thing and they're gonna keep an eye on But it's not about report. It is about reporting things, but it's not about, you know, big brother. It's about everybody knowing so all our brains together can come up with the best answer. So, and know, hey, look, there's a thing we could do this better. We can't, you know, that kind of stuff happens. So I think we're at a good spot, to open it up to Q and A. I know I'm a little early. I think about eight minutes or seven minutes. So if we have questions, let's let's dive into those if that works. Yeah. That's perfect. We we don't currently have any questions, but you guys feel free to submit those in the q and a section now, we can go ahead and get those presented to Greg so he can hopefully give you an answer. Yeah. We're gonna be really early. I'm curious to know if anyone is there people out there that that are going paper or full paper right now today? So we just got a question, Greg. Mike said, you mentioned Big Brother. That's great. We are getting ready to roll out HCS heavy job, there are definitely going to be a lot of foremen that have that mentality. So can you speak to that a little bit more? Yeah. Yeah. So to so so again, when I when I am when I'm in a room with with those guys and I and I feel it, I mean, you know, they've they've been doing things their way and and, you know, there's there's the camaraderie thing going on. I got it. But, you know, you know what? The estimators had to guess, you know, their estimate is basically, you know, what what's the wild ass guess, but it's basically a guess, right? And and then you got your guys, the foreman go out and do it. Well, the more we know how they do it, the number one, the estimator, he's not, he's not, he needs to know so we can make better guessing. So guess what? He can give you better work. So it's not so much more work. It's not so much that the foreman, you know, that, that it's big brother. It's that we need this information. So we understand, hey, if you did it better, we need to know that if you did it slower, we need to know that so we can bid it better and and and not lose work or be be be a part of that. So so to me, that's part of it. You gotta, you gotta relieve them or at least tell them, hey, we're not trying to point fingers. We're trying to solve the problem. We're trying to, to figure it out. And if the problem's the budget's way off, well, it's off because he doesn't know how, how often, how it really takes to to build it. So we gotta communicate that information around and it starts at the field. And I know field guys do feel that way. But but it's it's been my experience once they get into it and they get used to it. There's a little competition that goes on and guys start going. Oh, look at me, man. I did this and I'm I'm getting way under budget or I'm doing all this. So there is a little, you know, that camaraderie comes back, but at the beginning there are they are going to have to be told, you know, not told, but just to, you know, ensure with them or support them and just say, it's not about trying to track you. It's trying to get our information so we can make the best decisions. Him as well. I mean, he's going be able to make better decisions as well. Go ahead. Sorry. No problem. Yeah. So we got that was that was good. We we got a couple other questions coming in here. So Andrew Hill asked, is there a preferred BI software that HTSS recommends? And, Colby, you may know. I, you know, I think we have I don't think there is. I think we you know, the two biggies are Tableau, Power BI, and and I think at this point, we have templates for both those. So if you were gonna use some of our data or you wanted our data, there are templates for both of those. I think we started with Tableau and we didn't have Power BI at first, but now we have both. If it's another one other than those two, you probably need to check. I don't know of any. I think those are the main two that we concentrate on, at least Yeah. Yeah. One writing examples. Yeah. Yeah. You're right, Greg. And and then going along with that, we also have a a custom team, that can build those reports for you in that software. So it's not like you have to have an, in house developers. We we have a team here that can build, some of those reports out for you. Yeah. And that's a really good point. I mean, in depending on the size of the company. But bigger companies have that, what Colby just said, they have business analysts and things in there that their job is to tie all the data together. And that is a good point. If you don't have it, finding a place to get that. You know, you don't necessarily have to hire somebody, but, you know, there are services out there that can help you help you and and advise you to do that. Great. Alright. Luke Frey says, does HTSS integrate with Procore, or are there any other integrations? Well, so we inter we we integrate currently the way integration currently works in in today's you know, in the old days, it was it's a flat file. We can we can basically produce any data you want into a file as long as and if, if Procore could, could import it, then you can say we integrate. Do we directly integrate with Procore? No, that means data that's in heavy job automatically shows up in Procore. No. Could you build something like that? Now, you know, we're not going to build it. I don't think we like Procore. I don't know if we hate Procore, but I just, you know, they're kind of a anyway, but we would certainly, you know, your data is your data. If you wanted to take, grab it and put it in Procore you could use what we call APIs to do that. People, you know, we are opening APIs up all the time. So every data, you know, if it's in the system and, you know, we can open an API, you would be able to program. Somebody would have to do this program to get the data and then put it in Procore, providing Procore had a way to do that. So again, integrating with specific products, like, you know, we can integrate data with anyone. We just have to know, you know, if you're gonna grab it out in a file or if you're just gonna grab it manually and and put it somewhere. So Yeah. That's agreed. We got another question from John Davies says, what HTS tools were you showing in your slides regarding running a more efficient workshop and scheduling slash brokering truck slash equipment? The the I was showing the screenshots were of our program called the dispatcher. Perfect. Didn't get this isn't a question, but just something a thought from Samuel. No questions for me really already using HeavyBid, and we're getting ready to implement HeavyJob as well. Thank you for the information. Right on. Right on. And then got a question from, let's see here, Thomas. He said, We use HeavyBid and the field wants HeavyJob. However, the accounting department thinks it'll be more work on them. Do you, I guess, get the accounting department on hold? Number one, I mean, so here's where I would come to, you know, or, you know, whoever's asked this question should have this conversation with accounting. I mean, certainly, how's the data gonna get populated in heavy job? That's probably what they're thinking. How's it going to get there? If it's in accounting, accounting is your source of truth. So for instance, when I talk about data, you know, how's the how are all the new hires? How are the employees going to get there? How are how is our equipment list and assets going to get there? And and then, you know, all the jobs and heavy bid that you create these estimates and you if you're exporting the budgets to your accounting system, if you are doing that, which is great, how is that information going to get into heavy job? Those are all things accounting is probably worried about. When you talk that, I mean, that is something to be considered. And if you're, you know, most companies that that buy heavy job, buy a program called DIS, which communicates with your accounting system and takes, hey, I set up new hires. You set up a new hire. It puts the new hire in heavy job. Set up automatically. Yeah. If you set up a new piece of equipment, it puts it in heavy job. So there's a system around that. So again, we want to help you get around double entry. So accounting thinks of that mostly, right? As far as payroll goes right now, I mean, if the job did exist in in HeavyJob, we can export that out to any payroll system. I have not there has not been a payroll system we can't do. Is there, Colby? No. I mean, we we have a custom team that for free, will make whatever flat file you need to export to an accounting system that they can import. So assuming the accounting system has an import feature of any kind, we can make something for it. That's right. So so so putting the data back into accounting will be better. The other last, you know, point to to to all that is you still gotta do checks and balances. And and my experience has been even then though, training someone in payroll to be able to look into HeavyJob and do these checks and balances is a lot easier than having them retype the information or putting it into Viewpoint or wherever, whatever accounting system, and then, you know, trying to change it there. So there's a lot of tools that actually would help accounting in this regard. So Yeah. Just another quick point to add on to that because that as a product specialist at HTSS, that's lot of what I do is help get the, payroll specifically set up for customers. And what really seems to happen is people are just more so afraid of change. They they they have the system in place. Oh, well, I get the time card in. I enter it in line by line, day by day. It takes me two days to enter in payroll, and I'm fine with that. But what we when we can show customers that you already have this information and heavy job you're capturing on time cards, we can make that process of putting it into payroll five minutes. It's a huge time saver for your accounting department, specifically the payroll folks who can utilize that time for something else. Yep. Okay. We got a couple other we'll we'll try to do quick since there's quite a few coming in. What takeoff software does HTSS integrate with from Luke Kroy? I think it's AgTech, Colby. I'm not, yeah, I'm not sure on that, honestly. AgTech, I think, is the one we we we integrate. I think I've heard of that as well. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We got, can you explain how HTSS integrates with payroll software and how it helps reduce time for the payroll switch? So we kinda just talked about that. But, essentially, yeah, I can answer this one, Greg. So Yeah. Go for it. The HeavyJob itself, of course, you have the time card in there. It's all digital. We work with you during the implementation process to customize how our software, HeavyJob, exports that to a file or directly to it if it has some type of SQL integration, or API. We can, at the very least, create a flat file with all the specifications needed that can then be imported in your system, and we work with you during implementation, test it multiple times, make sure we can counter every scenario so that you're getting everything that you want in your payroll system. And then it reduces time because once it is all hammered out and fully fleshed out, the the process should be, I click a button to export a file for a date range. I click a button to import that file, and then all the data's there. So, essentially, you're going from however much time you're spending now, submitting time cards, putting them in manually line by line for each of your employees, however long that takes you, down to maybe five to ten minutes. Yeah. Okay. And we have let's see here. Got good job, Greg, from Mike Lax. Yeah. Mike Lax. He could've done this. Right. Okay. That was okay. Do you have any official integration with any accounting softwares? Like Procore has official ties with Acumatica. So we do I mean, official ties would be I mean, most of the big players in construction accounting systems, we have templates with, which means like, and I hate, I'll name drop one, but if we went, if we talked about viewpoint in their system, any one of their systems, it doesn't matter if it's Vista, Spectrum, Maxwell, I don't even what, I think Maxwell's Vista now, But it doesn't matter. There's a template, you know, hey, import payroll. There's a template, HCSS template already in the system. So I'd call that an official integration. Now those still need to be worked on. Like Colby said, those still need to be tweaked for you. Are you gonna send stuff like per diem or or or, you know, maybe other type of subsistence or other types of cost adjustments? Those can be handled. They just have to be figured out. Are you gonna pay holiday pay? No holiday pay. There's a lot of little things that that we have to tweak for each company. I've done a lot of companies. I've implemented a lot of companies on in in a lot of our software, heavy bit heavy job, three six you know, equipment three sixty dispatcher. And and I can tell you payroll is generally there's never one out of the box solution for any one company. They always need a little something to help massage it along, to get it going. And we always figure it out. It's always, and if we don't, I mean, I, that is one of our things that we will do. I mean, if hey. We it needs to work, it will work, and there's no usually no actual charge. And that's what I was mentioning with that custom team. We have a a team dedicated to altering the export so that it works. Even if it's just specific for your company, we will make a file specific for the company that exports the way you guys need it. Yeah. We have need to learn how to import employees into HeavyJob. Right now, it's double entry. Okay. Yeah. So like Greg mentioned, we have DIS for that. It's a product. It'll automatically bring it over from your accounting system. We also have the import from Excel feature, which should hopefully make that a little bit easier on you guys. If you wanna learn more about that, you can give our support line a call, and we can we can walk you through how to do that. And if if you know, that depends on the number of people. I mean, if you're doing ten people a week, I think it's definitely worth looking at the DIS. You know, that's a huge benefit. But if it, I mean, if it's because you don't wanna bottleneck the guys in the field going digital means that, Hey, they can't just make stuff up on a piece of paper. They can write it in. And you know, how many times you go, wait, what did he write in? Who's that supposed? You know, all that stuff. Now he doesn't have that ability. He picks from a list, which okay, that's easier, but that list has to be there. So you do have to make sure we don't bottleneck the guys. So whatever solution you come up with, that's why DIS makes a lot of sense. But again, if it's only a couple one hire a new hire week, it might not be that big a deal to manually do it. But if it's ten or more or something like that, it might be worth thinking about talking. Okay. Got another one here. How does AgTech Earthwork and underground software integrate with HeavyJob? Typically, think it helps with HeavyJob, it doesn't. Sorry. That was a good catch. With HeavyJob, it does not currently integrate. I think we were looking at points, I think HeavyBid. And I think there's some integration with plans. If it's not out, it's I think they're working on something like that. Perfect. Dash, I see you also, submitted another question about importing things to create things, like jobs and cost codes. Like I said, if you give our support line a call, that they're super familiar with all that. They have all the different methods for creating them. And if you have questions about DIS as well, they can answer those or get you with a sales rep to explain it further. But, yeah, if you need help with actually getting those created, imported via Excel, for example, we can show you how to do that with HeavyJob. So that's if you're estimating in Excel, I mean, again, I'd go better digital for, like, a system for estimating. But but you could you know, if you have HeavyBid, you can actually export it all the way over to HeavyJob. So, you know, talk to support about doing that. Like he said, there is some ways you can create a job and import the cost code list. You can import all that stuff. It's usually table by table, so it does take a little little time. Or the DIS might be an option once you have it in your accounting system. The DIS can bring it over. So Perfect. And then, last one isn't a question. This looks to be all the questions. I'm sorry if I missed it, but as a customer saying, DIS is extremely helpful. We can pick and choose what we want to push to each system, whether it's to e three sixty or heavy job. So Yeah. That is Yeah. So that in in in in our world of, having we have just like in that picture on the slide deck, we had a lot of different we have the job, the shop, and we have different applications and we have one app. The DIS kind of communicates to all of them on setup data, at least can communicate to all of them on data to help you guys, eliminate that double entry. We are against double entry. Okay. So we got looks like two minutes left on the clock. If there's any final questions, go ahead and send them now. Otherwise, in about a minute, I'll hand it back over to Aaron. Okay. Let's see. Okay. Casey said roughly what does DIS cost? Oh, you know, it's all different now, but I think it's a yeah. I don't know. I think it's hard for me to even say. I don't even it used to be a flat rate, but now I think it's some subscription rate. I think everything we have now, there's either I don't know if there's still a flat or a subscription. So I I don't wanna say anything without and speak out of turn. I think you I'll just call in and get that. But Yeah. You can reach out, Casey, to your sales rep. They should be able to give you a quick price on on how that works. Unfortunately, I I don't have any pricing information either. Okay then. That seems to be all of the questions. Aaron, I'll go ahead and toss it back to you. Great. Thanks so much, Greg and Kobi, for a wonderful presentation. If anyone had has any follow-up questions, feel free to shoot that to us, and then we'll try to get in response and include that in the follow-up email. And in one to two business days, we'll send everyone who registered a follow-up email with the recording as well as a PDF of the presentation. And if you have any question, please don't hesitate to reach back to us. And thanks again for joining us in today's webinar. Everyone, have a great evening.