Seamless Integration: Job Costs, Document Management, Safety, and More with HCSS

Thanks everyone for joining right at noon central time here. So we'll go ahead and kick off. My name is Reed Renfrow. I'm the product marketing manager for our operations products here at HCSS. I'm joined by Gen Whatley, who is our senior product manager for Safety, and Andrew Fowler who is our Senior Product Manager for HeavyJob Implants. So we're really excited to have both of them today. They're experts on both of these products. And we're gonna go ahead and go through how all of our HCSS operations products can work together and some of the benefits from owning the whole suite of HCSS products. So just a few housekeeping notes to start. If you do have questions at any point throughout this webinar, please go into the Q and A box, enter your question in there. We'll either answer it live or one of us will try to type a response to you. So use that feature, it helps us organize and try to make sure we get everything answered. And if we can't get it answered during this webinar, follow-up after. So thank you very much for joining. As we get started, wanna talk a little bit about just the everything that needs to get set Can jump in there real quick? Yes, Jen. Can we first just check, make sure everyone can hear us? Can a few people just raise their hand, give us a thumbs up, say something in the Q and A so we know. Ah, okay, perfect. Thank you, Randy. Thank you, Jason. All right. So you guys could definitely hear us, which is great. And it looks like we have a pretty full house. Just a heads up for everyone. Because I see a few really familiar names in here. Some of y'all really advanced users. I think this is more of an overview of how all of this works together. So we'll be pretty high level. So just giving a heads up, but feel free to ask questions like Reid said in the Q and A of anything that you might have. And so if you advanced users, you know, free to stick around, maybe suggest some other things. So yeah, we can go ahead and get started. Yeah. So HCSS has a variety of products. This is really an overview of everything that we have to offer. So we have everything from fleet maintenance, telematics and fuel management on the equipment side. We have HeavyBid leader in estimating for heavy civil construction. And then today we have the operations projects. So around job costing, field reporting, dispatch and scheduling, plans management, and safety management. We're already spending most of our time today. So just wanted to make sure that for everyone on this call, do know about all of our products. Again, today we're gonna be kind of focusing on the top half of this wheel on our operations products. With that, I'll turn it over to Andrew. Alright. Thank you, Reid. And just to expand on Jen, we're also very open to any suggestions. Give us a email, Andrew Dot Fowler at HCSS.com to Jen, same deal, first name dot last name. Love to hear from y'all. Love to hear what we're missing, where we're hitting, what do we need to do to get you in the right path. But, yeah, so jumping into the topic today, we're talking about the HCSS operations platform. And so we're going today really talk about how the combination of HeavyJob and safety and plans goes from more than just a point solution into an operations platform that really solves all these needs for you. And we're really going to dive into really the crews and the field and a little bit on the office as well for how this full workflow is going to really come together. When we look across the HCSS platform for operations, the start was with the time card. So this was more than twenty five years ago now. It's been the field favorite within the heavy civil construction industry for quite some time. What we learned there is work with the foreman in the field to capture really accurate data, to make it really easy to capture that accurate data. And what we hope to show you today in some of our presentations is how that methodology and that way of thinking has expanded into all of our product lines, into plans, into safety, for making it really easy to capture that data out in the field. Because what that feeds into, excuse me, is connecting that office in the field, having that back and forth to create some synchronicity to really enable you to know as a project manager what's going on in the field. Yeah. And I just wanna expand on that, Fowler, the capture accurate data, which I think is the one you're talking about. I added in daily because that's something I hear so often from people is that is really what makes a difference is if you're not having to wait for these things, you're not having to sort through a lot of, open ended forms to find the issues, to find the key points. It is actually being pulled up for you so that you're just you're so much faster. But I'll let you keep going. Yeah, absolutely. The daily point, I mean, that can't be understated. Going back from old solutions to weekly reports or monthly reports to daily knowing what you're hitting on and daily knowing what you maybe missed out within your compliance, right? And which is kind of on that last point of reducing risk on the job site. It's all kinds of risk. It's not just your cost risk. Am I underperforming or over performing on this day? It's risk for do I have the right documents in the field? Am I reporting the right things to make sure that I get paid for all the work that I'm doing on the job site? And it's we know the most important risk, of course, is for those employees and those laborers out in the field, making sure that they're getting back home safely. But yeah, so just to talk through the three individual parts of the operating platform operations platform, excuse me. We're going to first talk about HeavyJob. Again, overview of our overall system, and then we'll dive down into where those integrations sit between those three. Because when you look across really what you can get today in the software world, there's going to be a time card solution. There's going to be a plan solution. There's going be a safety solution. We have reasons why we're the best in each one of those, and we have reasons why altogether we really work well for what you want to do in operations. But yeah, HeavyJob. What we work to do there is minimize that risk, that daily reporting, just like Jen said. What does it mean to gather that information, labor, materials, equipment, run time, everything else on a daily basis, and we report that back into the office. And not only that, but making it available to the field as well. So within the time card actually pulling up and seeing how am I performing? Am I going to overrun if I do this a certain way? I'm missing a labor. I'm not going have as much production today. All those different things really bundled up into a really compelling use of I'm managing my costs really effectively in the field. And again, connecting it back into the office to the field, enabling you with that iPad, with that tablet in the field to gather those time cards, putting those site conditions in the cost code notes or within the time card, the daily diary itself, gathering all the photos that you need to bring it all back up and sum it up for you in the daily digest, which we'll really be focusing in on on this webinar today. Yeah. And I know the focus today is on operations, but I always have to call it out because I think it's just such a a helpful thing for teams, is the ability to pull in from HeavyBid so you can actually see, not just in the office, but even in the field. This is what people were thinking. This is what they estimated for for this time period. So you can actually see, are we are we far off from that? Are we different from that? And you can have those conversations. And I know I didn't explain it as well as you, Fowler, but I always think that that is something that is really unique. Yeah. And like Reid said, we started out with HeavyBid rights. So what does that mean to actually connect back into estimating and the workflow there? That could be a whole other webinar on operations and estimating and how we sync up to really do something really well there. But yeah, rolling into plans. Plans, this is our plans management system. So we work to really do two things really well. One is to manage your revisions, make sure that those are out in the field as soon as they should be, that everybody is staying up to sync, up to date on those latest revisions. And really the best way of saying it is we work to simplify construction. So there, from twenty five, forty years ago, whenever we first started HCSS to today, construction in the field specifically has gotten much more stringent in what the foreman is responsible for. A lot of those go back to developing spec sections. We just had a conversation today, Jen and I and a few other of our associates, of how DOTs are changing, how you work with them every single day. What files are we pulling from? What new specs do we have to follow-up on to really get this work done? And so really what we want to do inside of plans is to simplify as much as we can what you're doing there. So again, revisions control, very important. We make sure that all of that is pushed out automatically to your format so they have the latest revisions for those plan sets in the field. We also enable you to create this full job manual with our document management, whether it's SDS sheets for SafetyGen or it's something like your different tickets. Anything else that you really want to put in into that job manual that's available digitally now in the field, you can put directly inside of plans. And then, of course, location services and simplifying those those workflows. We do something really cool, really innovative with location services. You'll see that a little bit with talking through our integrations. That just gives you that context out in the field to really understand what it is that you're supposed to be building on. So if you do not have a foreman that is new to construction or new to that role and, you know, it's been two years versus five like it used to be because of the labor shortage, we can now get this onboarded much more quickly. Same build takeoffs, right? So you have some guys that can figure out the quantities very quickly, run those calculations in their head or just on a scratch piece of paper. But now we want to make sure we get that accurate every single time because of how slim those margins are. So let's make sure that we're really improving on that and making it as simple as possible for the foreman to do those daily tasks. A lot of good things that you're giving out, Fowler, that are really great summary of the things that we're focused on. And one of the biggest things on the safety side that we're focused on is helping you get your teams to submit things. It is so true that it is a challenge to get things submitted because there's so much changing in that field. There's so much stuff that people have to do and things have changed over time that the foreman, the expectations for them is so high and it's easy to forget something. And that's why we've taken the time to talk with a lot of you, even some of you who are here in this webinar, how can we help bridge that gap? And some of the things that we have for that are time card warning, but I'll get into it in just a minute. But it's really just a great reminder when someone is there finishing up their day to say, hey, you might have missed this thing. We also have scheduled inspections and meetings, and that is really just helping people know that, hey, these meetings, we wanna make sure that you're addressing certain things at certain points in time. So it's really a communication tool as well. And it could be everything from, hey, we we need you to talk about heat awareness. We need you to talk about fault protection. We need to talk about these certain things that we see rising risk in the field through observations or different inspections. And so we just wanna make sure that this is covered. Or it can be, hey, we we had a recent near miss that was concerning or an incident, and you can choose for certain teams or the entire job site to do an incident review. And so it's really a great way to make sure things are covered, things are discussed. So a few different things within there, but I'll move on. Another thing that safety focus on is trying to standardize your safety program. Many times you can have jobs that are absolute standouts. You've got some great people out there that are really raising the bar, and then you've got some other jobs where they're maybe a little behind and you're really trying to, raise the level of everyone together. And there's many different ways to do that. But just two quick points on that is that I know we've got so many different templates that can help guide your field. And of course, you can always build your own so that everyone has access to the same library and hopefully can help push the level up just a little bit. And of course, you can set goals by pay class. So this is something our employee metrics report. And just what this helps is you can say we need to have our operators do or a foreman do a certain number of observations per month. Then back in the office, can see, oh, you know, Jen, she's doing well. Fowler, Reid, hey, you're doing only two observations. And it really just gives you a short list of people that you want to spend time talking to and just understanding where the reasons are that they might not be quite hitting the mark. And of course, I think we already spoke a little bit about this. It's important to identify risks that day. You're waiting on paper, if you're waiting for someone to get the opportunity to sit down and read every form submitted, sometimes that time lag can make a big difference in the velocity of finding issues and then spending the trying time figuring out how to address it. That can really set a team back even if they're trying their best. So, alerts, the ability to filter and sort and, you know, just understand what type of things are happening. That can really help a team just move a hair faster. And what I'll say about all of this, Jen, is what I really like about the standardization is once it gets to that time, when it's time to input your time card or it's time to fill out that inspection, because it's standardized, it's much more quicker to get to that process. So the foreman, the superintendent are not spending a lot of time inside of our software. They're spending time out in the field and doing that work they're supposed to. But when it comes time to do it, because it is important to track these things, important to know about it and get it all documented, It's as quick as possible for them to get through it. Yeah. It's really what we're trying to do is get things done quickly so you can get out there and, you know, actually build the things that you decided to make your career off of. And build them safely. And build them safely. Thank you, Fowler. Oh, okay. So time card warnings. I mentioned this and said I'll get to it in a second. And many of you here probably are somewhat familiar with these. This is just a refresher in case you haven't come across them. But usually time card warnings are things that they're just an easy reminder for foreman when they're going to submit their card. When they hit send, you have this little pop out and it says issues found. So this one it's mentioning production quantity, or signatures, but there's actually, new time park warnings for safety, which you can see in the next slide. It is for meetings, JHA, and, equipment inspections. And next slide, please. And really what this is doing is just helping people get a reminder of saying, oh, maybe forgot to submit your meeting. You maybe forgot to submit your JHA. And previously, we've worked with people to understand what the needs are and we've released it. We've seen really high usage. And because of that, we're actually pretty soon, I think at the next month, pushing out a new update to this. So right now you could turn it on for a meeting every day. It's checking if you have a time card, do you have a meeting submitted? And we're now changing that to be, you can set a certain day. So you could say, well, we really need a meeting every day, but we just need a JHA every Wednesday or every Tuesday, Thursday. So we're making that change coming out soon, but the equipment inspection one that one isn't changing. That one is staying exactly the same. It just is checking on the time card. Do you have a inspection per piece of equipment? And you could see in the next slide that even if you don't turn this time card warning on, you still are able to actually see per equipment. Is there an inspection for it? Can you jump over to that? Perfect. Yeah. So this is just what we're seeing here is just this piece of equipment. There is an inspection submitted by someone else. So it's easy for the foreman to see where we at, with those equipment inspections for today. So don't even need to turn on the time card warning for that. And next, I think we're talking about, follow ups. So oh, wait. Now we're talking about photos. Yep. We're gonna switch gear back into the plans world for a minute. Gonna go through a little bit about our Daily Digest and and how a lot of our companies currently use that today. So Daily Digest is just like it sounds like. It is a summary back in the office for your project managers typically to filter down to their jobs, filter to specific foreman, and see what work they're submitting. So that's going to be really all the work from plans into HeavyJob into safety. It's that operations view of what's going on to really click very quickly. But what we've done is to integrate really the photos into HeavyJob from plans. And we're going to talk through why. When we're talking about taking photos, it is valuable to always document that, always have proof. As they say, the proof is in the pudding of a picture is a thousand words. Lots of reasons why we do photos today. But the big thing is that when we're capturing that, a lot of the times the context of the job is what's the most important to capture. So you'll see that within this view here. We have our map view, as we call it, inside of HCSS plans, and the individual photos with the blue little pin mark identified on that sheet there itself. So all the information being pinned into the map and into the individual plan sheet gives it that context that you need within plans to go back and look at it afterwards. Okay, I think I understand this photo, but where is it actually on the job site? What station is it close to? All those things are very important to know as a project manager or a foreman in the field reviewing that information. But that's a little bit different than that project manager in the office who really just needs that digest to say, where's all the information? Give it to me. And then I can figure that stuff afterwards. But right now, just need to figure out what's going on, what happened on the day for inspections, for all the photos and everything else. So for that reason, all of the photos that are taken here end up automatically inside of HeavyJob, inside of our daily digest, to really tell that story of wherever that data is being input, because it's more important to have a context of a project, of a sheet, of whatever inside of plans, it's going to end up in your daily digest. That way you can view that information and really understand what's going on. Then I can expect Jen for a little bit more about daily digest. It is. And I do see some questions and some suggestions and feel free to keep sending that in. We will address that during the q and a section. I wanna make sure we cover most of the content, which I might need to start speeding up. I love to talk about what we work on and what we build. But with this, we're still talking about daily digest. So one thing that, we're focused on is trying to make it easy for operations as a whole to stay in the loop with, safety. And so, within Daily Digest, you know, it's got all of the good stuff of, you know, where you're with your your, your time card, some of your costing, some of your other stuff. But you can also see right there in your workflow, right after you view your photos and docs, kind of what Fowler is talking about. You can also see the inspections submitted for the day, your JHA submitted for the day and your meetings. And even more so you can see some things of, hey, how many people attended the meeting versus were on-site? Are there people missing? Are we seeing less attendees than we expected? And more importantly, if there's inspections, you can easily see, oh, there's actually some issues that came out of that inspection. And they can explore from there, but they can also explore actually within their mobile app. And if you go to the next slide, Reid, I can talk a little bit more about it. Because essentially what this is, is it's a big push. Because we heard from y'all like there's just so much going on and it's easy to report things, but it's not always easy to know what are the issues that are outstanding in the field and which ones are, you know, just really high severity, high importance to close the loop on. And so of course, what we have here is the ability to see what follow ups have been assigned to me. And so you can go through, knock those out. But you can also, your project managers, for your safety professionals, for your superintendents and foremen, you can see what are all the open follow ups on the job site. And so what this really does is it does a few different things. Or, you know, your foreman or the operators, if they see something small and they know they can fix it, it gives them the opportunity to just knock that out. So if there's an expired fire extinguisher, they have an extra one in their truck that's not expired, they can swap that out, upload a photo, and be done with it. And then if a project manager or safety professional is on the job site, they can spend a few minutes in their truck before they go out just looking at what are all the open follow ups. What are the ones that are really important that we wanna walk the job site and, ask people, what's the update on these? And then conversely, we have our list of closed follow ups. So now you have the opportunity to look at the things that have been completed and haven't been completed well. So you can walk around and actually have some some really positive conversations. You know, you can walk around and say, hey, Fowler, you know, thanks for raising the bar here. You know, you added photos in, great closeout comment, really helping our team. And so it just shifts the conversation and makes sure that in the field, you're helping to build that that culture of appreciation. And, I think I have another screenshot in here. This is just what a follow-up looks like. Quick question for you, Jen. What do you see in terms of the the safety managers, the safety department incentivizing, doing these operations? What kind of incentive programs do you see out there? Is it, sort of around how many, follow ups could be completed, is it always around more of the the daily inputs? As many different companies there are, that's how many different incentive programs there are. People build it off of all sorts of things, but we have heard from people that with these new changes and this visibility in the field, people are actually shrinking the number of days that they're seeing on average that an issue is outstanding, which of course we all know that that makes a huge difference in terms of the risk that exists on the job site. So for anyone that has this or is thinking about this, this is one way that you can really help shrink that risk gap. Really great. Yep, do we have one that or jump into project controls. Alright, looks like it's me. Alright, last workflow on my side at least. We're going to talk through project controls and issue management. So this is the the overall workflow of a field personnel is alerting you to an issue. It could be just any issue out in the field. So what we have here displayed is our project control module. It's new and revamped for anybody that has been in this screen before. We spend a lot of time in it really make it really clean and really easy to use, and have additionally added in that potential change orders module there as well. But after we add issues, the big thing, if we go into the next slide, Reid, is the ability to link that into the plan set. Now we see at the bottom half related drawings one hundred twenty six view and HCSS plans. That's what I'm talking about here for this particular integration. Because when you talk about issues, it really does have fit form or function. So we're going to be looking at where and what plan drawing is related to when it comes to creating RFIs or those potential change orders, which all link back into this project controls module. On to the next slide, we'll see how we can actually identify and show that issue linked to and identified inside the plan set itself. Yep. And so here, the big thing about issues inside of plans is we are now narrowing down all of that log of project controls and issues that we saw inside of the project controls module into this very narrow list of these two links, these two issues that are on-site this individual plan sheet itself. So we're able to identify and very quickly as I'm getting to do that work and I had this plan set pulled up, see what issues are up there, identify them, quickly read them, and make sure that it's nothing that's going to impact my work for today. In addition to that, because the plan set is where you're going to be first, we want to identify those issues, we have a full notification workflow built into there. So as the new issues come in, as new RFIs are updated, things like that, you get this update of what's going on within those issues themselves. So really, just creating this nice workflow for the office and the field to identify what issues are important, when they're important, because that's whenever you're looking at that plan set itself. All right. Perfect timing. I think we're into our Q and A now. Let's go ahead and jump over there. Reid, will you see what we got? Yeah, I'll go ahead first. We have a question that came in from James. Some of the operational issues we have are based on not using all the products that are offered. Is there a way to turn on alerts in our inspections to alert our shop without having to invest in Equipment360, one of our other fleet products that's available? Yeah and you know, I think this is a really great time to bring up something I didn't even touch on. And that really just is the safety inspection alerts. Do actually send over to Equipment360. So that's what James is referring to. And that's actually when I was talking about the inspection follow ups in the field, a really great thing that I didn't mention is part of that integration. You actually can see what has been sent over to the shop itself. So it makes it easy for people to know what has actually been communicated, what still needs to be able to to be communicated. Actually, when the shop in Equipment360 works on their work order and closes it closes it out, it actually will close out the the follow-up itself. So there's a a two way integration there. Now, James, to your question, it sounds like you're not ready to use Equipment360, but what you're trying to do is, be able to alert the the shop on this. So there's there's a few ways you could go about this. Within safety alerts, you could go ahead and turn on alerts and set up a shop email, or set it to certain people to get those alerts sending over in email. They won't have that two way integration. They'll still need to basically look at the thing, copy and paste into their their work order management system. So a little bit of cumbersome, but it's doable there. The other thing they could do is get a safety inspections license or inspections only, and then use that mobile view to go in and filter by equipment. You can filter out to the type of equipment or even just to specific pieces of equipment. And of course you can filter by job. And so that might be another pathway for them. So hopefully that gives you some options before you're ready to make the jump. James will be at UGM next week. So, yeah, come find us. We'll all be there, James, and happy to answer more questions. Looks like we had another question come in. Can HeavyJob be integrated with Bamboo? Andrew, can you take that one? Yeah, absolutely. Yes is the most general answer for there. So we have quite a few different integration strategies. For something like Bamboo, our recommendation would be our managed integration services. That's where we manage the integration between Bamboo to pull in anything that you need to from there and push that into HeavyJob. We also have APIs that you can develop that integration yourself. And then we also have a partner program as well. Bamboo is not a partner, so that would not be an automatic turnkey solution for you there. But we do have the ability to work with partners as they go through our partnership portal to get signed up and do that. Great. Looks like we also have a question that came in from Alan. Will the time card warnings be available on the web? It'd be really helpful to have the reviewer to know what warnings were flagged. Yeah. I think we each wanna say something. Jane, go go first. Well, I was gonna say, Alan, no. Right now, we're making that update of new new improvements on the safety time card warnings. There's a lot of other updates and ideas that we're taking in from people unless, you know, just kind of how we prioritize and understand. And it sounds like what you would like is a simple report that says at this point in time, this time card warning was flagged. Really what you're talking about there is really for the the ignore and send, not the the hard stop. Because we said a hard stop. They are submitting everything before. So it's it's really just for that use case. And I see some value in that. We should talk a little bit more about, are there any caveats or other stuff? But I will definitely talk more about this. But we are getting out that other update really soon. Yeah. And from my input, I think it's whether that is a entry person that's actually filling out a time card for some reason, and you have maybe a separate set of rules you want them to follow because they're in the office, or if it is just a reviewer that wants to to grab that. So I think that's some of the caveats that we could jump into, of course. Happy to talk with you more. Was just gonna say, and I saw a quick, follow-up of, from Miguel. Is it possible to lock the time cards until a supervisor sends his daily JHA or toolbox talk? And yeah, that's the, that's the hard stop. If the, that supervisor is trying to send in the time card, a hard stop. Cannot send that in until they have completed their, their JHA or meeting. And we actually have an even more advancement on that. If you schedule a meeting or an inspection, it will actually be a time card warning, and they can't actually submit until they have completed the scheduled item. So a few different things in there. We had another question about if plans location features can be used when using PDF plan files. Yes. They can. We actually only accept PDFs as an upload, and then there's a calibration process to go to to get that location services turned on. Happy to tell you more about it. Another one, does HeavyJob integrate with Acumatica? Yes. We have several customers that use Acumatica, both for filling in setups as well as pushing out those time card records back to Acumatica. Any update on OCR for sheet numbers and descriptions? Also, please add the sheet description in the main view on iPad and web. Sounds like some plans feedback. Yep, absolutely. Great feedback. Yes, it's on our roadmap to do more around OCR this year. It's been a journey to get to what we need to do to actually build on those features, but we're there for it to accomplish that this year. So you should see some changes around OCR and how to select areas, things like that coming out in twenty twenty five. Looks like we have another Equipment three sixty and HeavyJob integration question. The documentation of equipment hours needed repairs, is that a feature of Equipment E360 itself or does HeavyJob field and its base format allow that? Yeah. There's ways to implement it inside of HeavyJob to get those hours. So some people use non use codes to document that needs to be repaired. A non use code is R code or something similar. And then the person back in the office can then run a report to identify that an R code has been used. So that's one way you can do it. Notes inside of time cards are a few other ones. But I would say as far as triggering it to do a repair and to flag it and send up the right, hey, this person, go look at it without me having to run a report. That's something that really would want to sit inside of inspections at E360. Jen, any other take on that one? No, I think that's okay. We could talk about this for a long time, but Michael, I think that the thing is that E360 makes this easy. There's ways to get there with heavy driving safety. It's just not gonna be as fast. And so it really just matters is the velocity important or not? And so you can have someone go through inspections, find like, oh, this is a real issue and go through that follow-up workflow. It's a great way to go, but it's just not gonna be as quick. And like Fowler said, you can find it in Happy Job with the hours, you just need people to be good about the non use codes and running that report. Think we have our last question is, will we be able to get C Equipment time card adjustments be integrated into the web version of HeavyJob? So that's similar to the time card adjustment tool. So very particular feature for anybody not familiar with where we're at inside the software. There's the ability to do overtime spreads for your labor, and there's other tools that are more specific for equipment inside of our desktop version. Something that we definitely want to look into more. It's always just a question of what else we have going on. Great question though, Dan. I think that's all of your questions. Thank you so much for joining us today. As Andrew and Jen mentioned, feel free to reach out to any of us if you think of more questions after this webinar or we're always interested in helping answer your questions and getting feedback that you have on how we can improve and continue to make our software better. So thank you all for joining. Have a great day.