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Episode 29
5 Plays11 months ago
testing
Recommended
Transcript
Cold open and counting game
00:00:01
Speaker
So Carlos to check, to check. What? Let's just do, let's do a thing where we like count backwards and forwards. So I say one, you say two, and we just see how tightly we can do that. Okay. One.
00:00:15
Speaker
Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Seven. That's eight. What? It's like the hardest game ever. And why was there so much delay? Was it you thinking about what the next number was? Oh no, there wasn't any delay for me. Okay. And that's the cold open.
00:00:49
Speaker
It sounded like I was immediately responding to each one. Were you getting a gap? I was getting about one second with yours. Okay, let's do it again. Let's practice our counting to 10 and how quickly we can do it and then see if we can make it all the way to double digits. Okay, one, two, three, four, five,
00:01:15
Speaker
six, seven, eight, nine, seven. Yeah. Well done. What the. Sorry. There's a sound board.
00:01:37
Speaker
This is already blown Riverside out of the water. Yeah, Riverside's gone now. That's the soundboard. I feel like I was in some weird drinking game there and the panic takes over that you're gonna get the number wrong. So it sounds like there's like maybe a little bit of lag but not that bad.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's like one second at most, whereas before we were hitting like two or three. Yeah, I think it's pretty good. Cool. It feels like basically what Google Meet is. Yeah, yeah, it's no worse than those calls. Okay, cool. Cool. Nice, right. That's good, I'm happy we've got a cold open.
00:02:28
Speaker
And it's literally, you can't count to 10. Yeah. I can't remember. Did we get it covered up in, but then still the normal intro or did we just go straight in? Yeah. Yeah. Normal, normal intro. Yeah. Okay, cool. Sound. And then we, well, we're going to have a John Cena theme, but that didn't work. Yeah. He's had enough times that would happen.
Introduction to Episode 29
00:02:52
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 29 of the Offsite podcast where we chat all things construction and technology. My name's Carlos Cavallo. And I'm Jason Lancini. How you doing? How was Melbourne?
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, good. Although I've come back with potentially, potentially unconfirmed case of COVID and a suspect pain in my eye, which is definitely not pink eye. I'll just say that for sure. Just to clarify. But it does feel like eye strain. So yeah, the basically the takeaway and the big learning was don't leave your house. Yeah, okay.
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah. And probably not go to Melbourne and go to projects with 200 engineers around you. Yeah. I think whatever it was, I can't remember maybe 11 teams or something in the week was pushing the, was pushing the limits of what I can do at my age. You're probably kidding the productivity of the Melbourne construction industry for a couple of weeks. Site tours and drinks, too many of them. Yeah, for sure. Right.
Technology in Construction
00:04:08
Speaker
Today, Jason and I are going to chat through something, which is quite a comment. That's pretty crucial for the podcast. For the conversation that we often have in the office or on calls, which is, what is the landscape of technology that our customers are using? We like to stand top of it so we understand what that map looks like.
00:04:32
Speaker
But it's also interesting to see emerging players and trends across contractors, regions, and obviously teams.
00:04:40
Speaker
So we like call it like the like what's on people's screen tests, you know, like when you're on when either you or like one of the team or on a call with a customer, everyone's got the like row of bookmarks, you know, what what are the tools that live in the bookmarks bar of folks on on the biggest projects is the like is I guess the topic, right? Yeah. And the learning there is never share your screen because Jason's doing research immediately.
00:05:10
Speaker
I'll be like, I'll be like, what's that logo? I've not seen that one before. Yeah. Yeah.
Pronunciation Debate: Aconex
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah. So, uh, let's kick off with the most vanilla of categories, uh, document management. Um, there's one massive player in the UK in particular, uh, which is Acadex, uh, a couple of years ago, no more than a couple of years ago now purchased by Oracle.
00:05:36
Speaker
Um, it's pretty heavily mandated across major schemes, like cross-rail and HS2. So it probably makes sense as to why people sort of adopt it as they're taught anyway, if you're going to be using all these major schemes rather than jumping between, um, outside. Can I interrupt? I just, this is a, I don't want to go down a total sidetrack, but you're calling it Aconex. Is it not Aconex? Uh, that feels quite American to me. It might be.
00:06:05
Speaker
Yeah. Normally, that's what I've called it. And funnily enough, I happened to have a chat in the last like fortnight with one of the co-founders. And I'm almost certain he said Aconex. He's probably right, to be fair.
00:06:23
Speaker
But I'm not, yeah, he's right. I'm not 100% sure I recall which one it was, but I'm almost certain it was. I'm not doubting whether he's right. I'm doubting whether I'm correct. It's yeah, it's probability sits with me being wrong over the co-founder of AconX. Sorry to interrupt. No worries.
00:06:48
Speaker
I guess in terms of like the other ones that we notice or see, plan radar, A sites, there's like a few names that seem to be fairly common across projects. I have heard that sort of Procore isn't too strong in this space. So that's like, you see a lot of content and marketing and stuff around Procore, but I haven't had any positive feedback from customers using the document management side of things.
00:07:15
Speaker
How does that compare with Oz? Similar sort of bag? Definitely when almost on every customer screen, there's usually a bookmark to Aconex. There is a decent cohort, I would say, in Australia that use what was TeamBinder and is now part of an innate document. Definitely, I know of a site from the UK. I have not seen it used in Oz.
00:07:43
Speaker
And I've not seen on any of the bigger contractors the documents feature out of a Procore or an Autodesk or something used for that. I just think that those things, the depth of functionality for, I think it's like the transmittals and tracking that in the RFI, this is not quite deep enough for what they need. So definitely it's like Aconex, maybe a bit of like TeamBinder slash documents.
00:08:12
Speaker
And that's really, to be honest, from what I see here. Yeah. They are actually fairly complicated tools. It's not just like a file system with a lot of documents that are being up-revved. There is a lot more to it, to be fair. So it makes sense that these sort of ultra-focused apps are winning in the space and not the big suites and their versions of. Cool. That's a vanilla topic. Move on. Yeah.
00:08:39
Speaker
onto something super exciting, master schedules. So there's literally three key players which cover almost everything from what I see. You've obviously got P6, widely adopted for infrastructure in the UK, widely adopted across more than infrastructure, it seems, in other countries.
00:09:04
Speaker
I know they've been pushing the cloud version of this. I know three major tier one contractors who in the last six to 12 months have tried and reverted back to the standard sort of P6, which is... Where's Ollie on the soundboard, weren't you? There's like... Wow, wow, wow. Which I guess,
00:09:30
Speaker
I guess the worst part of that news is for people like you who are managing a product and probably want to build awesome API connectivity. And I guess that's making it more difficult that people aren't all transitioning to the cloud versions of that tool. Yeah, I think definitely there's something that's got to happen there. I think you're right. Like it's just the same. Well, you said three actually. What were the three?
00:10:01
Speaker
naming the contractors. No, no, no, no, no. The three tools you said. I thought you said there were three tools. Oh, so yeah. So that's the first, we'll come on to Aster and MSP, but I guess the background, Aster, like it's on every building project here. They tend to not use P6. I think it is easier to use. It's a bit simpler. P6 has like way too much functionality, which is why it's more on the sort of complicated infrastructure projects. And then there's MSP, generally smaller jobs, like
00:10:30
Speaker
PMs that have more responsibility to actually own the master schedule like it, because it's easier than the other two, you can sort of pick up and run with it. So we say a lot of MSP. A lot cheaper. Yeah, substantially cheaper. But yeah, sorry, back to P6, you said. Yeah, so I was just going to say that it seems to me that there doesn't seem any great exodus away from the desktop-based versions of
00:10:58
Speaker
like P6 and Asta. I think the penetration of Asta in APAC is probably, well, it is definitely lower. Some building contractors and projects will use it, and then maybe I would class it as the more adventurous planners.
00:11:20
Speaker
give it a go. I even see occasionally within like a big contractor, that's like a, you know, 100% a P6 shop, they'll have like a, there'll be a couple of people using the caster for specific projects. I can think of a couple that come to mind. But yeah, it's, if you asked me this in 10 years ago, it'd probably be the same answer. I don't know if you asked me in 10 years. Hopefully it's not the same answer, but I don't, there's not a lot changing there. Yeah.
00:11:49
Speaker
People are ferocious in their views on P6 versus Esther as well. It's quite an interesting, like, yeah, with planners, they really do have their tool and they back it. And I don't know whether it's because you have to commit six years of your life to learn how to use those tools properly and you don't want it to disappear. So you back it and say, yeah, stuff any change, which is a great mindset. Yeah.
00:12:18
Speaker
So next up, project management.
Popularity of Autodesk: Issues and Insights
00:12:22
Speaker
The most common seems to be the Autodesk Construction Cloud Suite. So you're talking about big, big construction management suites, basically. Yeah. So let's define the categories. You're purchasing a suite, and then they're going to try and use as many apps within that suite as possible to get their money's worth. So Autodesk seems to be the most common.
00:12:44
Speaker
a number of major contractors or tier one contractors are using it for sure. The hard thing is to gauge the actual depth of use. So yes, they use Autodesk, but then we see Oracle Acanex use for document management. We see Synchro use instead of Revit for modeling. We see other applications used for things like site diaries. So I still don't think they've ticked the like, we are a suite, you use us and you don't need anything else box.
00:13:11
Speaker
but it seems to be doing the best out of the bunch. Yeah. It's, it's same as like the document management, right? It's like with those, there is seems to be a little pattern of like those big platforms. They cover every single base, but all the features, it's a little bit like shallow. Uh, and
00:13:30
Speaker
especially if you're a big contractor and you're trying to make a business case for going to one thing. It's like, what's funny is everyone wants this one thing that does it. Uh, like in the contractors, they don't want to jump between tools, but because there's not like feature parody between like a best in class document management and like the built-in document management in like a pro core, uh,
00:13:52
Speaker
It's very hard on a big organization to rally company support to say we're going to go from there. Because someone in document control wants this very specific feature that is their entire workflow that they do every day. And it's not over there, therefore, we're definitely not moving over.
00:14:11
Speaker
So it's, it's really interesting that like the specific outcome that they want, because it's like, so because there is a trade off of, well, it doesn't have the 7,000 deep features. We can't move. Yeah. Um, the pricing point you mentioned is an interesting one. I'm not actually sure how Autodesk a priced, but, um, Procore you were seeing more and more of, um,
00:14:37
Speaker
From what I've gauged, it's really great for their sort of data collection apps. So like gathering information from the field seems to be what they're strong at.
00:14:45
Speaker
It's unpopular for things like their model viewers and document management and estimating. Apparently, those just are very strong aspects of the tool. But considering Procore charge their subscription based on a percentage of every revenue, you're really in a tough spot if you're not using all the apps because you're still. It does. It does depend on which of the modules you're using as well. So it does. It varies. It's not just like that. You don't get everything for the, they normally sell it. But if the person doing that negotiation
00:15:15
Speaker
Um, they might be quite unaware that certain apps just won't be adopted by the team and they're going to purchase their own. So it's, it's a difficult thing. It's kind of like how it kind of, it's kind of like how we pay for notion and you still do your to-do list in your calendar.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, I will. If anyone's seen Carlos's calendar, it is a, you've never seen anything like it. It's a full to-do list and note-taking app in a calendar. Yeah, between, between seven and nine PM, I have like 10 calendar entries. And as I finish them, I delete them. And if I reprioritize, I shift them to the day that I'm going to do them. It works.
00:16:03
Speaker
Someone in Google HQ is going, what is going on with this user? This guy is super productive. He does 100 meetings per day. Yeah, but he also deletes everyone he makes. Yeah, someone were having a good time somewhere. Final category. Let's label this GIS slash imagery capture.
00:16:32
Speaker
Um, inclusive of like BIM or no. Um, well, I'll name a few apps in a second and you can tell me what we'll categorize them as, but like by far the sort of, um, biggest GIS tool here is ArcGIS. Um, they seem to be everywhere. They're on with major organizations like national highways. So that suddenly gets like a third of all the spend in the UK. Uh, the women that likes of high speed too.
00:16:59
Speaker
A lot of main contractors are looking to adopt in this space have spoken to a couple in just the last couple of months who are making that purchase decision. And a lot of it is to do with like the integrations that come with it. So that seems to be the biggest player. And then I've got sort of a few apps that came to my mind, but I thought GIS imagery, you've got sensor, you've got something that's actually popped up with a couple of customers recently, which is QGIS. Wasn't even aware of that more than two months ago.
00:17:27
Speaker
And then you mentioned propeller quite a lot, which is more on their sort of drone surveys and image capture. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, so you're right. I think ArcGIS is definitely the biggest player. And then QGIS is kind of like a free or low cost version. And fewer, more than anything. No, they've got a desktop application as well. I think it's open source. But I don't know how the hosting stuff works. I've downloaded it at one point and played with it.
00:17:57
Speaker
open source version of parts of ArcGIS. I don't think it's it's not competitive for whole platform. And then there's like the other category, which I think like sensor and propeller are probably playing in the same space. Which is like, I think it's like an SDK for a drone survey. So like software to run in the drone scan that then can
00:18:21
Speaker
consume the imagery or point cloud and a way to visualize it and run, you know, deltas between, you know, earthworks levels and stuff. In Australia, propeller is very, very, very prevalent. And I see it on almost, it's probably one of the most prevalent bookmarks I see on people's screens on a day-to-day basis.
00:18:48
Speaker
And what's really cool is last week when we were in Melbourne, we spotted that a couple of the customers there were given access by Propeller to, I think it's a beta feature where they'll publish their imagery to an open standard. It's called a web map tile service.
00:19:06
Speaker
So you would know from the UK that products like Sensat, there's an issue where you can't get access to the data through an API. So you've got to export it, re-import it, host it in ArcGIS. So propeller have a way to publish it to a web map tile service, which we can connect to directly. So we can now start to directly integrate with ArcGIS, which is really cool. So yeah, long story short, in that space, it does feel like there's
00:19:35
Speaker
I see people running both propeller and ArcGIS as well. So I don't really know why they're not, they feel like to a degree they're competitive, but.
00:19:43
Speaker
People will use, but I have the feature set that I'll GIS have in terms of like not a layer types and it's the asset data. It's, it's more image capture and view image kind of thing. Yeah. You can kind of think of like, uh, actress is like a whole platform built around like geography at the core. Um, you can build apps on top of it and stuff where it's propellers, a specific app for a specific scenario. Not that was a good explanation or not, but yeah.
00:20:11
Speaker
Sorry, another question of propeller. Do they actually run this, like the service or do they send the guys to site who then man the drones? Or is it just like you fly your own drones in the system? I think either you fly your own or you hire someone in to come and fly it that's got whatever the license is, the CASA license or whatever it is, depending on which country. Yeah, okay.
00:20:33
Speaker
A lot of time it's in contract seasons. I don't know if you see the same thing there, but a lot of times in contracts from clients to run drone flights once a month or once a quarter or whatever it is. And it's priced into the contractor's bid. Yeah. Okay. Cool.
Exploring BIM Tools
00:20:50
Speaker
What are you seeing on the, what are you seeing on the BIM side? Just cause I was interested in, in that cause it does seem that that's still a bit of a like free for all. Yeah.
00:21:01
Speaker
Synchro seems to be the most common, like if I go to site and a lot of teams will actually just run like one of their 4D visualizations so you can see how the job's built just because it's a useful way to understand the scope.
00:21:17
Speaker
I'd say more than 50% of the time it's on sync, right? But that's like 4D, but that won't be where the BIM model is. They'll have something, that'll be just for the, that'll be the 4D component. Yeah, it's like the, let's call it the viewer, the 4D viewer. They'd use that. I think Autodesk, but yeah, I can't say I've,
00:21:41
Speaker
Yeah, dug into that too much. And here it seems a lot like there's a lot of revisit being used. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There seems to be more of the like viewers popping up. So you've got like 3d repo who a site reached the purchased. They seem to be used by a bunch of building contractors. Um, the, the, the feedback seems to be, it's just quite easy to use. And they also have a viewer in power BI. So you can sort of put it in the hands of anyone without purchasing licenses. Um,
00:22:13
Speaker
So yeah, the negative one I got was the Procore one, which is, it's pretty difficult to use and people haven't really taken it out. So maybe they're opting to use the viewer that's on the actual system that they build the model in rather than try and view it through the Procore suite. So yeah.
00:22:32
Speaker
You and I have spoken before, and it came to mind because I was at a conference recently when I was traveling, about how in the space of construction software startups, they always have this sea of blue logos with really hard to remember names.
Real vs Fake: Software Companies
00:22:51
Speaker
And the names are always two word amalgamations of two very positive construction themed words.
00:23:00
Speaker
So I thought to maybe finish off the chat, we'd play a little game. I thought about it on my flight back the other day. I thought if I could give you like maybe some pairs of names and maybe one's a real company and one's a fake company and you can try and decide which one is the real construction software company.
00:23:24
Speaker
So whichever one's more ridiculous is the real one. Look, I can't put that much thought into the game theory of the names. But I've got like a couple of different combos that we can run through. And then there's four different groups. And if you get four out of four, you get a gold star. Although someone on the soundboard will play a sound. That's what happened. Cool. So first two.
00:23:55
Speaker
Uh, uh, out build and Excel a build. Excel a build is ridiculous. So that, that just can't be the case. Um, and I'm going to stand by that no matter what the answer is. So I'm going to, I didn't think you'd get that one, but yeah, that's, uh, that's correct. So that's a 10 points to Gryffindor. Um, right. The next one is, um, uh, control pro and procure track.
00:24:26
Speaker
Wow. Control Pro. Procure track. I'm going to say that Control Pro just sounds more made up. It sounds like something to do with golf. I'm going to go with the procured track. It's the real one. Control Pro. What does Control Pro do? Earn value management, I think, from memory.
00:24:55
Speaker
Wow, like project controls. That's right in your alley, mate. All right. Next one, I'm going to like level it up a bit. We'll do a combo of three. So you have to pick it between the three. One or two is real. Like is one fake or one? You know what? I don't remember.
00:25:19
Speaker
One's fake. One's fake. Okay, first one, flow site, arrow flow, and flow former. Say the first two again. Wait, I don't even remember what I've done here. Flow site and arrow flow.
00:25:45
Speaker
I really hope Arrow flows the fake one. Quick pause. You're searching them. Actually, I think they're all real. Yeah, they're all real. They're all real. You didn't say that was trick questions. Well, there is kind of trick. So FlowSight's not a startup, a construction software startup. It's a product from a software startup.
00:26:13
Speaker
So that is probably, let's call that one the fake one. Right, okay. This isn't good. It's professional. Right, so that's three. Number four, last one. And then we can wrap it up. So we have Site Mate, Site Hive, and Site Pro. I'm pretty sure the first two are real. I've actually come across those. So the third one's fake. Okay, yeah. You finish on a high.
00:26:44
Speaker
What's that score? Three out of four. Let's go with two out of four. Because the third one was kind of a bit of a hard one. 50%. That's a pass at uni. Take that. Indeed. Nice one. Right. Yeah, I think that's it. Thank you very much everyone for listening. Thanks.
00:27:13
Speaker
That's really weird.