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E:11 What can NEOM learn from HS2?
72 Plays2 years ago
Jacobs Construction Manager Josh Weatherly joins Carlos & Jason for this episode. The three discuss Josh's experience working on NEOM & how Apple's Vision Pro could impact construction.
Design & BIM come to mind when considering the new Apple venture into AR headsets. But what could it mean for reality capture? Would it impact things like generating snag lists and records more than Drones and Microsoft HoloLens have?
4,000 piles mark a strong start to The Line, and Josh chats about how the vast scale feels on site on the West Coast of Saudi Arabia. Hear what he has to say about learnings from Crossrail and HS2 around how to increase cost certainty in mega-project delivery.
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Transcript
Introduction: Hosts and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everyone and welcome to episode 11 of the offsite podcast where we chat all things construction and technology. My name is Carlos and I spent most of my days talking to construction teams about how they deliver projects. And I'm Jason and I help build software that construction teams use to deliver their projects.
00:00:16
Speaker
I've got another shit piece of artwork behind me today, as well as the aircon that you can probably hear in the recording. Four weeks in a row, referencing something in camera for people on a podcast. That's going to be the trademark of the intro, Carlos. If only our banter was engaging as our content, we'd be flying, right? Yeah. How's your week going?
00:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, not bad. Busy. I had a wedding at the weekend, which took a couple of days out of me, so now I'm playing catch up. Yourself? Good. I actually got, for the first time this week, I got a series of lovely messages from people that have listened to this attempt at a podcast, saying that they enjoy, found it really relatable and engaging, which was, I think, a shock to me. But it was lovely.
00:01:06
Speaker
I actually got told it was the best podcast I want to ever listen to, but my mum probably is a little bit biased. Yeah. How drunk was your mum at that point?
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'm hoping it's over, but she definitely wasn't. Right, so this week's a very exciting one.
Guest Introduction: Josh Wetherly
00:01:28
Speaker
We have our first ever guest. We've got Josh Wetherly on the pod, a construction manager from Jacobs working on NEOM. But before we get to that, we're going to kick off with a discussion about the Apple Vision Pro.
Technology Spotlight: Apple's Vision Pro
00:01:40
Speaker
Those of you who caught up with tech news in the last week or so, we had the usual Apple launch where they go through everything from like hardware, software to new products. And they released something called the Pro Vision, Vision Pro, which way around, Vision Pro.
00:01:55
Speaker
And this is Apple's first sort of headset. So everyone's quite familiar with I think the Oculus and various other sort of headsets that are really aimed at sort of gaming and things like that. But this, what looks a bit different is it essentially blends digital content with actual physical space. So you have screens in front of you, but you can actually see all the real world around you, which is pretty cool.
00:02:17
Speaker
So first impressions was it obviously it looks cool. It's Apple. It makes competitors look basic, but it does come with a price tag. I think it was three and a half thousand dollars. So expensive piece of kit. And I say it looks also it does kind of look like a bit ski goggles, but the aim I was going to say your bar for like what looks cool is significantly.
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, I really like the glass. It's like the curve on it. It looks cool. If they were ski goggles, they were a bit flatter. They would be cool ski goggles. Be like wearing goggles with eyeballs painted on them. Yeah, but they made it clear that the objective is actually to get down to actual glasses. So once they can get all the text small enough, it will just be like your day to day glasses.
00:03:00
Speaker
The general sort of consumer use is, it's basically sticking in Apple TV on your face. You can watch movies, you can play games, you can scroll through apps, you can browse the web. So pretty cool stuff. But I guess, obviously we need to think about it in the context of construction. There's obvious use cases that will come out for things like design and looking at BIM models. So you can see the model around you, you can see asset data, you can see
00:03:26
Speaker
I know walkways, exclusion zones, things like that. So the immersive experience is an obvious one that we'll see. And people have used headsets like that before. Pretty shit, but kind of, we get the idea.
00:03:38
Speaker
I started thinking about the sort of reality capture side of things. So if you're on site and you've got these sort of goggles on, assuming you're not falling over trip hazards that you can't see because they're on your head, you could be looking at a wall or an asset. You've got the bin model data that's attached to it, but you could start to actually
00:03:59
Speaker
capture information, so you could be doing inspections, you could be putting together diaries and records, you could be generating snag lists by looking at things, it monitors your eyes, you could actually just look at something, you could probably then just speak and then add details to something that's then tagged it to a location, it's tagged it to an asset, it knows who captured the information, it knows what you effectively instructed these systems to do.
00:04:24
Speaker
So Jason, as a QS that's been on site about three and a half times, does that seem like a realistic use of it?
00:04:32
Speaker
Well, second, I thought you were introducing me as the QS. Um, I remember, no, no, I'm not a QS. Look, I don't know the, the thing that ever, like every news article was banging on about was the price at like three and a half thousand USD that the price really to me was, uh, if you were thinking about it from a construction perspective, relative, like if you think about the competitors out there, there's the, that Microsoft HoloLens, which a lot of, whenever we see construction specific BIA demo things where people are walking around like a.
00:05:03
Speaker
a BIM model of the site that's usually on the HoloLens product. They're like three and a half thousand pounds for the base version going up to almost five thousand pounds. I don't think the price for Apple specifically is a problem. I think for the price for the entire category is a problem if it was going to be used.
00:05:25
Speaker
Really, I just don't know what the killer app is. Like if we think about like our mobile phones, when, when that, when that transition to mobile happened, it was, it was the things like having the, like a social media app or the camera or the thing that drove the actual adoption of the technology. And we paid, you know, a thousand dollars for a phone.
00:05:44
Speaker
Without that killer app, these things become that novelty that sits in that special room that visitors that come to the project get to go into and turn on. And they remember how to fire up the little demo. So I started thinking about like, what is the, what could be the killer app? And I didn't come up with any great ideas, just the spoiler alert. I saw what you want on the part. Sure, ideas. Jason, that's it.
00:06:12
Speaker
Like obviously we see a lot of all of the guys, the XYZ reality, this is like their core product. There's a lot of demonstrations of people walking around the site and seeing a model and being, oh, there's the column, whatever, there's the pile.
00:06:34
Speaker
If that use case is actually valuable for a project, it has to be something that like the end installer can use. Like, so it's not just the, you know, the engineer that's doing a little jolly around the site or the QS walking around with the one headset that the project owns for it to be really valuable. Like all the people actually doing the work need these headsets. And like, obviously projects don't have three and a half grand per person to whack around.
00:06:57
Speaker
And then I had the other idea of like, you know when you're putting together IKEA sets and you always have to like do a couple of things and then you go back to the instruction manual and then you go back to do the couple of things and you go back to the instruction manual, like you basically get this feed of the instruction step by step as you're doing them in there. But again, like all of those, it's a lot of headsets. So I don't know, Carlos, and I don't even know if I'm sold off your reality capture thing because like, again, in reality,
00:07:27
Speaker
It's way cheaper to just stick a helmet on your head. And in the future, it'd be even cheaper to get the robot to do a lap at the site or the drone than it will be to have Carlos the QS walking out for his one trip a month with the goggles on. I expected to just look at things and it's doing my payment, sir. It's just, yeah, working out. You know, you don't even need to leave the office to do your payment, sir. I just asked the engineer,
Mega Projects Spotlight: NEOM and More
00:07:56
Speaker
easy.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yeah. Sorry, yeah. No, I was just going to say, I don't know if you had, I don't know if you wanted to contribute some bad ideas to the bad ideas collection, but other than the really good idea I had, I mean, there's some obvious things, right? So if we assume we've got to the end girl, which is glasses, so there's not this giant thing in your face and you can carry it with you day to day, but it can present useful information. There could be like some cool like hazard stuff, which we have seen on helmets, but like
00:08:26
Speaker
not a massive helmet that looks like, again, a giant ski goggle. It must be able to give you useful information. If it got really intelligent, it could like correct you when you're doing something wrong. Like, I think there's a lot of space to go into. It's so early that
00:08:43
Speaker
I don't think anyone knows where that will go yet. It's clearly just a gadget for people to watch TV on a plane. When you mentioned glasses, I just had a memory of a project I worked on, which is a sort of major gas infrastructure project. We obviously provided like PPE for the workforce.
00:09:02
Speaker
And someone did an accounting of how much we were spending on safety glasses every month and replacing the safety glasses for the team. And we actually worked out at one point during a period of the project that we were replacing everyone on the project's safety glasses once every two weeks.
00:09:21
Speaker
And so I just had a moment. There was like, if soon as you've got your, you know, your safety glasses, that Bill's going to be, uh, yeah. Can I have another pair? Yeah. Uh, yeah. They'd have to be like shatterproof. They, like, they probably encased them in these like massive, like security boxes or something, just so you could wear them.
00:09:44
Speaker
Yeah, like either either everyone on the project has three pairs of these glasses or like, or there's this one person that just has this giant room full of glasses at home that they've collected. You taking one per day. Yeah, yeah, I think I think we're going to be using our regular eyeballs for the time being. Yeah, I think that's a fair statement. To wrap up the section, you just mentioned Ikea saw a crazy stat the other day. 10% of the babies that were conceived in the world last year were conceived in an Ikea bed.
00:10:12
Speaker
So we did not prep any, you did not know that I was gonna mention IKEA at all. But I saw this that yesterday and I was like, that's mad. 10% of the world's babies are conceived on an IKEA bed. That is market dominance. It was a busy day yesterday.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah. Awesome. So next on next to the next part, which is our guest. So Josh Wetherly. For those that are listening, Josh is a civil engineer. He's worked on Crossrail with Skanska. He's worked on HS2 with Ferrovial. Pretty sure he did a stint in New Zealand and he now works on NEOM with Jacobs. So a bit of an all-star CV, all-star guest. Josh, how are you?
00:10:57
Speaker
Good morning. Yeah, not too bad. Thanks for having me on. Big listener. Good to hear. Good to hear one of five listeners on the offside pod. Yeah.
00:11:10
Speaker
I guess to kick off a bit of a discussion, NEOM, we're all educated on NEOM via news, whether it's like official NEOM content or like articles and various bits of information we can find online. Is someone working on it? Can you tell us a bit about the scheme? I can, yeah. So for those that don't know where it is in Saudi Arabia, it's situated on the west coast. So it borders the Red Sea.
00:11:39
Speaker
It's about 200 kilometers from the Jordanian border. We are under construction at the moment, so there's been about 4,000 piles that have been constructed between 1.5 and 2.5 meters in diameter. I work for Jacobs. We're part of the Neon the Line delivery partner, which consists of Parsons Corporation and Atkins S&C Lavalin.
00:12:05
Speaker
And then Bechtel are also on site constructing the spine as well, which is this transportation corridor that runs parallel to the line. 4,000 piles. That's quite a number. Yeah. I had the joy of going out to Saudi to see the piling operation about six weeks ago now. And it's pretty colossal. Each module is 800 meters long by 200 meters wide. So that gives you the kind of 2D scale of the project. And there was
00:12:35
Speaker
I don't know, 60, 70 piling rigs on site. So within an 800 meter long module, it's quite congested with a lot of big kit, which is great for a civil engineer because that's what we love.
00:12:49
Speaker
Josh, nice to meet you. I guess for those that have looked up the line and for those that haven't, they should definitely look it up or the whole NEOM scheme. The scale of the project is staggering. I guess the challenge of that scale is probably not lost on the team actually trying to deliver the project.
00:13:10
Speaker
How, how do you as a project team like manage pre production planning at like such an epic scale so by that I mean like if I think about previous projects that I've worked on. We think about before the project begins what supplies are we going to go to for precast or different things.
00:13:31
Speaker
Like I was wondering whether you folks have challenges like where are there enough workers in the country? You know, where would we accommodate all these people? Is there enough glass in the, in the world for the giant glass line? Like are those problems that you guys are like actively like having to plan for? So there are some really unique challenges with, with the program and actually the logic links within the program as well. So at the moment we've, you know, we've got a,
00:13:59
Speaker
We're trying to overcome the waterproofing interface between the piles, the waterproofing, the raft slabs. It takes quite a lot of robust planning to plan for the interfaces, the scopes, which package of works do these activities fall within. So it is really complex. And as the design develops and the design matures, that program is going to need to be more robust to achieve the ambitions of
00:14:28
Speaker
I think 300,000 people living in the line by 2030. Yeah. So I, when I was thinking about this before, I was like, like you've worked on mega projects for years on like cross rail and high speed too. And, and like, I guess many of us that like others of us that I did work on those projects, you probably saw and experienced things on cross rail HS2 and you thought like,
00:14:52
Speaker
If I ever had the chance to start one of these mega projects again from an early stage, I'd do this differently or that differently. And now you probably have the chance. Is there anything that you're taking from Crossrail or HS2 to be like, this is a definite learning that I'm trying to apply at this new mega, mega challenge? I thought about this yesterday. I think it seems like construction projects all over the world have an obsession with
00:15:19
Speaker
start and work at the earliest opportunity. And I feel like a lot of mega projects, giga projects lack maturity when they start. So the analogy that I have is it's like getting a team of professional sports people that have never played together, never met together without doing any pre-season.
00:15:43
Speaker
playing their first game and trying to win gold or trying to win the prem or something like that. That's sort of Ted Lasso I think, isn't it? Quite possibly, yeah. And I just think we've got this obsession and we as an industry need to make sure that our teams are mature enough to go out there and deliver effectively. Our designs are mature enough to feed into the construction teams so the construction teams know what they're doing so you enhance and increase project certainty.
00:16:13
Speaker
And I think that kind of falls back onto, onto clients world over that they need to, I think there's an opportunity for clients to spend a little bit more money upfront to get those teams formed and to get those designs mature. And then over the course of that project, which could be, I don't, in Crossroads case, a decade and HS2 case, a decade. Um, I think you will see less cost uncertainty. The further the project progresses because you had the design.
00:16:43
Speaker
You've got the designer, you know, 80%, you've got the team 80%. So yeah, it's like, it's like the classic, uh, sorry, Carlos, it's like the classic construction, um, design and construct that spiral, uh, not to be overly dramatic, but like the, the design, uh, there's not enough buffer between design and construction through the program. The design slips, but the construction starts.
00:17:09
Speaker
And then, well, we don't want to, you know, we don't, we want to hold these end dates once we've started digging the hole in the ground. And then so we start doing this thing where we break the design up into smaller and smaller pieces to release work earlier and earlier, like in the, in the language of like some projects you go from gates to mini gates to try and release bits of the work early.
00:17:30
Speaker
And then all of a sudden like the complexity of that design just like skyrockets and suddenly like a design team of 50s, like 400. And actually the design is probably taking like five times as long. And then we've realized that like the slab that we need to pour next week is in the gate that we've not planned for another six months.
Improving Construction Processes
00:17:49
Speaker
And it's just, then it's just all, yeah, it all just starts collapsing in, doesn't it? Yeah.
00:17:55
Speaker
I mean, a real solid construction example is I don't understand why we don't get a team of a team into do ground investigation surveys, non-intrusive or intrusive, pretty comprehensive. So when construction teams do break ground, they have an element of certainty with what they're dealing with. But common practices, construction teams don't really know what they're digging into until they start construction.
00:18:22
Speaker
And then something happens, and then they go, oh shit, this design doesn't work. That design rework. That's cranking up the cost. That's extending the program. They were all unforeseen circumstances, which you could have had greater certainty on if you just spent, I don't know, 50, 100 grand doing a pretty comprehensive ground investigation survey in the first place, which would then inform the design, help prep the contractors, and make the scheming program run a little bit smoother.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, like the cheapest insurance policy you'd ever get. Oh man, a hundred percent. Yeah. But it's just, it's that change in mindset, isn't it? It's that change in mindset that you're spending money, but you're not getting something tangible. You're not seeing construction progress, but what you, what you're actually seeing is project certainty. You know, you'll see, you'll see a more streamlined program, streamlined costs. And really that's what, that's what the taxpayer and the client want.
00:19:16
Speaker
And what's super interesting, I had this conversation with some folks from a couple of the larger contractors here in Australia recently, in the game of like tendering these projects, if the client hasn't done that ground investigation and the contractor deems that that like uncertainties to their advantage, they'll be happily happy to accept like ambiguity, because they know that they can leverage that, you know, once the contract's won.
00:19:42
Speaker
Yeah, they account for it in the risk pot. So, and I really hope within our industry that there's an opportunity to collaborate far harder and far greater at the outset. So we've got, you see project 13 principles being rolled out, you know, and that's a good opportunity for client-designer contractor to be singing off the same hymn sheet for the contractor to feel involved and for the contractor to have influence into the design. So all of those value engineering opportunities,
00:20:11
Speaker
don't come down the road too late. Those VE ops are being incorporated into the design from the outset. And then maybe, you know, the Project 13 principles, if your KPIs and incentivizations are based around productivity or, you know, the use of MMC or, you know, how many milestones you hit, like legitimate milestones, not fabricated milestones that happen in Crossrail.
00:20:40
Speaker
might drop. Yeah, let's all get a work from PrEP for the big photo opportunity. So Josh, I guess last question for me, changing the tact a little bit.
00:21:00
Speaker
For anyone listening or even in particular, a younger person in their career that's seeing or hearing about Neom and going, oh, this looks like an interesting challenge or something that might be a nice opportunity to do something different.
00:21:15
Speaker
Are there any packages or contracts on the project that are either one or not yet one that you go, like if there was a cool one that I'd recommend to a friend or super interesting one, what do you reckon are the things that you'd be like, these are the super interesting things that you'd want to push someone to do? Good question. I mean, neon, the line is one big, amazing challenge, right? It's diversifying Saudi's economy.
00:21:42
Speaker
So they're less reliant on hydrocarbons and they're diversifying their economy in their country, which is an amazing challenge. It's an amazing opportunity to see that part of the world develop and grow and to help kind of develop and grow that country as well. You've obviously got the big juicy bits of reinforced concrete, the 500 metre high cores, the primary floors,
00:22:12
Speaker
the secondary cause this it's so much kind of, you know, big person, you know, there's a lot of massive plant that's going to have to go really exciting kit that, that needs to, um, that needs to be utilized, uh, to construct me on the line. But I actually think that the living, the, the liveability space within the line itself is going to be the greatest challenge. And if executed, if executed well, then you're having such a big, a big.
00:22:42
Speaker
Um, you know, a big part to play in, in creating the line as it was intended. Yeah. And what I guess on the final people, the people that live there will actually like to see and use and, and, and, uh, experience. Yeah. And I think it's that mismatch, isn't it of, or miss mismatch of livability. It's the workspace. It's the office space. It's the community space. It's the healthcare, the education.
00:23:12
Speaker
the sports facilities, and how all that stuff interacts with one another, and then how you construct it. And the only way it can be constructed is through off-site manufacturing and modern methods of construction. So my advice to any young person would be, I think the UK just released a modern methods of construction HNC, and that's how I started my career. Bit of a hands-on apprenticeship, you get a far greater, more rounded understanding of
00:23:39
Speaker
civil engineering and what you're going to do before you go into the more academic degree. So when you do hit site, you've got a pretty good understanding of it all. And that is the way our industry has to go to address carbon costs, program challenges. So I would say the livability piece in the on the line is a really awesome opportunity and a really great challenge.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. That's cool. And I noticed, giving you a background on HSM Crossroads, that you didn't say the high-speed rail package. Not reading anything into
Conclusion and Farewell
00:24:15
Speaker
that. No, the transportation corridor. Well, the reason why I said the transportation corridor is because it's not just rail, right? That transportation corridor is for pedestrians, it's for vehicles, it's for utilities, it's for rail, so it's
00:24:32
Speaker
transporting anything from point A to point B that can feed the liveability of neon the line.
00:24:41
Speaker
Right. We've absolutely blasted through our time there. I've learned a lesson. Don't try and get in a question between two civil engineers having a conversation. So that was good. Josh, thank you very much for coming on the show. That was great. It's good to hear information on the hot topic from someone who's actually on the ground there. So yeah, thank you very much for joining the podcast today. Cheers, chaps.
00:25:05
Speaker
No problem. Right. Yeah. And that is all we have time for today. So as always, thank you very much for listening.