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The Experience of Adopting New Tech on Construction Projects with an Ex-Engineer
91 Plays2 years ago
This week, Jason is joined by guest host Mike while Carlos is away on paternity leave.
The pair talk to Sam Hanisch, a new hire in the Aphex team about what the typical experience for engineers is when dealing with vendors, how the process of adopting new tech should go as well is what it's like to cross over from being engineer into Sam's new role at Aphex.
Follow Carlos on Linkedin | Follow Jason on Linkedin | Check out Aphex
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Transcript
AFX Cap Sighting and Offsite Podcast Intro
00:00:00
Speaker
The absolute pick. I was walking around the airport in Sydney and I saw a guy walk past the other day with an AFX cap on. And he looked great. No way. No you didn't. Did you see yourself in the mirror? Someone was wearing the AFX cap on. When you ship about 7,000 of them, someone's eventually going to shop wearing them.
00:00:22
Speaker
You're listening to the offsite podcast with Jason and Carlos, where we talk all things construction and technology. Join us for discussions with industry leaders and insights into the latest trends in construction.
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome back to the pod.
Meet the New Co-host: Mike York
00:00:36
Speaker
So first up, I going to introduce a brand new co-host for the offsite podcast. Carlos is taking a couple of weeks off because he is becoming a new dad. So congratulations to Carlos, although slightly in advance when we're recording this. Carlos is going to be off for a couple of episodes while he gets used to never sleeping again, I think for the rest of his life.
00:01:04
Speaker
Um, in his stead, uh, where I'm going to be joined by Mike York, who is the G strategy officer apex and is going to definitely swing the balance of Oz UK, uh, co-host to 100% Australian, uh, co-host of pod Mike welcome, mate.
00:01:23
Speaker
Thanks, Jase. Good to be here. Very big shoes to fill for Carlos, but having a couple of young kids myself, I feel like, yeah, I've come in with the right bit to fill the shoes for a couple of couple of apps.
Guest Introduction: Sam Hanish at Apex
00:01:38
Speaker
Awesome, mate. Thank you very much for joining. And, uh, I thought we'd start with like, what would be a somewhat easy episode. The goal was, um, to get, uh,
00:01:47
Speaker
a really friendly customer of Apex to talk about construction software and how great Apex is and use that as a nice warm-up for your first one of the co-hosts. But I unfortunately couldn't get anyone nice. Does anyone say anything nice? So I thought instead we'd bring on an employee.
00:02:08
Speaker
So I guess today is Sam Hanish. So Sam is a mechanics exec at Apex. He has recently joined the team after many years, like myself in construction as an engineer and a construction manager.
00:02:26
Speaker
Sam, thank you very much for getting up early and joining us today, mate. How are you? Yeah, good. No problem. Happy to be here. I thought when you were doing that intro about a customer, I was like, shit, am I doing a profile here or something like pretending to be a customer? So moment of panic's over. That's good. No, it's good to know that you would be happy to pretend to be a customer just based on that intro if needed.
00:02:53
Speaker
As you said, employee, you know, I just do what's needed. I guess would be super interesting. Just for some context to just start with, like you're at a large contractor here in Oz or a couple over many years, uh, by all reports, uh, from people I've spoken to that worked with you, uh, were really good at your job.
00:03:16
Speaker
And I'd imagine as a result of that, you're paid pretty well in construction. I guess the ultimate question is for context, what made you make the switch?
Why Transition from Construction to Apex?
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, probably a few things. I think most engineers or most people in construction, they can remember a point where they're tossing out whether to maybe do a bit of a career shift. And it's probably most people in most career paths are being
00:03:40
Speaker
sort of 12-13 years in the same stream, you know, going like engineer on site, doing projects, projects, projects, moving up, you know, from engineer towards project management space. So pretty standard engineer profile and
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'm in my early thirties and I've really been looking for some sort of different opportunity. And the thing with it is there's sort of two things. There's always the fear that you move into something completely different and you've got to start again. So it's really hard and that's probably why people don't make the shift. So when this opportunity sort of came up and we had a demo and I really loved the product, it was
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, I could see a path where I could make that transition, but I still had all this experience that I could bring into this role. So that was part of it. And I guess, like you said on the money, it's a bit of a, they call it the golden handcuffs. I'm sure you've heard that expression, but that's the feeling a lot of engineers get as they're moving up into higher ranks. They're not necessarily so happy, but the pay is good. It's actually, it's a great job.
00:04:49
Speaker
You get a lot of new projects, it's very diverse, so it's hard to pass it up. But yeah, I had no kids at this stage, so I'm quite free to make these sort of somewhat risky jumps.
00:05:05
Speaker
I got this, it would have been last year sometime and one of our teams sent me a message saying someone's just written into our like support email or chat function and they sent me through this message that was like this super well written
00:05:22
Speaker
funny, honest, I guess that context that you just gave basically written in, in a message. And I was like, well, I was like, yeah, this, this person can, uh, can communicate super well, is willing to take that risk. And, uh, may I thank you massively for doing it because you're, um, you're doing a great job and thanks for responding. Yeah. Thanks for responding. I was like, there's no way he's going to write back to this going to use this weirdos and emails like that.
00:05:51
Speaker
No, many outreaches with successful responses, mate. I guess you can see from the first few emails I've been doing at AFIX that I probably spent a good hour or two writing that email. Mate, the reason I wanted to have you join this conversation is that
00:06:11
Speaker
Very few people have like sat on both sides of the table.
Tech Sales in Construction: Perception vs Reality
00:06:15
Speaker
It's something that I've experienced and a couple of the team here have, but yeah, that experience of being both the, the in construction, kind of the target of, you know, software and technology vendors, and then like jumping over. I thought it would be a really unique timing and opportunity to talk about exploring that concept from both sides. And I guess on our side, being the like, let's say now that you're on our side of the software,
00:06:40
Speaker
Uh, vendor side, I guess we kind of have this expectation that construction folks, engineers, project managers, planners, whatever the role is to kind of just bombarded with ads for technology. They're getting spammed with app bound emails all the time. They walk around an event. They're getting like crash tackled and mobbed. What's what is.
00:07:00
Speaker
What's your view on that expectation versus reality of what it actually feels like to be, let's say, the target of the software and technology that's everywhere? To be honest, I never...
00:07:13
Speaker
I never had that experience where I felt like I was getting swamped by tech sales or tech products, like the usual sales pitches I'm getting in front of my co-tire or a lot of hire companies or mum and dad plan operators that are trying to get on your site. The actual tech approach wasn't very often and I wonder whether that's because I wasn't going to those sorts of conferences.
00:07:38
Speaker
maybe those sort of targets are sitting up in corporate because i'm sure they're getting bit but from my perspective it wasn't i was never really getting bombarded you know most of the new tech that we tried to proceed with was either stuff we found or it was stuff that came from corporate
00:07:54
Speaker
Okay, it's good to know. So Mike, that means we can really ramp up the ad velocity. It's open season. Yeah, that's great. I work for a lot of sort of tier two companies. So I imagine it's a different story for the guy, you know, the guys and girls sitting in the tier one shoes. You know, with those email extensions, they're probably getting a few more hits.
00:08:18
Speaker
So what's your perception if you, if you, if you just lump in like all sales approaches then that you were getting bombarded with, you know, I won't, I won't shout out. Okay. Again, but there, um, yeah, for all those vendors that are trying to like get onto your project, what's the perception from you in construction when you're getting like that heavy outbound versus maybe seeing them more passively when you've got like emails landing in your inbox or wherever else they're getting to you.
00:08:47
Speaker
Yeah, what's your perception of like those outbound approaches? I think everyone's a human that's sitting there on these projects and we're all very busy. It's pretty easy to sniff just a generic bulk sent out email. So generally, like if you you're getting something, you can tell you can see someone who's written an email or it's a bit more personable. And there's not like infographics from their catalog on there that you're more likely to take a second to read it.
00:09:17
Speaker
And to be honest, there's quite few and far between. Often, as I imagine these companies are trying to get very broad coverage that they're sort of getting a first name email and then just a bulk dump out to any engineer or supervisor they can get in these orgs. So they were usually ones that would get a response. But yeah, few and far between from what I can remember.
00:09:42
Speaker
So you, well, either, either they, either they weren't targeting you in particular, you must've like got off the old subscribe list or, or the like company, um, spam filtering system must've been doing, must've been working overtime or something now. Actually, I didn't know. I remember there was this one guy, um, and he was probably, he's the best, probably the best sales guy or the most dedicated like construction sales guy I ever saw.
00:10:07
Speaker
So he was selling, I won't, you know, obviously name the company, but. Is it co-tire again? Yeah, not co-tire. Um, bought a few things off him in WA for a project. And then this guy would call me every week for about four years. He would check in with me every single week to see what I was doing. To the point that obviously after five, six weeks, it's this guy again, you've got, do not answer saved in your contacts.
00:10:34
Speaker
This guy changed his number like three times through the process. So he'd gone through a year and be like, I'm not getting it. So I need to change my number again. And they just restarted. And I was almost impressed. I was like, you know what? Good on you. Like, you're going that extra yard. But he's definitely on the far scale of spamming your customers. Okay, right. So when you say best sales, you mean like most energetic or? Yeah. Okay, cool.
00:11:04
Speaker
Like hey Sam, yeah so obviously if you're not getting bombarded probably quite as much as we might have thought. That means one, construction's a very lucky industry potentially to start with because every other industry that I've been in it's you are getting harassed.
Karma in Sales: Embracing the Role
00:11:21
Speaker
But I'm interested in terms like how often would you be actually engaging a supplier or a vendor from some kind of outreach approach? Is it
00:11:30
Speaker
Can you kind of count them on your hand or are there ones that are actually getting through and you go, yeah, that's actually useful and I'm interested in doing something. Yeah. So I was pretty bad. Um, I'm probably brought a lot of karma, bad karma on myself, moving to this role, but I like, I could say near zero times that I would engage with sales that would come in.
00:11:50
Speaker
And so I should say, like, there is, there's a lot of sales coming through outreach, but it's not in tech in all other space and construction. There's plenty, plenty of reps coming to the door, coming to the project site to drop in, you know, the drop-in is great. Pastries are welcome.
00:12:08
Speaker
But my classic play was, I know you come and ask for me and they would get ambled straight to the graduate engineer every single day of the week, but there's no way I was ever, unless I knew them, and I knew a couple of them, the side office rocker, they're never getting to me, they're going to the grad engineer.
00:12:24
Speaker
It works pretty well though. That one gets you. I was going to say, it sounds like it's either like a good referral recommendation or an elite level pastry or something like the footy. You got to get up above to get your attention. The hot tip, the pastels and alders. There's one supplier, they're legendary across Melbourne. So for all the suppliers out there getting those pastels and alders. Okay.
00:12:49
Speaker
prepare to be bombarded. Um, do you, um, I guess on the flip side, I guess as a contractor, when I was in the role, uh, in construction, I'd have this view of, uh, like all the salespeople that were like landing in my inbox or the people coming and knocking at the door, getting handled to the graduate engineer that they were kind of like, let's say like snakey, lizardy, slimy, um, very like transactional. Now that you've, uh, now that you've fully adopted the persona
00:13:19
Speaker
How true, how close do you think that is to reality and what's been surprising for you in terms of what it actually looks like? Yeah, like I said, I've brought on a lot of, I haven't brought myself a lot of good karma in my behaviour towards sales reps over the years. I think that, yeah, there is unfairly, there is that sort of
00:13:40
Speaker
you have this this idea of their persona. It's not really it's not really snaky but there's always that undertone of well you know there's obviously a transaction here and I can I can honestly say that sitting on the other side of it now you're just happy to talk to someone like you just so you know you're
00:13:58
Speaker
You don't even care, you don't care about, you're like, you know, I just want to have a conversation and see where you're at because, you know, I might be able to help you. Yeah. And often, you know, you'd never get to that point. Um, you as like onsite, as an engineer, you're like, I'm shutting everything out. Like when I need something, I'll go and get it.
00:14:17
Speaker
Whereas, you know, often there's probably been moments where, you know, I'll be spinning the wheels or as a project, we'll be spinning our wheels on something that someone outside of the org could probably help us with, but we're just not open to that transaction because we, you know, we put those blocks up and we've been doing it for, you know, 12 years.
00:14:35
Speaker
I think one of the things that is was eye opening to me to understand is that like the way most things like if you're being sold something from different vendors or software vendors or technology vendors.
00:14:51
Speaker
The way a lot of it is, let's say like priced, that company isn't like becoming worth a billion dollars from making one sale to one project for, you know, a year or whatever. So the incentive structure is for, well, especially for a lot of software as a service, there's no great incentive for anyone to be like a lizard or snake or a slimy person.
00:15:13
Speaker
to try and quickly transactionally sell a thing to a project. The incentive is to build a relationship that adds value and over time compounds and compounds and compounds. Because yeah, your lives you would see on your side. There's no great amazing
00:15:30
Speaker
trick to like, you know, if you can trick one project into buying some software, if it doesn't, if it doesn't deliver real value for them, there's no, there's no second project. There's no, when those people move to the next project, there's none of that building of long-term relationship.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, to be honest, when I think about the traditional sales in construction, because we're talking about tech, but tech is such a small percentage of what actually hits the project teams. Engineers are actually really bad buyers because we've been ingrained to just knock price down and go through this sort of procurement process where you go out and you have to get three prices and go through this sway of interviews to these poor people just to buy a few thousand dollars worth of stuff off them, whereas
00:16:15
Speaker
supervisors are probably great, you know, on the other side are really good buyers. And they're the ones that you see traditionally set up these really good relationships with, you know, plant suppliers, quarries, other material suppliers, and they're, they're the ones that can see the value in these relationships, because they're the ones who are making phone calls on a Friday trying to get
00:16:35
Speaker
two pieces of plant there on a Monday and leaning on like a favor or you know promises of future work so you know I'd say engineers could take a lot out of age of you know supervisors playbooks as far as you know relationships with people in sales.
00:16:53
Speaker
Yeah, there's a whole interesting study into the buying behaviors of construction industry because of that procurement process. We're so used to buying rebar contracts in a specific way or whatever it is that we buy everything in the same way.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah. And I can think of a ton of projects that, uh, like customers or companies are the customers of, of affects who project like decides to use or purchase our software. And then for the next four months, they go through the, like, we're going to go and ask Monday.com for a quote. We're going to go and ask Oracle for a quote. And then we're going to do a little table of like the pros and the cons of these like different tools. And then the costs.
00:17:39
Speaker
And then, uh, yeah, it's like trying to like square peg, round hole everything into like the, well, this is how we buy everything, um, process.
Trialing New Software: Challenges and Decisions
00:17:47
Speaker
And it's kind of, it's kind of funny to watch, like we have like, you know, as, as you know, we have like, we put our pricing on our website and I know a bunch of companies or projects that will do that assessment process, then they'll come back and say a second round offers of pricing and then it'll go a month ago past best and final offer round.
00:18:08
Speaker
Yeah, the link is still to the website. The link is still to the website. Yeah, it's still there. I mean, you're right. It's not a bad thing, but it's, you know, you pick which, you know, what you're applying to, it's not, it doesn't work for everything.
00:18:23
Speaker
it does work for a vast majority. Yeah, like he said, the technology is like such a tiny bit of what the whole, what construction is actually buying and it probably fits like the vast majority of it. So in terms of, I'd be interested to understand like from your previous experience on projects where those projects have adopted or trialled some software or technology and whether it was you that like brought it in or a colleague that brought it in,
00:18:51
Speaker
Maybe like just as a scene setter, have you ever had like a, let's say a bad experience on a project? I've had a few, to be honest, most of the experiences have been bad. Not bad. It's just not perfect. I think it's one of these things where you're really looking to hit this like super high mark to bring on 10. And then, you know, it might be like 75 or 50% useful. And then at that point, it's, you know, you can't, it's not a part, it's not a past mark thing. It needs to work.
00:19:21
Speaker
you know, for the project or it doesn't. So yeah, I've brought on, I've tried to bring on a few different texts in my time. That's sort of, you know, that's my kink a bit. I quite like to have a look what's out there. I work for a company and they were doing some work with a, you know, this piece of software and I tried to bring it on. It was very powerful, did some really cool stuff that had some help. But the problem, one of the biggest problems I had was getting people to use it. Like I was like, you know,
00:19:50
Speaker
You had to get something set up and at the end of the day, you need engineers where, you know, the people that it was meant for to make their lives easier and they didn't use it. And it came down to their experience using it. It was a bit clunky. It was, you know, it gave them some value, but they also had to do a bit more work to get it, you know, that value out of it. And because it wasn't core to what they do day to day, you know, it was like, how do I lead these horses to the water? Yeah. I can see the value.
00:20:18
Speaker
it really doesn't matter what i see i can't sit there all day and with you know 15 20 engineers to use something because i think it's good and i think that same idea is what the most deployment or most trials of software i've seen is where corporates trying to bring in software because they're usually the ones that are sort of strategizing at a high level or they've got a
00:20:40
Speaker
of business use that they're trying to deploy. It's the same thing though, you know, they'll come out and they'll have this big push and they'll push it on the project manager and at the end of the day, engineers aren't using it. You can only whip them for so long and really you're relying on some sort of social structure within your company. The fact that someone from corporate is selling a PM, who's selling an engineer to do it to make it happen. And if you're at that point, it never works. Just as time goes on, it dissipates out, people stop using it.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, that top down approach definitely like has a high propensity to end new, what we'd call shelfware, like stuff that people buy and it never gets used and sits on the shelf. Mike, do you have a question, mate? Yeah, I, I really love this stuff, particularly when you're reflecting on what it looks like to actually get technology and it drives some value. And so often if I think back to my experience deploying
00:21:35
Speaker
Whether it's a crm or a marketing system or a bigger resource management system so much of that value is unlocked as you said when people actually use it it doesn't matter how good or how powerful it is if people aren't actually using it and so yeah i was interested just to come double click on your experience with you can see the value of something.
00:21:58
Speaker
How did you go about trying to get the buy-in from the other people? Because there's always some inertia to get over before you actually unlock that value. And so yeah, I was just keen to hear a bit more about how did you try and tackle that? I imagine after the first failure or two, you thought about trying to rethink it. What did you learn? Probably didn't learn much out of it except that I was like the corporate with my naive engineer mind that I just go, all right,
00:22:25
Speaker
You're all in my team here. I want to do this because I see the value for this project. So here it is. I present it to you, train you how to use it, and then go. And then you just sit back and two weeks later, why aren't you using it? I told you to use it. And then it's just tumbleweeds.
00:22:46
Speaker
And then you try and bring it in, and then when you start talking to people and they explain it, and then you actually sort of sit in their seat and you're using it and you're like, okay, I can see, our incentives aren't aligned here. I want something out of it, but I'm asking you to do extra work for it. It doesn't make your, this is your role, you have responsibilities. It's not really making, it's not getting you a better outcome for your day to day. So, our incentives are different.
00:23:15
Speaker
But I didn't learn anything out of that, I think, until I sort of sat on the other side here. I just thought, oh, the tech shit. Or, you know, like, it just didn't happen. And then I'll move on and crack on with the project.
00:23:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's so true. It's a lot easier said than done. And I think, yeah, sometimes it takes plenty of those experiences before it actually starts, but you're basically just running a mini top down exercise yourself. Like you've created your own mini head office. This is the way we've decided to do things. Great news guys. Yeah. No, never works. Never works. You've, you've heard me say probably a bunch of times before saying this idea of how like, um,
00:23:54
Speaker
There's all this, there's, there's this conversation in the media around social media where it's like, it's saying that like the users of social media are not the customer. They're the product because it's all about capturing the data and selling it off to people. And I've, I've said a bunch of times internally and.
00:24:11
Speaker
And to people that I think like a lot of construction software is like in a similar boat. The software is designed with the end users, whether it be engineers or supervisors or whatever it is as the product. They're part of the product, not the customer of the product and the process of thinking about what's the behavioral change for them? What's the experience like for entering the information that we need to capture?
00:24:37
Speaker
Uh, you know, did I get any value out of it is all kind of secondary or not even thought about behind. We need to capture this data and I get a report. And whether that report's going to you as like a manager of a team or as a project director is corporate.
00:24:52
Speaker
Those outputs and stuff, they're great. Everyone wants those. But like the, when the rubber hits the road, someone needs to, because construction's a messy non-digital industry like this. There's dirt being thrown around, there's stuff being welded, there's concrete getting poured. And there's very, it's, that's not throwing off a lot of like really structured data that can just go straight into a board.
00:25:17
Speaker
And so there's this layer on top that in order to turn that digital, someone's going to sit there and ends the information. And so often the software jams that behavior to a supervisor or an engineer who are like the busiest people on the project and assumes that they're going to like fundamentally change their behavior so that head office person gets a little chart.
00:25:40
Speaker
That's just not reality. I mean, it's like any new process that happens on a project inevitably goes to, I won't say every time, but let's say 90% of the time falls to the engineer.
Engineers: The Unlikely Software Users?
00:25:55
Speaker
And it's not because we hate engineers, it's just that engineers and supervisors are at the center of what's happening in construction.
00:26:03
Speaker
everyone else who might be able to put that information in as sort of a secondary step to the information like where that data is coming from. So, you know, the engineers at the coal face, if they get someone else for that data, they've got to tell them about it or give them something anyway. So inevitably it falls to the engineer.
00:26:21
Speaker
Yeah, totally. If you were knowing what you know now, and then sort of talking to a younger version of yourself that might have been trying to like do the mini top down deployment of your team where you just tell them, use this piece of software, it's great, I get a chart. Yeah. What would you do? Would you do anything differently?
00:26:40
Speaker
I think corporate tried to do this a bit more, they're probably a bit more experienced at it where you're trialing things a bit more. I think probably arrogantly I thought that I could just go and find solutions to problems that I saw and then implement them, but it's a lot more complex than just this sort of nail and hammer thing where you've got a problem and then you find a tool to
00:27:02
Speaker
You know, to fix that problem. Um, so I think if I, if I was doing it again, you know, you would probably try and roll it out over a longer period and trial it with the actual users and get feedback on it before you try and deploy it. Um, and in that feedback, you're going to get a lot of information around what's good, what's bad. Like, does this help your day? And I think those sorts of questions.
00:27:23
Speaker
inherently are going to answer the question, well, are other people going to use it? Honestly, it comes down to the value profile. You know, does this offer me value? Does this make my day easier? If it doesn't, let's move on and find something else.
00:27:37
Speaker
So Sam, something that you were talking about there, particularly where you're leading to, I guess that concept of trialing and maybe that kind of working a little bit better. If I reflect back to my experience, it feels like there's always this push and pull dynamic where I really want to get something out of it. I've got to take the team on a little bit of the journey though.
00:27:59
Speaker
And so have you had any like either driven them yourself or been a part of some of those trials where it is starting to help kind of unlock some of the little value to exchange for the ask that you're making? I'm just keen to hear if you've had any luck or experience in starting to kind of alleviate just some of that burden of whatever the extra time to change costs people. Yeah. There was one, I wasn't launching it though.
00:28:26
Speaker
From corporate, there was a, it was like a site, site diary type application, maybe doing the right way, doing a couple of project trials and trying to, trying to launch that and just to a select part of each project. Um, you know, just have sort of one engineering stream and supervise the string, looking at it and trialing it, providing feedback. So it was handled very well. Um, but.
00:28:51
Speaker
you sort of get to the point you could see some benefits. And it sort of comes back to my earlier point around this, you know, it's either got to work like the 99% of the crew if it's only works for, you know, 50, 75%, that's great. But you're at this decision where you've got this, like through the site diary, you know, did some great things, but you reach your point as a business and
00:29:14
Speaker
This is the same info that came back from these trials is, you know, as a company, do we reshape our process to fit in with this software? Or is the software going to make the investment to reshape a process to fit with what we do? So, you know, that's where you get to where you're, you're quite happy with what it does.
00:29:33
Speaker
you're fixed with the decision to either jump across and change what you do but nine times out of ten the businesses just aren't going to do that and make that leap for a new piece of software and that's where it falls over.
00:29:46
Speaker
It's super interesting because that conundrum comes up a lot, not so much in what I've seen from our software, but I have seen in talking to customers when they're thinking about adopting technology, this idea that a certain piece of technology that might be used by some of their peers or lots of their peers or whatever,
00:30:10
Speaker
requires a slightly different business process or process on the project to what they typically run. There's that trade off of do we change, do we try and change our behavior to do that sort of thing? That's like, let's say more standardized or do we stick with the way that we do it? Um, sometimes I've seen that lead to like contractors building their own version of that tool, um, around their, around their process.
00:30:34
Speaker
which sometimes can work, but then on the flip side, if that process that they have is like inherently inefficient, they essentially just encode the inefficiency and the software that they build and then lock it in. Yeah.
00:30:49
Speaker
And so is this, I don't envy the folks making these decisions at the contractors because they're kind of, they're kind of damned if they do damned if they don't, if they build it around what they currently do, they're kind of locking in the inefficiency. But if they try to change what they've got this behavioral change problem. And it's been such a huge, it's a huge locking because, you know, it's not a cheap investment to go build these things like you're bringing in some serious people to
00:31:16
Speaker
to build these complex database frameworks around what your business does. And you really, like you know that like you push yourself down this path and maybe you never even had the conversation
Process Reevaluation Before Software Adoption
00:31:27
Speaker
internally. Oh, we really have here with this current process. Like, you know, should we be tidying this up a bit before we go and build this framework around it?
00:31:36
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. The other thing that you said before, which, uh, for those that are listening home, we just took a five minute pause while I tried to remember a question I was going to ask, uh, the, the thing that you mentioned was trialing different tools. And that prompted me to recall again, lots of conversations I have with companies around how they've got all these different tools and, you know, con, you know, people on projects have the tool for X and tool for Y, you know, the bookmark bar is like a hundred different apps.
00:32:05
Speaker
was the experience you know everyone talks about how in construction they're like not connected in many many ways was that the experience for you as you trialled and looked at different tools on a project were any of them connected to each other or was it very like siloed download this upload here
00:32:25
Speaker
Yeah, it was pretty much like you could, there was some cross compatibility where there's a lot of like GIS mapping tools out there, for instance. And so really they're trying to pull the same information, but they're not, neither software has been created to integrate with each other. It's just like hard downloading and uploading, like forcing it between two. I think the problem is that these software, they're trying to answer a specific value proposition. Like they see something,
00:32:53
Speaker
they see a problem that they're trying to solve. You know, they're just about trying to solve that. There's a lot of software out there now where these integrations you can do are pretty, pretty cool. Like there, there's so much data flying around. I think most businesses are now looking at this, like all this data flying out, how we capture it in an efficient way. And that's probably the key, like in an efficient way, because it's really no help to, you know, contractor.
00:33:20
Speaker
Who's got 10 different pieces of software with 10 different they do 10 different things that talk to each other 20% of the way like you don't want to be copying that information across because in the same way that Anything that relies on a person to do an activity that steps gonna fall over Somewhere along the way and you're gonna have the wrong information
00:33:41
Speaker
Yeah. And like the bar for like, for us, for example, in a fix to adopt technology is like, if it doesn't integrate with the other things that we use, it's like almost like not even an option for us. How strongly do you reckon that integration piece, uh, is weighted in the decision process in construction at the moment?
00:34:00
Speaker
At a project level, I don't think they really were really thinking about it. We've got these other things that's on their mind. But at a corporate level, I definitely I get the feeling that they're thinking down that path because, you know, they're not just managing what happens on a job, they're managing a whole business. So how they integrate with either what they do or what they're planning to do is paramount. Yeah, awesome.
00:34:26
Speaker
Last question, hopefully it's a good one. No pressure. The last bit that you mentioned just in terms of that, obviously the difference between project based and you've been on plenty of projects and what the head office is trying to do at a contractor level.
Consistency in Tool Usage Across Projects
00:34:42
Speaker
They're obviously looking to kind of start standardizing and integrating and kind of codifying best practice as they go.
00:34:48
Speaker
Just your experience moving through a few different projects, some with the same contractor and some with a different one, did you find that it was quite similar the stack of kind of tools that were using on each project or was it different and it kind of was solved almost bespoke each time on each project?
00:35:13
Speaker
Most contractors are using a similar set of tools and then there's some fringe tools that they're trying to bring on and you do see a few that come through and companies adopt them company-wide.
00:35:24
Speaker
Fairly similar sets. Yeah, I would say like the the set of tools that I think the reason is that you think of every construction project you've almost got to think of it is like it's only many business like it's it's a job that's going out they get a you know a set of rules that the company's given them as to how they operate.
00:35:43
Speaker
back to sort of a central location but all these projects like you know a lot of them now are joint ventures are these different framework models alliances they create their own businesses there are different locations with different setups different requirements so there's different needs for the projects so a lot of it does stem out of
00:36:01
Speaker
every time a project is set up, what do they specifically need? So the basic tools that, you know, enterprise agreements, that corporate center answer, basic ones, but a lot of the time projects need to go out and answer the questions specific to where they're at and what they need to deliver that project.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah, cool. Mate, we are out of time. So thank you very much for taking the time. I just want to say, like, I think if I talk to, as I talk to projects around Oz UK and around other places, one of the biggest criticisms that I think I hear about technology vendors generally, and they're like sales reps is our
00:36:38
Speaker
The vast majority of them are not from construction, inexperienced, very transactional, and kind of just trying to sell them something and make a commission. And I think your experience, as you've, I guess, demonstrated through this conversation as well, is like wildly different. And so, yeah, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us, and thanks for joining the team, mate. No worries. Thanks. Have a good Saturday, mate. Cheers. Cheers.