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E30: Construction Tech to Watch in 2024
96 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Jason & Carlos discuss some burgeoning technology in construction that they've noticed from the projects they work with and industry news.
Covering Sitemate, Buildots, Speckle and more.
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Transcript
Introduction and Routine
00:00:00
Speaker
Yeah, that was a start. Are you standing up? Yeah. It's like, it's my only steps in the day. If I don't stand up for this podcast, I'm doing no steps for the day. My little things beeping at me. Stand up, sit down. Yeah. Even though you're on a screen, it's like you're looking down at me. It's really like, yeah. You should see my calendar. It says podcast and exercise at the same time.
Episode Introduction: Construction and Tech Focus
00:00:37
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 30 of the Offsite Podcast, where we chat all things construction and technology. My name's Carlos Caballo. And I'm Jason Lanzini. How are you doing today, Carlos? Pretty good, thanks. It's like five degrees in the UK now, so it's cold and horrible and miserable, and you're standing there in the t-shirt, so I'm quite jealous.
00:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, but I do have an air conditioning going because it is kind of the opposite. And today we're going to, we're going to actually do some of the technology bit of construction and technology. Is that right? Talk about some actual tech. Yeah.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, we make a big claim that we talk about both, but I can't remember the last time we did a tech chat. So yeah, we'll bring it back strong. Cool. I'm looking forward to it. On that theme. So today we're going to talk. We spend most of our time talking to projects about how they deliver those projects. One of the benefits of that is we get pretty good insight into the sorts of tools they use, they love, they hate, they're mandated, they trial and everything else.
Key Construction Project Tools
00:01:38
Speaker
So we've got an idea about what is used, what might be popping up. We also like to think that we keep track of the general market anyway. So today we are picking three tools each and sort of pitching the fact that we're going to see maybe more of it next year, or they're going to sort of emerge as a key player in their space. You're skirting around it. You did say it was predictions. We had to make a prediction that we would be held against, didn't you?
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, I guess I held off the word prediction because one of my three is like, it's already doing pretty well. So I kind of piggyback. Yeah, yeah. The big things. Yeah. So Jason, you're up first.
Spotlight on Site Mate
00:02:27
Speaker
Oh, okay. Well, I've picked three. I've gone heavily on Australian-led or base companies.
00:02:38
Speaker
So first one I'll talk about is company that was originally, I think based out of Sydney. Um, the company's called site mate. We might've talked about it before Carlos offline. Um, you can kind of think of it. I think that tagline is something like a no code tool builder specifically for construction, but I guess to.
00:02:58
Speaker
um translate that uh you can think of a kind of like air table but specifically for construction there's like a database you can and you can build tools and applications on top of it so kind of like an easy to use power apps may be another way to think of it if you're in the microsoft ecosystem is this trying to get rid of like the endless like list of spreadsheet trackers and things like that yeah basically anything that's in a spreadsheet or you know
00:03:26
Speaker
I guess you can see a lot of smaller companies that have a lot of stuff living in spreadsheets. They're thinking about moving to a system, but then delete to like a protocol or some things, a lot of money, et cetera. So you could see a sort of having a generic workflow tool builder.
00:03:44
Speaker
fill that gap where you could have a safety documents living like a safety workflow fill out inspection. So you can create a form piece that people fill in the form you can have workflows of approvals that sit on top of it. So you end up with like a form builder and that's populating a database.
00:04:01
Speaker
Why he could do anything. Is there anything about it that's like construction specific? Because in my mind, I'm thinking why are the generic tools that can do all of these things pretty well, not just used? And is it because construction like being pitched something that's for construction or is there like aspects that are pretty
00:04:18
Speaker
like construction specific. There's like a, there'll be a whole marketing story of like the positioning of it, but, and they're like, I think they have a lot of built-in templates that are like, here's your site diary and blood. Here's your, you know, like if you go to like an air table, you're going to get a lot of like, here's how Airbnb do their product development spread using like power apps and things like that.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's just that everything. So they have a lot more domain expertise in construction. The founding team are from construction. And they build tools and I think layer on some of the other controls and field types and stuff that construction specifically need. And they're now pushing towards integration specifically for construction.
00:05:00
Speaker
Cool.
Rise of Buildots
00:05:01
Speaker
So you're not standing start when you pick it up, like you would with an air table or an ocean. It's like, that's what I like about it. Cause I think there's a real clear, clear playbook for them. Like if you can, if you can make it really easy for a company or a project to start building their first tool, whether it's like a site diary or a safety inspection or whatever it is. Once some people get the hang of that, then every other form or tool they build is almost like it's free.
00:05:29
Speaker
because you're paying per user. So you can start to really like stick in a lot of different workflows into this one product. And once you do that, then that customer is super sticky because they've invested so much time building out a set of tools in your product. So I think it's really cool. And how early are they? They're not that low. In the relative to big company, they're early, but they just raised the Series A like I think weeks ago.
00:05:59
Speaker
As we're talking now, there is another seven and a half and they're definitely raised like more than five before that.
00:06:06
Speaker
Um, and they've established a North America office. They've got a team now based out of the UK. Um, and I think starting to put some interesting pieces together. So I think it's, um, yeah, definitely one to watch. So for me next year, I think like this is a prediction for us. I think we're going to see them turn up on our customers more often, but I think that they will, um, I think that there are small companies, like I said, that don't want to make the leap to like a, like a.
00:06:35
Speaker
full stack solution that's expensive. And then even in the bigger contractors, there's so much baggage in making a decision to move from whatever thing that currently doing that it takes so long. I can see projects just building out what they actually need.
00:06:55
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine it's the same as Power BI. People love to customize in every project, every person, everyone wants their own thing. So it gives them that flexibility to adopt, to then grow. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. And every construction software, the problem with it, the problem with so many of them is that they're like, as we were saying previously, it's like Bill's way of doing site diaries or Fred's way of doing it from this project.
00:07:25
Speaker
If you build a whole product around that way, it's very niche, but if you can build a tool builder and maybe you have a template that is Bill's way and you have a template that like, then you suddenly got something that wider groups of people could adopt and stick with. So I think it's really cool. I think they're doing a great job. Yep. So the first pick, what do you got? So my first one is not a small company. I'm going to, I'm going to like,
00:07:56
Speaker
No, no way. I've got, I've got one massive one and I've got one really new and niche one. So I thought they balanced quite well, but the first one they phrase like nearly a hundred million, I think something like that, but build dots. And the reason I picked them is in the last three months, I've heard them mentioned four or four, four or five times from our customers. And the previous year or two years, I hadn't heard of them at all. So I think they are building a bit of momentum, specifically progress tracking.
00:08:13
Speaker
It's a challenge. There's an implement, right?
00:08:25
Speaker
So they like the fact that this device makes its way around site each day and they get progress tracking percentages against tasks, particularly on fit out jobs within construction projects. So you get relatively accurate measures on a daily basis.
00:08:41
Speaker
Now, obviously understanding progress is key for any project, but also with my QS hat on, that's really useful information for payment applications, for flagging issues early. Like if you've got a 10 day task, you're eight days through and you're at 40%, like that's a clear flag that you could jump on a bit early. And I'm sure the investors love it.
00:09:02
Speaker
Is this like a, like a competitor to like an open space or like a hollow builder where there's some like thing on a hat or something on a robot or whatever it is going around doing. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a handheld device to someone does the walk each day.
00:09:18
Speaker
So there's a lot in that space. The reason I picked it is that this specific name keeps popping up at the moment. Like OpenSpace are huge. I think they're just about hitting the evaluation, but I haven't actually come across a customer using it yet. So it's interesting that this one's emerging.
00:09:33
Speaker
Are they doing it for like record capture of photos or is it progress? Is the progress update being, is it being like quantifiably extracted? Yeah, so the progress update is the thing that these customers are saying is the useful set of metrics that they're using every day.
00:09:54
Speaker
for flagging issues, for dealing with subcontractors. And it's just really simple, quite visually easy to read. If you see their application, it's like literally sets a task, progress updates. I don't know how they deal with things on like a fit-out where the measure isn't visible. Like that part, I don't know how you could deal with, because it's got a visually seer, and it compares it to the model winner that says, you're 80% of this floor being fitted out, or whatever that might be.
00:10:23
Speaker
But once you go to services within a roof or things like that, I don't know how they then deal with it because it can only see what it can see. But it's a QS's dream because they can sit in the office and get those progress updates without going out there. Like from when I did some research into this space like months ago, it did feel like a bunch of them were still quite a while away from like accurately extracting progress. Because there's a lot of problems in there, right? You have to extract from an image
00:10:52
Speaker
progress, some sort of like meaningful data set that then is able to be quantified against the model. And then you have to work out with some level of accuracy. What's different or what does that mean? And then you've got to translate that to some sort of schedule activity. Yeah. That's really difficult, which is mega difficult. So I can't, I'm, I'm very skeptical about how far through that.
00:11:19
Speaker
If we think about how we would have done it on sites, it is just indicative. I wouldn't pay a subcontractor based on these because if I walked around site with an engineer to assess a payment application,
00:11:36
Speaker
the actual useful information on the engineer is they're gonna be redoing that or like this is gonna take X amount of time because there's an issue or a fault or there's something to do with quality. So there's a lot of like narrative and context missing from just a scan simply saying you should have done seven meters of bricklaying and you've done six. So yeah, I think it's interesting. It's definitely got a way to go.
00:12:04
Speaker
How much did you say that they raised? I think their last raise was 60 million. Yeah, that's that big cheese. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's not small. That's so cool. Are they based? They're based in from memory. It's like Israel, Tel Aviv, they'll base. Pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah, someone might prove me wrong there. But pretty sure that's from memory. So I don't know. Yeah.
00:12:30
Speaker
Yeah. Um, cool. No, cool. I'm going to go and do something totally different. I'm going to go to an Australian company. You're like an ambassador for the, for the country that I just promoted the rates.
00:12:45
Speaker
someone's got to do it um okay so uh you're a qs or you are a qs right what would you say is the biggest waste of time uh of all the like parts of a qs's job it's made the reaction be a qs's job but we'll just go with this uh line of questions we could just we could fight about whose job it is all day um probably
00:13:08
Speaker
It's NEC contract specific comms. So like writing. Yeah. And I think from early warnings to conversation events
Procure Pro: Enhancing Procurement
00:13:19
Speaker
to. Right. Well, this isn't going to help you with that at all. But what it does do is.
00:13:24
Speaker
So I'm biased because like I love a workflow based systems. Like it really plays well into my OCD where an application takes like something that's kind of like a linear process that has possible variations that make it complicated, that look similar between companies, but then companies customize how, you know, they layer their business logic around how we do this workflow.
00:13:49
Speaker
And one of the most painful workflows I used to hate doing as an engineer and wish there was a system properly for back in, I guess, back in my day was procurement. And so I really like the tools that are trying to build a sort of whole workflow around, around procurement. The one I've picked is Procure Pro because they're based in Brisbane and I'm in Brisbane.
00:14:17
Speaker
And, uh, the guys just today got announced as being on the like list. Um, you know, there's a, um, publication called the Australian financial review. It's kind of like the financial times, but in Australia, uh, they're on the fast 100 list for like fastest growing startups, the ability to take the process of scope of work, going to market, getting vendors responses back, doing a tender assessment, doing the questionnaire.
00:14:45
Speaker
getting that through a certain internal sign-offs and allowing companies to layer in what their limits of authority are, what their tender assessment sign-off process is, what their scope of works are. That whole process was like, back when I was doing it, was just a giant clusterfuck.
00:15:05
Speaker
Like if I was on a project today or I was on running a construction company, I'd be buying something in this space. So I really like it. And what I also really like is, I guess what I am interested to see over the next year is there is some like competition in the market. There's another competitor also from Oz and it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. But I definitely see this workflow living in a bigger platform. And so.
00:15:35
Speaker
When, you know, if they can execute well and get to the right size, I could see for sure they're having a really interesting exit and partnership with the, with the bigger platform, like one of the bigger players. So I really like it. Definitely one to watch for me. Just a few years ago, one of our customers over here, Sandistan was like, um, yeah, we love
00:15:55
Speaker
what you're doing with planning. Oh, can you just build something procurement? And this is what you want you to build. And it was basically driven from a lack of decent procurement tools. They've got this awful government one here. So if you're procuring anything over like a hundred K on a public job, you have to use this terrible app, but no one seems to have really nailed it. So it'd be good to see that sort of take away because it was always a massive unknown.
00:16:17
Speaker
And that's sort of like the sort of government rule. And we know why the government mandates the, you know, the process to make sure that there's like fair tendering and procurement processes and all that, but sticking right in the middle, like right in the middle of the whole process of procurement is like the contractor starts with making a scope work. Then there's like a process and then go to market. And then there's a process. And so when the government says you must do this thing in this tool.
00:16:46
Speaker
uh that we've mandated it really blows up what can be done especially if that tool that they're mandating sat in the middle is like kind of archaic product they don't have like you can't just send them data for an api
00:17:01
Speaker
and then get data back. So it makes it hard in those markets. I don't know. I don't know if the UK is particularly a hard market for this type of software, but definitely in smaller contractors and definitely in other markets, especially when they're not doing government funded projects.
00:17:19
Speaker
I think they're having really good success, and I think it's a no-brainer.
Shape: Simplifying Issue Tracking
00:17:22
Speaker
It's just tricky when you are a contractor that's doing some work that qualifies for this, like, you must do this process. Yeah. I don't mean to put fuel in the fire of hatred towards QS's, but every project that I've been on, we had a procurement department do procurement, didn't actually do it ourselves. Yeah. That's why I said at the start, because I actually don't really know what the QS team do, because everything's always someone else's scope. But yeah.
00:17:48
Speaker
One day I'm going to work it out. Right. So my second tool, I'm going niche. It's not 60 million raised and pushing billion dollar valuations. A few projects have been giving really positive feedback about this recently. The company's called Shape and Shape is part of the sort of laminar
00:18:13
Speaker
company or group or Laminar for anyone listening is a consultancy that operates in the UK and Europe. Lots of planning and project controls professionals deployed on major projects. So they've got a couple of tools and one of them is effectively an issue tracker. It is what it says on the tin. You can sort of log in detailed issues for due dates, ownership, deadlines, photos, supporting information. The feedback from teams are, it's real simple to use. Anyone can just pick it up. It's an app on your mobile.
00:18:41
Speaker
removes the likelihood of relying on WhatsApp and emails and just losing stuff into the ether of stuff recorded on a construction project. They are major, large tier one contractors giving this sort of positive feedback. I think for me, one of the reasons it will actually
00:18:59
Speaker
sort of grow quite well is Laminar seems to be growing at quite a pace. They've got a lot of guys now and they seem to like double every year. They've got like an army of champions actually sat on projects offering this low cost, easy to use tool. So you'd expect them to be able to sort of roll this out quite easily. I guess just to tie it back.
00:19:23
Speaker
What did you do for issue tracking? Well, don't ask me a question. Cause I didn't do it, but, um, the one cause you had no issues with your work. We don't want to know about the issues. Issues are lasting. You want to write down. What is the actual, like, what is the value, like proposition for a contractor and then maybe like, um, the person that's supposed to be doing this issue cause like.
00:19:52
Speaker
If there's a, you know, if I, if I went on to, was on projects last week, right? Walking around the site, uh, area manager sees an issue first thing that, uh, they do find out what's up in the channel for like civil works. What the hell is happening here? Bill sort this out and then the person responds. Yeah. Okay. On it. I'll call this person. So there's like a conversation that happens back and forth.
00:20:19
Speaker
Then it goes back to, Oh, by the way, how do you done this as well? So it's just like a natural conversation. Like, you know, you would use a like teams or email or slack for, so I just can't get my head around. Like if I saw an issue on site, is the first thing I do go to this issue tracker and put it in, does it get solved there? Or is it literally just I'm recording it and then I'm also doing the thing in what's.
00:20:46
Speaker
If you're let's say you're the foreman on site and you spot an issue like it doesn't have to be like an actual snag it could just be an issue to do with like logistics or even as simple as something being untidy. If you're WhatsApp-ing someone saying sort this out ASAP or whatever you might be saying for the picture.
00:21:06
Speaker
You're not going to know it's not done until the next time you walk past that and then blow your lid because it's not been done. And we use Slack, which Slack would be better than WhatsApp because at least it's trackable, traceable, you can tag people and everything else.
00:21:20
Speaker
You'd still lose it in, like, think about how much communication is going on in construction. You still lose it in this mess of stuff. And ultimately, until someone sees it again, that's when it all blows up and someone's going to be pissed because it wasn't actioned. So I could see why it would be handy to be like, there's an issue here. You're going to tag the engineer or the subcontractor or someone saying, sort this out, and the deadline is today or tomorrow for urgent, or maybe next week if it's like a snag or something.
00:21:49
Speaker
So to have that definitive list, which are then knocking off by marking things as complete, I think the OCD side of our brains, that feels quite nice. I don't know if any of the big suites do that. Do you know anyone on a project that does that? I don't know any construction supervisor. Even if we just think of snagging, and I think this is broader than snagging, contractors have these big trackers and spreadsheets.
00:22:16
Speaker
stuff. It's such a manual job to review and check and assign. So I feel like there's a good, it feels sensible and the positive feedback is this is really easy and we're actually keeping on top of these lists and things are being done and actually like we know it's being done rather than stumbling across the issues multiple times. So I feel like it does have a space
00:22:40
Speaker
I think like for me, the ability to have it in a spot and go back and track what's done. Like that's all very positive. I just, I mainly was just stumbling at like, would I, if I saw an issue and I walked past an issue, going to be on the phone idea, um, or like minor issue. I'm going to be on the WhatsApp channel going, Hey, get this sorted here. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's just like when.
00:23:07
Speaker
would I do it? Yeah, maybe the other person to like actually do it because if it's something that's not like right now, like right now you would call because you're not going to log an issue tracker with a due date of now because that's quite aggressive. But if it's something that needs to be done next week, it's nice to have something there with a person in a deadline. So yeah, I think it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, cool. Although interesting, you can probably just build that workflow in site mate. Not that like I'm not doing
00:23:37
Speaker
Anyway, you, you, an angel investor inside me. Um, well, last one is definitely like above my pay grade.
00:23:49
Speaker
I follow this company. I really like their vibe. They have this like really cool base of like power users that are always sharing what they're doing and a great like community of users, which is not easy to do in like a business app.
Speckle: Revolutionizing BIM Data Integration
00:24:06
Speaker
Company's called Speckle and you can think of it as like maybe at like it's simplest like a data connector for design model data.
00:24:15
Speaker
Let's imagine Carlos, you and I are both designers working on a project and you're using Revver and I'm using some other tool and whenever we have to send model data to each other, someone needs to do an export and send it over to the other person. That person has to receive an upload, different from what they had.
00:24:32
Speaker
So there's like a whole version control and sharing information backwards and forwards. So like the first thing that I think they've done is they built a bunch of these plugins that will plug into like a Revit or other tools and allow people to either manually or programmatically sync their data to a cloud environment. And that allows the other person to also sync the data. So you can get a notification that says, you know, there's new data on this model and you can get it to be pulled in and you can work out what the differences are and stuff.
00:25:01
Speaker
So because the design tools are largely a collection of desktop apps, they built a layer which pulls the desktop app data into a cloud environment and allows a nice, easy data exchange between designers. But then because the data is in a cloud environment, they then have all these other things that they can do, which is they built a web viewer where anyone that's not the designer can go and view that model data, see it, get information from it.
00:25:30
Speaker
And then because they've got that and they've got this like set of tools, they can, they built like developer tools. So like an SDK and stuff, kind of like how we embed some visual elements of visual elements in our product that sits on top of some frameworks and stuff that other people have built. And these guys have built some tools that allow other developers to integrate some of their tools into their application.
00:25:57
Speaker
Which kind of would position them to be like this platform where all the design data lives. So like this data exchange hub from desktop applications, but also the portal into it from their own viewer or other people's apps. That would make them like a really interesting substrate for, you know, like they could take a lot of power from like an auto desk.
00:26:23
Speaker
Because Autodesk is trying to do the same thing, but within a proprietary kind of like walled garden. And this is more like an open source BIM, open BIM approach. And again, I see that if they get to the right point, definitely being.
00:26:39
Speaker
of an acquisition target for someone. Does that allow, um, does that allow multiple people on the same project to use different modeling tools? Like if you had one design, I'll spend too many questions. Cause I do want to admit like, again, it is above my pay grade, but my beliefs. So.
00:26:59
Speaker
Because a massive problem must be, I haven't onboarded myself onto a modeling tool, but I'd imagine they're not a quick learner. So if your business invests in one, another business invests in another, and you're both collaborating on the same projects, you can use your own tools for the same data set.
00:27:17
Speaker
Well, I think that happens already, but in order to get around that, they have to export and import from common standards. But then every time you do an update to the model, you've got to manually track the version history. You've got to have a document control that does the upload into ACNX or whatever the system is. Revise it there. Someone on the other end needs to receive it, put it into their environment. This would basically just
00:27:44
Speaker
do that programmatically for you between the, the two people that actually need the data or more people. Oh, good friend George from scans. We're probably getting quite excited about that. We should ask him next time. You know what? He definitely knows a lot more. He should have come in and told us how it works. Is this, you followed them. So you've been reading about them or have you actually seen them to put on any schemes or anything? No, if I follow, like I'm connected with some of the folks online. Cool.
00:28:14
Speaker
Right, my third choice.
00:28:18
Speaker
I haven't actually got a product to pitch here, but that's a space. Sorry? Is it OpenAI? That's not OpenAI. Within the commercial space, there are a couple of tools that seem to be quite prevalent, like Ina and CMR. Generally, commercial tools, they focus on comms. They focus on budgeting and forecasting, things like that. Relatively simple. The tools seem to be getting better from an aesthetic and a function point of view.
00:28:46
Speaker
But for me, the most important part is still missing. On any major construction projects, particularly NEC, which is the big sell, not just capturing what is our final cost.
Improving Cost and Value Reconciliation
00:28:58
Speaker
We're not just capturing upstream value, which is effectively our budget, because that's changing as we get compensation events.
00:29:06
Speaker
But there's something that we do on a monthly basis, or good QSS should do, which is called CVR, Cost and Value Reconciliation. And that is the combination of everything. So what is our upstream budget? How does that tie with our downstream compensation of interest supply chain? And how does that tie in with what we're actually going to spend? And those three things all together show you your profit and loss.
00:29:25
Speaker
And there's no real way to know that without having detailed compensation events in the system with like a range of a risk spread of how much sort of clothes or agree with client and the supply chain. So that's not been done. I know why people, it's quite a difficult one to approach because it's very sort of technical and it's also a product that you're going to have to build and gear towards a certain contract because then you see a very specific in the way they do that.
00:29:50
Speaker
So I can imagine it's not the most tempting thing in the world, but it's such a big issue that I hear from commercial directors from the biggest projects that everything's on spreadsheets and it's an absolute nightmare. Everyone gets to the end of the job. The change is absolutely screwed and they just agree a number and you might lose or win. So I think that's something that we're going to see someone attempt to do, but that's my last bet. Question then, like, because that is, I agree like there's
00:30:17
Speaker
you could, you know, going back to my love of workflows, you could easily see how that would be doable, but it relies on a bunch of like adjacent data.
00:30:30
Speaker
So you kind of need to do that in my mind in the same place that you're in a connected set. An application is either connected to, or is the same thing that you're doing your forecast cost in. Therefore you need to have your, basically all of your costs going into there. And then all of your value going into there. So it does feel like it would be.
00:30:56
Speaker
So it does feel like an ad as well. Yeah. So it does feel a lot like it then needs to be, that's just one like module within a bigger system. I don't know how anyone could break that out without duplicating a lot of the existing. Yeah. But if you look at existing systems, like a, like a PMI or a change from the client will be like a load of commercial like text information and a number.
00:31:24
Speaker
There's no breakdown to that number. You don't build the number in the system. That number relates to a spreadsheet on SharePoint. So this system doesn't actually need to connect into those, whilst the end game should be the fact that it connects into these systems, but it's probably detached from these systems because at the moment, all of this is spreadsheets, so you're not.
00:31:44
Speaker
You're not like halting your use of an application already because they just have the final number. But don't you see that you do like your, you would do the pricing of the variation in the system. You would set, you would then, it would be linked to the instruction coming in. You would have, you would then have the person that doesn't have like these updates that they make. Like I had a meeting with the client, then let it get sent. So it's connected to some sort of like communication service.
00:32:14
Speaker
You'd want that order being logged and like linked kind of like how a CRM works. Yeah. If you imagine you're producing a quote client and as you like pick the PMI number, it's already pulled the cost from all your downstream subby conversation events. So it's actually like linked. So like everything has a story. Well, yeah, that's, yeah, that's going to be like surely never going to happen. But like.
00:32:38
Speaker
What could certainly happen is that you are building as a QS, building up the price for this compensation, but you send it off. Maybe there's a workflow. It goes to the project director to approve it before it gets sent or whatever. Then once it's sent, then a timer is tracking and tells you, right, you've got to send your second letter on this date.
00:32:58
Speaker
That can get sent through the system as well. And then you're scoring, you know, when you have a meeting with them, you come back and log at a meeting score, you know, it's now looking like it's very likely or, you know, and then that could build up to.
00:33:14
Speaker
It'd be fun to build. I just don't know how to break it out of building. You'd easily be tempted to build an entire financial system. You'd have to focus on that core part and not get carried away with, oh, now we can do that. And now we can do that. And then you can't sell it. But for context, I was on one project where there was 2000 upstream
00:33:36
Speaker
conversation events and 25,000 downstream. So it's not a small feat to like keep on top of. That's what QS is doing. I thought, no, don't bash him. Like just let him. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Someone's got to make money off the back of all the mistakes going on. Right. We'll, we'll end it on that. Thank you very much everyone for listening. Thank you.