Construction Management

Construction managers ought to take a step back every once in a while and assess their mission. Building a good product is only part of success – profitability and adding value to clients is perhaps equally important.

Construction Management: A Fresh Look

Construction Management

It can be difficult to grasp the scale and significance of the larger battle when you are hunkered in an isolated trench with bullets flying overhead. Many of us that work in the construction management industry understand this. Still, we ignore the need or fail to take the time to step back from our roles to examine the construction management battlefield. It is a good idea, however, to step out of the trench from time to time and look at construction management from a clearer perspective.

Construction Management Definition

Looking to the fine contributors that built the construction management page at Wikipedia, we can see a general definition. See below.

Construction Management

The definition given above (and this one, this one, and this one) may be adequate for a freshman term paper. But it is general, dry and devoid of the conviction needed to inspire the kind of creative thought that leads to innovation. At least for me. So, I suspect, it isn’t terribly useful for folks in the construction management industry that may be trying to solve problems, win more business, or escape the bullet ridden trenches.

A better way to define construction management is the process of coordinating design, procurement, and construction teams to produce the safest, most reliable, valuable asset for the client while beating schedule and budget.

Construction Management Mission

The construction management description above may sound like a mission or goal of construction management rather than a definition of construction management. It is. You in the construction management industry are incredibly capable, working with your talented teams to build marvelous, utility rich things all the time. You have that down. Rather than resting at that plateau and producing things, it’s time to aim higher and put the client and performance on the front burners. With the client and performance at the center of the mission, construction management professionals will have the mindset that will build a more successful business and brand.

Construction management professionals that take a client centric approach understand that without a client, there would be no project. Moreover, the client centric construction management approach knows that the easiest business to win is repeat business. Since client centric construction management teams understand this, they will go to nearly any length to avoid disappointing the client.

Performance centric construction management overlaps some with the client centric approach, but is more internally focused. Increasing project performance usually means projects are completed faster, with better margins, and higher quality. The performance centric approach drives construction management teams to innovate and progress the industry rather than playing the same ol’ tricks to pad the bottom line. This results in performance centric companies having more longevity, prosperity, and dominance than others.

To further instill the client and performance centric approach to construction management, let’s deconstruct and examine the latter mission/definition laid out earlier in the article through the lenses of the client and the performance centric general contractor.

The first part of the construction management mission is the process of coordinating design, procurement, and construction teams. These are the three pillars of a construction project. Without strength in these three areas, the roof caves in. Without quality engineering, the product is flawed. Without proper procurement, the wrong materials and equipment are bought at the wrong prices and delivered broken to the wrong facility behind schedule. Without proper construction, the material and equipment are assembled poorly. If any of these pillars falter, the project is in serious trouble. Further complicating the process, each of these groups is connected. If Engineering and Procurement don’t coordinate, buyers may purchase too much, too little, or the wrong items altogether. If Engineering and Construction don’t coordinate, the asset is built/assembled incorrectly or in the wrong order. If Procurement and Construction don’t coordinate, material and equipment may arrive late, early, or broken. With this interconnection, coordinating and collaborating effectively is an absolute necessity.

Client centric construction management takes coordination a step further by integrating the client as well. Producing regular reports on progress, submitting designs for approval on schedule in a user friendly format, and being open about progress and stumbling blocks are hallmarks of a client centric construction management plan. Clients appreciate the transparency and involvement as slips, change orders, and overruns can be identified earlier and mitigated before problems become major. This approach pays dividends to the general contractor in the form of client trust and repeat business.

Performance centric construction management seeks to improve the coordination among these groups to prevent the common problems that plague construction managers such as: overruns, engineering rework, procurement delays, change orders, and increased client oversight. Common strategies to achieve this include integrating data to prevent information siloes, hiring engineers who will work closely with procurement and construction, using interface management applications to corral conversations, and creative online bidding tools. These are just a few performance centric strategies to coordinate these teams. There are unlimited tools and strategies and many are quite creative.

The next part of the construction management mission is to produce the safest, most reliable, valuable asset for the client. The key to this portion of the construction management mission is building the most value to the client. Both performance centric and client centric construction management approaches aim to deliver the safest, most reliable asset for the client.

Client centric companies understand that value delivered to the client extends beyond a safe and reliable asset. They deliver value through being trustworthy, transparent, and competent. They strive to be more competent by having the best people, integrating their teams, and leveraging client and supplier expertise. They are transparent by identifying problems, gaps, and unclaimed efficiencies early on and reporting early and often. They are trustworthy by being honest and showing their competency through transparency in everything they do.

Performance centric companies are thorough and efficient in producing the asset. They understand that defined and optimized project processes are the key to efficiency, too. They have strong document control teams armed with good tools. The players in the project have the right information at their fingertips. This means engineers have access to the latest drawings and even superseded drawings, with tools that make it impossible to confuse the two. The information, like drawings and equipment data, flows coherently to procurement and then to construction. Information is processed with defined review and approval workflows. Reporting is consistent, meaningful, and timely. Teams use dedicated communication channels rather than relying on emails and skype. Responsibilities within the project team are well defined. Bids are solicited from competent, approved suppliers and returned in useful formats. Construction teams have materials, equipment, and teams on-site at the correct times. Testing and handover plans are well defined. Operators have handover documentation and operating manuals before operation commences. These are the hallmarks of a performance centric company that will dominate their marketplace.

The final part of the construction management mission is beating schedule and budget. This is terribly important. Nothing is more repulsive to clients than paying contractors that knowingly underbid the project only to recoup through “unforeseen” change orders. That is a dying business model. Client centric companies reject that model and understand that it destroys value to the client, along with their own reputation. On the other side of the coin, clients are increasingly aware of and searching for client centric companies, and are rewarding them with more business. As the industry advances and clients demand tighter budgets, schedules, and more transparency the client centric companies and performance centric companies will continue to win.

If you are interested in implementing a more client centric or performance centric approach to construction management, I encourage you to reach out to us at info@projectools.com or fill in the form below.

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AEC Software Guide

The right AEC Software helps architecture engineering and construction teams coordinate and collaborate more effectively. Finding the right AEC software isn’t always easy, though.

AEC Software Guide

We’re going to address the question, “Are your buyers looking at AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) software making the ten critical demands that software buyers should be making?”

Software market is usually driven by legitimate, pressing business problems that need to be solved, things like schedule slippage, cost growth, preventable stoppages in production. These pressing problems may seem huge and so pressing that it might tempt you to settle for applications that look good and just don’t deliver. You want to be the hero. In order to be the hero you got to make the ten critical demands that every software buyer should be making when shopping the Architecture, Engineering Construction and Project Portfolio Management software space.

Let’s just take a look at what happens when the critical demands aren’t made during an AEC software purchase. You end up with unhappy users because you purchase software that doesn’t eventually work. That’s a huge bummer for the folks who use it. When they communicate that back to you or around the company and so forth, that’s going to make an unhappy you.

Another thing that happens when you don’t make the critical demands is that there’s low adoption or no adoption of your software purchase. Buying an application that users don’t need or don’t know how to use is a waste of money. If they don’t use it, you’re totally missing the boat, and it was a pointless AEC Software purchase.

Another thing that happens when you don’t make the critical demands is the cost escalates or inflates and it ends up blowing your budget. That makes you look bad, puts you on the defense and it attracts scrutiny from executives, management, also maybe clients. You don’t know who a bad AEC software purchase is going to upset. You want to avoid that altogether by making the right demands when you’re shopping for software.

Another one is implementation delays. Your team isn’t sold on the value of the AEC application that you’re buying. They’re not going to make a lot of time to help with the implementation. Another thing you want to demand is that your software provider cares about your success because if they don’t care about your success your schedule’s on the back burner. You got to make a demand that they play your game on your timeline. We have this guy over here in the corner and he’s saying, “Thousands of dollars, countless hours to implement and train, and I’m still running spread sheets in parallel.” That is a very common frustration with the folks that buy AEC software to use themselves. It is also very common for folks that have AEC software purchased for them, is that the applications either don’t work or they take so long to truly, fully implement that they have to use two systems at one time. That’s terribly frustrating. It’s a huge waste of time, effort, resources and the moral portion of it, like having to use a spreadsheet and, for instance, a document management assistant to manage progress and status. That’s just demoralizing.

I’m going to give you guys the ten critical demands to make from AEC software companies and yourselves and your teams that will ensure that your AEC software purchase is a good one and that your implementation is successful.

The first demand that you need to make is demanding that person buying your AEC software whether it’s you or somebody else in your company is that they focus on value rather than price. At the end of the day who cares how cheap it is if it doesn’t work? You only deal with price once. You have to deal with poor quality AEC software or poor quality service every single day. Next, take a look at what’s most important, is what your business can gain from using AEC software tools. Rather than gaining a tool just to say you have a tool. That’s really not the right way to go. Focus on value that it’s going to add, business problems that you’re going to solve rather than price. You’ll be on your way to making the right demands from your AEC software buyers.

The second thing you got to do is demand due diligence. Buying a new piece of critical AEC software is a big deal. It changes the way you do business. Properly vetting your software partner is key, just as you properly vet any employee or any key employee or any key supplier or partner, etc. In this vetting process you need to demand that your software provider proves that they have financial viability, that they’re going to be around in ten years, and that they have innovative ability, that they’re going to be ahead of the competition, and really give you the tools that you need to execute your AEC flawlessly every time from design and engineering through construction and handover. You want to make sure they have integrity. There’s nothing worse than doing a software deal and then finding out that they’re a bunch of grease balls. Luckily this doesn’t happen very often. We live in a very social age, so when you do encounter greasy people or greasy people are out there word gets around. Vetting people is great and definitely something you should demand your AEC software buyers do.

The third thing to do is demand transparency. Demand that there are no hidden costs in your AEC software purchase. You need to demand that your teams read the service agreement. Demand from yourself that you read the service agreement. Demand that you call the references and don’t be afraid to ask about cost, and unexpected cost, and how they felt about any cost escalations. What was the cause of those and what happened? How did the software company handle it? The third thing is ask your sales person. It’s their job to give you an accurate quote and make you aware of all the possible costs. Demand that they give you an accurate quote and demand that they give you something they can stand by not just for this year but for next year and the year after, too.

The fourth thing is to demand a roadmap or a growth plan. If an AEC application works like you need it to you’ll be solving real problems and creating real value for your company. Chances are you’re going to want to roll it out to more divisions or Engineering and construction projects company-wide, perhaps. To avoid unexpected jumps in price, you want to make sure to get pricing for your plausible growth scenarios from years two through five, at least. Definitely understand the size of your company and have your rep give you scenarios. Demand that they’ll stand by them.

The fifth thing is demand that your AEC software buyers or yourself look past cool technology and features. This isn’t really intuitive, but solving business problems is way more important than any one feature, platform or benefit. You don’t want this to be you. Always have problems and objectives in mind as your searching for AEC software. Don’t get distracted by bells, whistles and unproven technology. This seems like a simple concept, but we hear this mistake time and time again. If you’re buying an AEC application based on promises of what could be, you’re really setting yourself up to fail. Make sure it’s something that’s proven in your industry. If you’re buying the idea of an application you’re also setting yourself up to fail. If you can’t see the software demonstrating core AEC tasks before you buy it, it’s probably a bad move. Demand that the AEC software you’re buying is more than an idea, and that it’s more than a promise, and that they show you how to solve your business problems.

The sixth thing is demand success on day one. A blank slate can sound really nice, but not in the context of business critical software. Extensive customization and configuration is very expensive and it’s time consuming, and slow to be delivered. If an application does have the key functionality, go with it. The customization and configuration route, at the end of the day, is going to spell huge expense, slow delivery, and anguish and a lot of uncertainty. You have your expectations versus the spec versus the end product. There are all kinds of cartoons depict this but I settled with this guy. He’s unique, man. Don’t play the customization game and demand that whoever is in charge of buying your software doesn’t make that gamble with business critical AEC software or any software for that matter.

The seventh thing is demand industry experience. There are generic AEC software offerings out on the market. They might be cheaper, they might be prettier, they might be more flexible, but they’re also oftentimes unproven in your industry, difficult to configure, and then time consuming to configure and get working just who you need it. When you demand an industry specific or vertical centric piece of software, or experience that supports that, it might be more expensive. It’s going to be specialized to what you need. The people that work at that software company are going to be able to act as consultants to give you the true best practices. This is a huge value that is often overlooked. It is tragic that it is, but unfortunately so. If the AEC software company has walked down the same road before they’re going know how to navigate the turns and the bumps in the road. You’ll have smoother implementations, quicker implementations and they’re going to speak your language – the language of the AEC industry.

The eighth thing is demand the ability to integrate. The inability or unwillingness to integrate AEC applications is really bad. You need to demand this from your AEC software provider. It’s not 1998. Your applications do need to work together. If they don’t work together today, that might be okay. The possibility of that happening, of that integration, needs to be planned for down the road. You also need to ask about the integrations from your sales rep and to get a good track record and get references and get quotes for these integrations. You don’t want an integration where they say, “Oh yeah, that’s easy. We can do that later,” to actually be a huge deal that takes forever and is a lot of effort and costs a ton of money. Demand that they commit to a timeline, a scope and a price before you settle on an AEC software provider. It’s ok to get your IT group involved in this conversation to vet the software company’s claims.

The ninth thing is demanding realistic training and implementation plans. Can your team leverage new AEC tools without adequate training? Probably not. Is the software partner willing and able to thoroughly map out and deliver meaningful AEC-focused training and implementation that’s going to make your power users and your casual users successful? Do they offer the trainer approach so your on-staff experts can bring your other team members up to speed? These are all things to think about. Since training is key, you need to demand effective training from your software partner, and demand realistic training and implementation plans. If they’re wishy-washy about on-site versus remote and on-site implementation’s important to you, which it should be because they’re more successful, demand that they’re going to be there because you want your team to be trained and ready to go in your application.

Last critical demand we need to think about here is demanding a culture from your company and your software company that embraces change. Understand that change is hard for some people. Not everybody on the team wants new applications and efficiency, visibility, and accountability. If you can communicate effectively about a new application and really articulate what you’re going to get out of it in terms of efficiency, visibility and accountability, those are really hard things for people to argue against. That is a way that you can demand that your company embraces the change that’s coming to them with new AEC software. Nothing rallies your team around a new application like strong executive support. Make sure your executive team is there behind you demanding that your culture shifts along with your new tools to bring increased efficiency, visibility and accountability and you’ll have an easier time with it.

Thanks for joining us today. If you ever want to talk software, if you’re buying any kind of software and you want to chat about it and what to look for or run it by us, whether it’s software that competes with us or doesn’t compete with us, we are always open to having a conversation about software. Just drop us a line at info@projectools.com.

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Master Document Management

Document management mastery is more important than people realize. It can make the difference between being a good company or a great company, so its time to gain a new level of document management mastery.

Master Document Management

Obviously Document Management means a lot of things to a lot of different industries, but there are core principals that are widely overlooked and executed poorly.

To achieve a level of mastery, join to see what the brightest minds in the industry are doing that set their careers, companies, and clients apart.

Document Management Mastery

Welcome to ProjecTools Document Management Mastery. Today we’re going to talk about Document Management Mastery. It is important to note that when you’re running a project and doing document management for a project, the key thing is to have all of your players working in the same system. If your players aren’t working in the same system, it’s all going to break down. There’s really no way to manage the interface of documents between the different groups, the clients, partners, subcontractors, et cetera. There’s no way to time stamp things and report on late action and things like that. Really, the goal with document management in this day and age is to pull all of your players into one system, pull all of your documents into one system, all of your communication into one system, and run it through project specific workflows and data type specific workflows that are going to work for your project, that’s going to develop your documents in the best, most coherent way, and that’s going to allow you to report on your progress, and in the most coherent and effective way. That, my friends, is the essence of document management mastery.

With that in mind, kind of setting the context for Document Management Mastery, let’s get into it.

The first thing for Document Management Mastery is mastering numbering. There are two types here, internal and client numbering. Let’s start with internal. Inconsistent numbering for document management, it really confuses your internal teams and it’s going to end up making you feel like a dunce, because people are going to ask you questions all the time. They’re going to ask you to re-do things which is okay, I guess, it’s your job, but there’s a better way. With consistent numbering, your teams really feel like they have a handle on what’s going on. They can interface with the data much better. Another thing to think about is making your document numbering simple. I’ve seen client implementations where document numbering levels had 10 or 12 levels. That’s pretty tricky, a little fancy, and ultimately, it was confusing and probably a little unnecessary. Try and keep it as simple as possible, because being too tricky or fancy can cause confusion among your team and end up hurting productivity.

The second aspect to numbering mastery is client numbering. You want to accommodate your clients when they come into your system to interface with documents for the project. You want to accommodate then by giving them the option to view and search using the document numbering system that they’re familiar with. Obviously, when preparing reports, you want to report back to those clients using their document numbering formats. ProjecTools has a really cool portion of the application, actually it’s just a configuration thing, that when you build your document number or input your document numbers, you can link it to your clients document numbers so the application will actually translate that into the client document numbers. I’ll show you a little bit about that later, and how it comes into play when I show you how to do all of these Document Management Mastery techniques in ProjecTools application.

Let’s move on. The second thing in document management mastery is mastering document distribution. You’ve really got to stop with the file servers already. It kind of makes you look JV (Junior Varsity) when you have clients or partners or subs remote into your servers and look through file structures, and try and discern what the latest revision is and so forth. It’s just not a great way to do things. There’s not really the right amount of security, permissions. There are permissions, but generally, it’s hard to manage, and you end up being too lax, or way too strict. It just gets confusing on its own. The second thing with distribution is do online distributions. We talk to folks sometimes who are still working with couriers and using emails to distribute their project documents for review and approval, and so forth. That’s just not the right way to do things. It’s super old school, that’s all untraceable, and it’s pretty unsecure. Anybody can forward on an email to anybody, so once you put it out there via email, it’s just out there. The forward button is too easy to click – especially if you have sensitive information or trade secrets.

The third thing to really think about when it comes to document distribution, to master it, is self service. You want to offer self service to your teams, your partners, your clients, your JV (joint venture) partners, and your subs, and you want them to be able to go into your application and view documents that they have permission to see. To master document distribution, you shouldn’t be using file transfer protocols or like I said earlier, emails and worse case scenario, couriers, to distribute your documentation.

The third thing that contributes to Document Management Mastery is mastering the markup interview process. What we talked about already is you’ve gotten all of your documents into one system, you’ve integrated all of your players into one system, so they’re all interfacing with the documents, using document numbering formats that they’re familiar with.

Now, getting your teams to interact with the data, that’s a different beast, so to achieve document management mastery you have to master markups and reviews. How you do that is let your tech affirmative folks do online reviews. Printing, marking up and scanning, that sounds like a pain in the neck to me, because I like to do mine with paper, maybe. Some folks, they do like to do it online, so you’ve got to make that available to them, and online markup review tools are really great for that, but again, at the same time, you want to accommodate people. By mastering your document management, you’re accommodating. You’ve got to accommodate those paper pushers, too, so you’ve got to allow them, the old school guys, to print out their paper, mark it up with a red pen, and scan it back in and upload it. That’s okay, as long as the process is seamless for the next person down the line.

Like I said, I’m going to show you how to do a lot of this stuff in the ProjecTools application after we run through what Document Management Mastery really is. The third thing with markups and reviews is you’ve got to have history. You’ve got to have a systematical way to collect each reviewers markups, so if there’s no history of how a document came to be what it is, it’s kind of just like, “Why did we do all those reviews and approvals through this awesome system that’s going to tell us whether it’s late?” You’ve got to have that history. It gives the documents a great context, and a path, so to speak, breadcrumbs so to speak, of how a document got to be where it is. The final thing with markups and reviews is clear and consistent dispositions.

A lot of times you’re going to encounter things like Carl walking down the hallway and he hands a stack of paper off and says, “Hey, this all looks good to me,” and the document controller is like, “Okay, great. Carl just handed me the stack of papers and says it looks good, but there’s red marks all over it. What does this mean?” That’s not a clear disposition. A clear disposition is “rejected,” “approved,” “approved as noted,” and things like that. When a task in ProjecTools is submitted back to the document controller, there are clear and consistent dispositions and they mean things. Document controllers, they know what they need to do with that document or that set of documents based on the dispositions. The next thing to think about when it comes to Document Management Mastery is integrations. Document control is not a silo, because you deal with engineering, you deal with your buyers, you deal with your cost control folks, and then on the construction side, you deal with your construction team, your inspections team, commissioning team and all that.

Even with a procurement, you have inspectors, too. You have your PO inspectors that go on site and they need to have the engineering and technical documents and the latest revision of those documents, mind you, to go and perform their inspections. When it comes to procurement, you want to make sure that your suppliers and vendors, they have the latest REV, because if they’re building from the wrong revision, that could cost you some serious cash. Then, cost control, when they’re preparing their progress reports, it really is a pain for the cost controllers to go and either verbally ask the document controllers or whoever’s managing document control to give them the status or progress for a particular set of documents.

If that link is automated, and the progress for a document or a set of documents flows back to a WBS item and as the document progresses through a system, that progress is logged automatically back to the cost control, they are going to absolutely love you, because you’re automating a process for them that typically was, shoot a bunch of emails back and forth, try and translate each others spreadsheet. It just removes the whole mess out of it. The last thing with masterful integrations is inspections. I kind of touched on this, but your inspectors definitely need the right revision. Otherwise, in the case of PO inspectors, they’re sitting idle. They might be in Korea, and waiting for a thumb drive to arrive in the mail with the latest document revisions, so they have to wait for that, and they’re sitting idle, they’re wasting much money. Finally, inspectors, they need an online self service, so nothing breeds frustration like I said, having a flash drive in the mail.

If your inspectors can log into an application, and quickly segment to the project they need, to the system they need, to the subsystem, et cetera, and find the engineering technical documents, they’re going to be very happy. Last thing I’m going to touch on is masterful reporting. As you can imagine, consistency and client friendliness are pretty key here. Consistency one, you want to deliver consistently formatted reports. Otherwise it looks like you’re cobbling your reports together, and how much faith is your clients or your executives going to put in a weekly report that looks different every time? You don’t want that.

Then, there’s consistency part two. This is more like rather than the look of the report, it’s more the content. When you’re pulling a report from a central document database to report on progress or status and say your cost controllers are pulling the same progress report, because they’re going to build for some earned value, if the document controllers report and the cost controllers report are reporting on the same progress for the same set of documents or something like that, and they don’t jive, they don’t match up, that’s going to have your client asking you some questions that might be pretty uncomfortable to answer. The third thing here is client friendliness. You want to report using your clients document numbering formats, just period. You should do it, because it’s really going to impress your client and you’re going to spend less time on the phone explaining to them, “Oh, yeah. Well, this is how we do things,” and then that’s never any fun.

Then, they’re going to ask you to put the report under Excel, and manipulate it to look like something they want. If you can automate that process, you’re going to save yourself a lot of headaches, and you’re really going to impress your clients. Okay. Now that we’ve gone through the basic tenants of Document Management Mastery, I’m going to jump into the application here, and I’m going to show you how we do some of the stuff. As we go through this, I’m going to be hitting on the main things that I talked about, which is mastering numbering, mastering distribution, mastering markups and reviews, and integrations and reporting. First things first, let’s jump into the document distribution matrix, and this is really the end users document register. In here, I have all of the documents that I have permission to see, and I’ll show you what I can do with this.

The first thing I want to do is I want to filter for a project. Let’s go to the demo project. When I search, I can see that all of these documents start with demo, and that’s how we do our numbering so that’s how I can tell. The next thing I want to do is show you guys that this is how we do our document numbering, demo A, that’s our levels. If we had a joint venture or partner that was in here, or even like a very big subcontractor that had a lot of stuff to do on this project, we might include their document number in here, as well, under our other document. I click this radio button up in here, and I can see the other document number.

Here is the big money right here, the client document number. You click the client document number radio button, and the clients, when you have them log into ProjecTools to access their files, they might not be real happy about it, but when you tell them how easy it is, they just click on the distribution matrix, they click on the client document number, and then they can search and filter using all of their familiar terms, they’re going to be pretty happy about it. That’s a huge point of value for integrating your teams by being able to speak their language, so to speak. The next thing I want to do is go over here to my document number. We’ll filter for PI. I filter for PI which is my P&IDs for the project demo, and I got to it pretty quickly, and you saw me toggle up here with my revisions. I can either tell the applications to show me the latest revision, or all the revisions.

I clicked on all the revisions because I want to show you a couple things. We can see that we have an A and a B revision. Under the A rev, I can see the standard file which is this link here. It’s going to open it up in ProjecTools viewer. PDF version, and if I click on this other one down here, it’s going to open up the WDG in ProjecTools viewer. I can also see for that rev A, I can see all of the reviewer comments and markups. I can see that scanned markup for the old school guy who printed it out and uploaded the document into the system. I can see all kinds of stuff, and it’s really good to just have that context as I move forward. For the last rev, I can also view the PDF or the DWG. I can even download it. You notice, I can’t download it over here. That’s because we don’t want people downloading superseded revisions. We want people to have the latest revision so there’s no confusion. We make it really easy.

We can also see the routing and transmittal history. Had this document been routed for a review approval or transmitted for review and approval, that would show up here. The next thing I want to show is basically the integration. This is really an overview of the distribution matrix and what you can do with it. What I’ve shown you so far is pretty engineering centric, so let’s clear my filters. We’ll go back and we’ll look at the demo project again, but instead of filtering for text to document number, let’s look up documents associated to a PO. Here I can see I have four documents associated with this PO. Your procurement manager, they can come in here and segment this by PO and see where the revisions are at. It’s just a great way to segment and accommodate different people on your team that need to access engineering technical documents.

The third level of integration I want to show you about, I talked about inspectors a lot, so let’s take a look at what they would see. Again, filter by project, and they could go down to a system here, and we’ll choose system 14, and you can see that my distribution matrix register went from 130 documents down to 20, and now I can filter this list down even further to see all the piping ISO’s, and print those out. As an inspector, I probably want to print those out and have them with me in the field when I’m doing my inspections. This is going to make it a lot easier for the self service, so your inspectors aren’t going to be sitting idle, waiting for documents to be delivered to them. They can have some self service, print them out, or load them onto their tablet, and go out in the field and do their inspections.

That’s about enough of the document distribution matrix. Now we’re back here at the home, this is what all the users see as soon as they login at the ProjecTools website. It’s all web based, so we were in the document distribution matrix, and now we’re going to go to incomplete tasks. Let’s take a look at this ETR review, engineering technical review is what that stands for. As soon as I open this up, I see some pretty important things that jump out at me. I see there’s a due date, I see a description, I see who the originator was for this particular task, and I see some notes. “Please review these P&IDs included and submit the task.” As a user that’s involved in this review and approval process, here I am down here, I’m manager DM, and I can see that there are some other reviewers here on this particular review and approval.

There’s John Doe, and Mark, and I can see what they’ve been doing. I can see that Mark’s actually looked at this, he’s acknowledged this. This task review, these three documents. Down here, we can actually see the documents that we have to be reviewed. Here are the documents that need to be reviewed. We can see that we have the three document numbering formats here. We have mine for the top, and then we have our other document in the middle, and then our client down at the bottom. This is pretty convenient for the folks that might not be as familiar with your document numbering system, so you can accommodate them. Let’s open up this document and really see what ProjecTools online markups and reviews do.

I can see that somebody’s been in here and they’ve made some markups. I can see that Mark Isfeld has been in here and he’s saying that these tags aren’t really matched up over here, and it’s missing some items. Then, I can see that the PM, project manager, he took a look at this and said, “Okay. Well, here are the missing items. The EA 101, FWD 102 and so forth. The item ID’s didn’t appear, so somebody needs to fix that.” I can also see the review history over here. Who said what about the document and what their disposition was. Mark said, “This needs to be revised and resubmitted.” The PM manager says, “It’s approved as noted. Hey, I added the missing items. I’ll get these into the new rev, but let’s move this ahead.” Down here, after seeing the context of the document, and what these other reviewers have done in real time, I can make my disposition as well and say, “Moving on.”

If I added markups in here, I can draw arrows and so forth. The next person to open it up, they’ll be able to see what I added as soon as I close this thing. Seriously. It’s all pretty much real time, and it’s very convenient for your users to do online reviews and approvals, which keeps them out of a paper process, and really automates the flow of information for reviewer to reviewer to reviewer, and then compiles all of it in a nice, neat interactive document for the approver to see what everybody said about it and make a decision.

Okay, and so I have three documents here. I’d be able to do the same thing for all three documents, add any comments, general comments about the task here, and then if I was old school and wanted to do my markups with a pen, I’d be able to download the documents, print them out, and then upload them right here into the “Add files” area.” Then, finally, as I talked about earlier with the dispositions, I’d add my disposition and submit it back to the document controller or submit it and move it on to the next person in the task. That’s really what I wanted to show you about tasks and distributions in reviews and approvals. We accommodated their numbering, and we made the distribution very easy. We totally removed couriers and emails, and FTPs, and giving people access to our folder structures.

We removed all of that, and packaged our tasks up into nice, neat trackable tasks that can be completed online, which really facilitates reporting, which is a great segue into reporting. Let’s get into some reports here. Here we are, we’re kind of in the backend here where the document controllers will hang out. Let’s take a look at this document progress report. We’ll take a look at level four report, and we’ll report on this milestone chain. Here’s the progress report for my P&IDs for the project that we were looking at earlier. We can see that all of them have reached milestone one and four of them have reached milestone two, and we see the percent completes here that really, the milestone chain is how we track the percent complete so we can bill for earned value.

These can be linked to cost control, as well, so we don’t have to print this report out and manually hand it to our cost control group or email it to them. It’ll actually flow over there on its own, but in this report, we can see the list of documents, what’s been completed, what’s behind, and then we can see plan dates going forward. Some of these aren’t up to date, but it really gives you an idea of how ProjecTools can help your document controllers and your project managers keep the document management process in control, rather than just guessing or spending a whole tonne of time digging through spreadsheets and file folders, and trying to make heads or tails of basically an uncontrolled process, which document control has largely been for the last 20 years.

We pretty much solved this and allowed you to track your progress for your documents, and keep the process in control. There’s one other one I wanted to show you. Let’s go over to our supplier data area in the reports, and you can see, there’s just a whole host of reports here. We have over 900 reports on ProjecTools application, and if you count the filtering options on each of them, you’re looking at thousands and thousands of reporting options. There’s one I wanted to show you here, the late action reports with routings. Here are routings that have gone out to our suppliers, documents that have been routed to suppliers, that we’re waiting for, that are behind schedule.

We have these for all types of data in the application, all types of tasks, these late action reports, so if stuff does fall behind, you can notice it elsewhere in your reports, and then you can drill down into who’s holding up the process, and maybe go hold their feet to the fire, or let them know that they need to get moving, because they’re holding up your process. Anyway, that’s all I wanted to show you guys today. I hope you enjoyed ProjecTools Document Management Mastery demo. This is really just an introduction to ProjecTools Document Management Mastery. If you want to masters level course in this, that’s really where our implementation team comes in. After you implement ProjecTools in your projects, you will have a complete understanding of how to master the document control process for whatever project you’re running.

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5 Skills That Make an Excellent Document Control Hire

5 Skills That Make an Excellent Document Control Hire

For engineering-centric companies, document control is massively important. Poor execution can lead to delays, confusion, frustration or even worse angry clients or building something from the wrong revision. This is why you need to hire the right team that can flawlessly handle document management in this online, big data era.

Obviously, there is more to finding the right document controllers than these 5 hard skills, but understanding these skills allows interviewers (and candidates) to zero in on the skills that make all the difference.

5 Skills That Make an Excellent Document Control Hire

Thank you for joining us to talk about the 5 essential skills that make a great document control hire. This discussion is aimed at folks hiring document controllers and should be useful for document controllers as well. I want to hit on the 5 key skills that interviewers need to understand and be able to have a conversation about to really determine if candidates are going to be a bust, simply good, or a freaking superstar.

For document controllers, this is a good look for you in what hard skills interviewers should be focusing on, and by joining us today, you’ll be able to articulate to your future employers or your current employers, whatever the case may be, the skills that you do have and the vision that you do have and what you bring to the table so you can really frame the conversation and articulate your value in a way that’s going to get you hired, promoted or even kept onboard if your industry tanks.

First, it’s important to know what’s at stake with a document control hire, especially for a small company with only 1 or 2 document controllers, but still relevant for even huge companies. The first step in this is acknowledging that bad document management hires hurt pretty bad. Let’s take a deeper look into this here. With a bad hire, you risk perpetual confusion that affects your commercial teams, your engineering teams, your partners, your subs, and most importantly, you clients and your executives.

If there’s numbering confusion for your different teams, they’re not going to know how to access the documents that they need. They could end up accessing the wrong revision and confusing that with the latest revision, and they could have trouble accessing and locating the documents themselves. The same thing with reporting on progress and status, if there’s confusion about any of these, numbering, revision, progress or where the documents are located, the reporting on those, on the progress and status, is going to come out of a place of confusion, and the reports are going to be wrong or incorrect or late or what have you.

Second thing that you got to acknowledge is that if you hire bad document controllers, it can be a complete waste of money. If your document controllers are bad or difficult to work with, folks just plain old won’t work with them. They’ll continue to do their own thing and really just hope for the best. In this case, which you don’t want to do, you’ve hired somebody for absolutely nothing.

The third way that bad document management hires hurt is that clients notice. Document control is a big interface point between your company and your clients or your company and your important partners, so if that interface is lacking or cumbersome or not accommodating or just plain old not a good experience, clients are going to notice and it’s going to reflect poorly on your company.

There’s good news to this though. There are tons of great document controllers out there. It’s just on the hiring managers and the interview team to know how to find them and tease the skills out of the candidates. Let’s take a look at the 5 skills that the document management hiring team needs to look for.

The first one is numbering and nomenclature skills. This can be broken down into two parts, internal numbering and client numbering. With internal numbering, if your numbering is inconsistent or numbering confuses your teams, it leads to duplicated effort, rework and spotty access for other team members. In the same vein here, being too tricky or fancy can cause confusion among your team. We worked with folks who really wanted to think out of the box their document numbering systems and transmittal numbering and so forth, and they went with it for a while, but they found that it just added to the confusion and didn’t work out in the long run. You want to look at the industry standards. They are standard for a reason, so you want to be familiar with industry numbering standards before the interviews. In addition to standards, what you want to hear from your candidates is that they want everything to be consistent. They want everything to be within the norms and in a format that’ll work for multiple projects and all of the teams that are working within the project.

The second part is client numbering. You want to hear things from your candidates like they want to accommodate clients by giving the clients the option to view and search using the numbering systems that the client’s familiar with. Good document managers make service a priority for internal and external clients. This might just be a condition of doing business with your external clients. If that is the case, you probably want to have a conversation in the interview about some strategies that your document controller candidates have for making that happen.

The second key skill to ask your document control candidates about is distribution skills and really their approach to that as well. You want to stop the file server apologists in their tracks. Just providing access to a server and a folder structure where people can go, have self-service to documents and look for the latest revision in the latest rev folder and the past revisions and the markups in other folders someplace else, that’s not a good way of doing things. That way’s been around for about 20 years and there are better ways out there that make things less confusing and just better. So this is a major red flag if you want a document controller to make any real improvements to your processes.

The second thing in distribution skills is online distributions. We live in a globalized world, so you have suppliers on the other side of the world. You have inspectors on the other side of the world. You have engineering teams in India perhaps, and your client may be in a whole different country, so couriers and emails, the traditional way to get things around, they’re super old-school. They’re untraceable and they’re unsecure. You want to hire document controllers that can see that and understand that couriers and emails and file cabinets and file servers just really aren’t the way to do things anymore. You want to tease out their ideas on how to get you guys moved past using these outdated systems and methods. What is terrifying is that most document controllers just use emails to distribute documents, transmittals, etc. You look at the groups on LinkedIn and any system that doesn’t rely on email is instantly poo-pooed by a large contingent of document controllers. It’s sad because emails are easy – a five year old can send an email with some attachments – but emails don’t provide good tracking and security. For example, you don’t want precious proprietary technology getting forwarded to shady companies.

The third thing here is self-service. While you don’t want to have just a file server for people to go access documents, there should be some component of self-service so people can go and access what they need to and find the latest revision very quickly and easily. You want to tease out some of the ideas they have for making this happen. There are a lot of good tools out there. ProjecTools offers one that makes self-service very easy to attain reality.

The third skill to look for in your document management hire is markup and review management. I think the most important thing to assess from your candidates here is that they should be accommodating to however folks want to do it, but with that accommodation, also be able to work that into a process. An example is letting your tech affirmative folks do online reviews using whatever system you choose where tasks get distributed to reviewers and approvers, and all of the markups on the documents get logged back to the revision and so forth.

This is good because the tech affirmative folks, they probably want to do this online. They think printing and marking up and scanning back into a system is a wasteful pain in the neck. I fall in the back half, but you want your document managers to accommodate the paper pushers too, so while accommodating the differences in preference here, but still making sure that the two methodologies fit into a standardized, coherent review and approval process is very much key.

Additionally, in the interview, you want to ask a couple questions about dispositions and how they can avoid things like somebody walking by them in the hallway handing them a stack of paper and the person handing the documents over just says, “Looks good to me,” and hands a stack of marked up documents to the document controller in the hallway. That’s not a good clear disposition and that’s going to require the document controller, who probably doesn’t a have a lot of technical expertise in this area, to make some judgment calls. You want to figure out what your document management candidate’s strategy is for avoiding that and gathering back the consistent and clear dispositions so they know what to do with the technical information that they get.

The fourth thing here is history. You want to ask your candidates how they’re going to implement a systematic way to collect each reviewer’s markups and log those against a correct revision and make them accessible for the life of the project and even thereafter as long as they need to be accessible as well.

The fourth thing you want to look for in a document management hire is their ability to integrate with other teams. I have a couple examples up here, procurement and cost control and inspections. Document controllers need to integrate with procurement because suppliers and vendors do need the latest revisions because building from the wrong revision, in the case of engineering, procurement, construction or architecture, oil and gas or anything, that costs some serious cash, like hundreds of thousands of dollars generally. You want to dig into their ideas about how they can integrate your document control processes with suppliers and vendors and even the commercial teams that are building these requisitions so there can be a seamless transfer of knowledge and basically ensure that all the parties have the latest revision all the time.

The second example here is cost control. You want to figure out how your document control team and your document control candidate plans on supporting a business group like cost control. Cost control is probably going to need some progress and status reports from your document controllers, especially if you guys are billing based on earned value. Communicating that progress and status can really be a pain for the cost controllers, and they don’t really want to be beholden to the document control schedule, so you want to dig into your candidate’s ideas about integrating the progress and status updates with cost control and how they can transfer that information or automate the transmission of that information in the coherent way that’s going to support that business group.

The third example here is inspections. Very much like the suppliers and vendors, the inspectors need a right revision, otherwise they could be across the Pacific Ocean in Korea, sitting idle at the supplier’s plant trying to inspect a piece of equipment or something, and not have the latest rev. Just some guidelines here as you dive into this specific situation, what you don’t want to hear from your document control candidate is that the document controller must use file transfer protocols or emailing a flash drive or mailing the physical documents. You don’t want to hear things like that. You want to hear things like online distributions and nothing about emails, nothing about file servers. You want to hear online distributions that can be packaged in an online task, but PO inspections and tasks like that, that’s a discussion for another day.

The fifth thing you want to tease out of your document control candidates is if they are a reporting genius. Some things to think about are consistency, and the first level of consistency is delivering consistently formatted reports. Really, the driver behind this is how good are they going to be at developing a standardized process that could be tracked and managed and aggregated into the system with all the metadata that’s there to report on things like due dates, overdue tasks, document progress, and document status for any grouping of documents and being able to group those documents, pull the statuses as well.

In consistency part two, this is really having everything in one place and the ability to allow other groups to go in and view your data at a limited level. For example, if your cost controllers wanted to go and pull the document progress from your database or if their database is linked to your document database so they could pull progress easily, you want to figure out how they can make those two things consistent. Just to explain the real bummer here if this doesn’t happen, say your client requests your document register status from your document controller and then also a progress report from your cost control group, if they both deliver the reports and the reports don’t jive, your client’s going to ask you some questions that are going to be pretty hard to answer. Neither team is going to look good and the company’s not going to look good, and your client’s going to be pretty upset, which in terms means your executives are upset and your project managers are upset and everybody’s just really angry.

The third thing to really tease out to figure out if your candidate is a reporting genius is ask him about client friendliness and how they’d make the reports that you send to clients friendly. It’s probably a condition of doing business to report in your client’s format, but it’s a good idea to ask your document controllers to draw on their experiences and ask them how they’re going to deliver those reports using client document number formats.

I hope this has given you a good idea of the things that you can look for. Just a couple other words of advice for folks hiring document controllers. Understand that good people need good tools to execute. ProjecTools happens to have an excellent one that handles a lot of this that we’ve talked about today. I’d also like to mention that we aren’t a recruiting agency, but if you’re really looking for good document controllers, there’s a lot of talented individuals right now that are out there looking for work, and if you can’t find anybody, fill in a form on the website, and we can probably help you out and point you in the right direction.

The third thing is we do have a couple good document controllers on staff, actually a lot of them on staff. They can help you out part-time/full-time, long-term/short-term, whatever is right for you guys. Sometimes for the right clients, we’ll manage their whole document control operation, but that’s a much deeper conversation, and if you want to talk about that, fill in a form on our website and we’ll contact you.

For the document controllers that tuned in, I just want to mention, wouldn’t it be great to talk about prospective employers that really wanted to focus on the skills that actually matter and dive into the vision and the details behind how to execute document control in a way that really adds value to clients, executives, to partners, to vendors, to inspectors, to everybody involved in the process? It just would be really great to talk to people on that level.

If you can talk like this in an interview, you’re going to be seen as the premier subject matter expert, and they’re going to see you as indispensable. They’re probably going to call people back in for second interviews and force them to talk at your level, which is going to be great for you and you’re probably going to get that job.

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Systems Completion and Construction Punch List

Systems Completion and Construction Punch List

For groups managing construction and completions of large projects (Oil & Gas, EPC, Energy, Architecture) its massively important to organize and manage data effectively. When done incorrectly teams/inspectors end up sitting idle or working on the wrong things which leads to blowing the budget or cutting corners – neither are ok in today’s business environment.

To prevent execution problems in construction and completions the best solution it to get organized and manage data effectively. This means having a central engineering data store, automating the construction and completion workflow with dependencies for things like punch list and CERT completion, making engineering/technical documents available to construction teams and inspectors, automating check sheet generation, and being able to report on progress and status.

Systems Completion and Construction Punch List Demo Transcript

Welcome to ProjecTools Systems Completion and Construction Punch List Discussion. Today we’re going to talk about systems completion and construction punch list. I’m going to show you how to use ProjecTools Systems Completion and Construction Punch list in a way that’s going to help you organize your construction and commissioning data in a way that your competition probably cannot do and really put you ahead.

Typical problems with the construction and commissioning phases of projects is that everybody’s using spreadsheets and Word to mail merge all of the information from a spreadsheet onto a Word document to create check sheets and manage schedules. It gets really messy. There’s a lot of emails bouncing around with all of these things and that’s not a very good way to manage your data.

Also, there’s a lot of manual processes involved with applying the right checklist to the right TAG data. It’s very time consuming. Often times with big projects, especially some of our clients in oil and gas and capital projects, they have teams of admin folks just applying TAG data to check sheets manually in Word, and it’s crazy.

The third thing that’s a huge problem is loading and managing completed inspection and check sheets back into the system or the file folder. If you don’t have a system that makes it a very smooth process, it becomes a very complicated and time consuming process. After those admin folks, the sea of them, have generated the check sheets and send them out, then the check sheets come back in, the sea of them turn into admins that process these completed things and put them back into wherever it’s going to go. Often times, it’s very difficult to report on what’s done and what is going to be done soon and calculating things like velocity and turn around. It doesn’t work when you do it that way, you know, putting these completed check sheets in file holders.

Another huge problem is managing the punch list items. You have had inspection teams scouring every nook and cranny of the asset snapping photos and logging the mistakes they come across. Each of these is a punch list item. Typically, these are done with paper, scanned into PDF, and sent to the teams authorized to process the punch list items. From there, teams are dispatched to go out into the field and remedy the issue. The problem is the collection and administration of these punch list items. Once the punch list items for the day, or week are assembled, some person has to make a judgement call as to which is important enough to get fixed and which ones get fixed first. This can be hard depending on how much information the inspector logs against the punch list item. Is he logging it against an ITR, a TAG, or an inspection on the ITR? This can be handled in a multitude of ways, however the best way is to have a central database as a catch all for each punch list item. This punch list register should be electronic and have rules that require some information about the punch list item. My recommendations are TAG Number (which should tell you System, Sub-System, and Discipline if you have a good TAG numbering scheme), the nature of the punch list, and location. Further, this database should be integrated with your systems completion database, so the completions team can see which ITRs and CERTs are affected by each Punch List Item. Even further than that, completions teams should be able to report on total punch list items, punch list items outstanding, completed punch list items, punch list items by ITR, Punch list Items by category, system, sub-system and so on.

The fourth thing is when it comes to certifications certifying that all of your equipment’s been built correctly, managing this process manually is not a smart process. It doesn’t take into count the ITR Dependencies. There’s no quick way or system to look and see if the right ITR’s are completed and the critical punch list items are cleared, or whatever your process is, before issuing the certificate. If there’s no system, you’re relying on humans to make these decisions which is not the most effective way to do it. If you have a system that can go in and look for predecessor Certs and however you build your workflow. You should have a system to enforce the processes and not rely on a sea of admin people or taking up your valuable time to go in and make sure the process is under control.

The final thing is reporting on progress and status falls short.

We’re going to address these typical problems in our demo today. I’m going to go through and talk about a couple of things that ProjecTools application does and then I’ll actually jump into the application. I’ll show it to you.

Really, what we help you do, is regain control of your engineering and TAG Data. We take the pain out of generating all of your check sheets, so whether it’s 10,000 or 100,000, we can reduce the time to make those significantly. We’ll automate the applying of the right TAG information to the correct check sheet. We use OCR (optical character recognition) )technology so when you complete the ITR’s and bring them back in, you can scan them and just upload them into the system. The system will sort it out on its own. It’s really slick.

The fifth thing is we make Certs smart through workflows and we’ll get into that a little later.

The sixth thing is you can report on progress and status effectively, quickly, and consistently.

The first part of progress reporting is regaining control of all your TAG Data. A lot of people use spreadsheets – Yuck! A lot of people use separate spreadsheets. If you have teams in different locations or different segments within your company, a lot of them have siloed spreadsheets and they maintain their own individual spreadsheet with all their TAG Data and engineering data. It’s really hard to get the different ones to jive together. Separate spreadsheets – Hell no! The third thing is inconsistent numbering brings about a lot of confusion. If you can’t associate client numbering to your TAG’s, you’re really up the creek without a paddle. It’s going to be a big pain in the neck down the road. If you’re just using spreadsheets or rudimentary systems or whatever that doesn’t have a change history telling you who originated this engineering information, who changed it, when they changed it and why, you’re going to run into some very expensive problems and you’re going to run into some very confusing problems. There’s not going to be any accountability and it’s going to end up being a nightmare from you.

All of these words I’ve heard from prospects and clients when they talk about using rudimentary systems for engineering data management or spreadsheets. We want to get you guys away from that and get you into something that … Get you saying words like, “cost effective, smart” and “accountable” and “sleeping peacefully.” … Not stressing out about how you manage your TAG Data.

The next thing I want to talk about is automating ITR’s and Certs. ProjecTools does use Smart Forms so you can upload your existing ITR’s and Certs. The system auto-populates them with real time, TAG Data. It saves a lot of time and avoids a lot of costly mistakes. There’s no fat fingering involved because it’s pulling directly from your engineering data store. There’s Smart Workflows, so Certs have prerequisites that ensure ITR’s and Certs are completed in the right time, in the right order. Also, Progression Dependencies so you can track the punch list items and ITR prerequisites that are holding up your Cert completion. Finally, Auto-Assignment Rules allow you to bulk auto-assign. We want to make things very simple and quick and intuitive so we can use your Meta Data to save you time.

The final thing here is you want a system that’s going to integrate with other disciplines and applications. ProjecTools has Equipment Manager which is the engineering data store. With Equipment Manager, you can associate the engineering and TAG Data to your ITR’s and Certs and save you a ton of time and increase the accuracy of what you’re doing.

Next, ProjecTools construction punch list. Aside from some really cool stuff that we can do with associated punch list items to TAG’s and ITR’s and Systems, Sub-Systems, etcetera. They can be useful in your workflow as gateways and use them in your Progression Dependencies. We have some clients that are using punch list to basically manage the whole construction. People just log in and they see a bunch of punch list items and complete them as they go. It’s a good way to track the actual construction progress. It works out super simple. I’m not going to show you in the application, but you basically export everything from your scheduling system and then upload all the rows as punch list items. It’s great because the individual contractor can go and log in to the application and they can sort them by date so they can knock them out in the correct order.

The final thing is the Distribution Matrix. You want to provide your construction and commission teams with online access to the latest revisions of your engineering, technical, vendor, and procedure documents so that they can reference the engineering information that they need to build an asset that’s going to be built to spec and operate effectively and safely.

Now, I’m going to show you how these tenants of mastering your construction and commissioning work in ProjecTools. I’m going to prove to you guys that we make ITR and Cert generation really easy and we pull the correct TAG Data from Equipment Manager and we have workflows and we help you report on progress and schedule.

Let’s jump into the application. What I’m showing you right here is ProjecTools Equipment Manager. As you can see here, we have 112 TAG’s in this register for the particular project. I know my TAG number, so I’m going to just filter that down. Let’s take a look at this TAG, this 10-10-PMP-985.

Right away, you can see here that there’s a lot of Meta Data that I can log into this particular TAG. I have my TAG number, my other TAG number, definitely my client TAG number in this case, a description of what it is, and some information such as the category, system, sub-system, location, and type. We’re going to come back to type here because this is how you can group TAG’s very effectively so you can merge the correct TAG Data onto the correct check sheet.

I want to point out really quick that for these critical items that are here in red, we require you to enter in a reason for editing this TAG number. If I was to change the other TAG number, the client TAG number, I’d have to put in a reason for editing this tag before I went and changed it.

Just to run through some of the other Meta Data fields here, we have some TAG details with capacities and electrical information. We can see the systems completion status, some other SC data about this tag, operating conditions, weights and coordinates, electrical loads, criticality, engineering and technical documents associated with this TAG.

Here’s some really awesome stuff. That TAG history we have here. We can see all of the items that have been changed since this TAG was created on June 15th of ’08. If we go up here, we can see that the most recent one was the 2nd of July, 2015. The other TAG number was changed. The old data was the XYZ-PU-987. The new data that I put in was XYZ-P-987 for the other TAG number. I changed it because of this reason here: I changed the client TAG number.

This is all really good stuff if you want to centralize all of your TAG Data into one central application that’s accessible online which means all of your teams can work together and input data to this register for a project. You can see who is doing what to different TAG’s. If something doesn’t make sense or something has changed that you don’t expect, you can go back and look at this history and say, “Oh, yeah. Carl, who is actually working in Korea right now doing engineering, he went in and changed this field. And I can go see exactly why. If I don’t agree with it, I can call him up and ask him what’s going on. It’s a great way to integrate your teams.

Now that we’ve taken a look here at this TAG that we’re going to be working with, 10-10-PMP-985, let’s take a look at ProjecTools Systems Completion application. In Systems Completion, we can do a couple of cool things. The first thing I’m going to show you is project ITR’s. This is your check sheets. We’ll start with mechanical equipment. We’ll pull up an ITR here of this pump checklist and we’ll download it. I have it over here. Here’s the ITR. We can see these blue fields here. These are smart fields that are placed on a .pdf and this is going to pull the information that I tell it to. Right over here is going to be the project name, this is going to be the project code, form, ITR type, phase, TAG number, etcetera. It’s going to pull all of this information from Systems Completion, mostly this part from Systems Completion. Then, this TAG information for the equipment being inspected from our Equipment Management Module which I just showed you.

Let’s take a look at how this all works. If we go to issue ITR assignments and we go to search criteria. I want to look at TAG number … We can see that I have four ITR’s associated with this particular TAG. Let’s go find the one we were looking at, MADA. We’ll open this up here. So system … We’ll print this out. Here’s what we’ve got. Now that we’ve issued this ITR work assignment, we can see that that project information, the form information, the type and the phase as well as the TAG information, the number, location, system, sub-system, manufacturer, drawing number, schematics, etcetera as well as all of these checks that we have to make have been populated on the form.

What Systems Completion did was it went and took a look at our Equipment Manager Module and said, “Hey, haul this META Data for TAG 10-10-PMP-985. Let’s go merge it onto this thing.” You saw how quickly that took. It only took a couple of seconds. We only did one, but you can do groups of these. You can do it by type or by system, whatever you need to do. You can do hundreds even thousands of them at once. If you set up your system smart enough, you can actually just do auto-assignments and the system will make its best guesses at what you’re trying to do. You can usually get about 90% of the way there with our auto-assign or auto-issue ITR’s feature.

The last thing I wanted to point out here while we’re in Execution is the data merge area. This is very useful because sometimes your engineering data’s going to change. In order to get the right changed data from your Equipment Manager Module and your TAG’s onto the ITR’s, you’re going to have to merge that data. This is a convenient place that tells you what TAG’s have data that have changed and what ITR those are going to affect.

This is telling me that all of these have changed information Equipment Manager. I can select all of them or just select a couple of them and agree with the changes and then merge them. It’ll pull the right information over from Equipment Manager and then print them out in very much the same way as the example I showed you previously.

While we’re in here, I want to go into setup and show you a little thing about the Certs. I mentioned that we have the Progression Dependencies and so forth, so I want to show you all the workflows here. We saw I had a few certificates. I opened one up and we see general information about my certificate, but here is the money shot: The Progression Dependencies tab. I can define in the system that I don’t want this certificate to be able to be completed unless all of my type A mechanical completion ITR’s are completed or all of my category A punch list items are cleared, cleared accepted and so forth.

The third level of this is determining the flow at which my commissioning is going to run. The system will … If I define the predecessor certificate requirement such as this one, the system won’t allow my A02 certificate to be completed unless A04 is completed as well. As you’re building out your certificates, you can align them to your critical path and your workflow that you guys have already defined as a company or as a project and we can support that and ensure your process flows as you intended.

The last thing I’m going to show you here is the Construction Punch list Module. This is absolutely cool. Anybody here that has permissions can issue a new Punch list item just by clicking on that button on the top of their screen and they can add all the relative Meta Data. The great part about this is that they can add all the systems, sub-systems, etcetera that this affects and add TAG numbers that are associated with this particular punch list item as well as add ITR’s as constraints. If I add an ITR as a constraint to this punch list item, the ITR won’t be able to be completed until the punch list item has been accepted or cleared.

Let’s clear this out of here and let’s go take a look at a punch list item that I created for the TAG that we’ve been looking at. Here is a punch list item created for this TAG and the output nozzle was cross-threaded so someone needs to tap and install again. I can add impacts, I can add my systems, like I said, TAG numbers, etcetera. Even if your people in the field are coming back and logging the punch list items, they might not have all of the permissions to view these tabs. You can define who on your team goes back in and decides whether they’re critical and so forth. However you decide to do that, the system can support your workflow.

The final thing I want to mention about the punch list register … When it comes to assigning punch list items and clearing them out, you can definitely have your contractors come in and manage their own punch list items that are assigned to them. Basically, they just get a login to the application and they come here to this screen, except instead of seeing all the punch list items for the project, they would only see the ones assigned to them. That’s a really good way to make sure that your subcontractors can come in and help you out and participate in the process in the application without opening up the door so they can access everything or get distracted by all of the data that doesn’t pertain to them.

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Lets Define Procurement

Let’s Define Procurement

Define Procurement

A quick google search defines procurement.Define Procurement Image

While obvious, this procurement definition is lame. It would get our consultants laughed at if they were to put this on a slide in a meeting. I suppose that’s ok if its display was intended as a joke. But let’s be honest – while military procurement may a joke, no one’s laughing

In the project world that ProjecTools lives in, procurement is the indispensable, months or years long struggle to obtain equipment, supplies, and services as designed and approved; and to deliver those efficiently, and in a state to operate safely, to the client on time and on budget. That’s how we define procurement at ProjecTools. The definition isn’t catchy. It isn’t academic – or complicated. It’s just a quick and dirty way to define procurement as we live it.

For folks in engineering, EPC, or construction, this definition of procurement will ring true. Everybody understands and shakes their head knowingly when we rattle off our definition. While the knowing nods say a lot, it goes unsaid that each group or player in our definition of procurement probably executes it differently. These different processes define procurement for any individual company. The strengths and weaknesses, and wide variations in the execution of the procurement processes keep ProjecTools inspired and happily engaged in the procurement business.

If our definition of procurement rings true for your business, it is worth thinking about the components that are at work in it. To help you flesh out your company’s definition of procurement we will start with the procurement definition and examine its parts.

Let’s start with Procurement is indispensable. At ProjecTools, we are selective in our role model choices. We love Stephen R Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). A key Covey principle of Covey is “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. Simple, but certain. Procurement is a main thing made up of many upstream main-thing components and downstream main-thing components that must be treated as the main thing for each owner of each component at each critical time. Without procurement, products would never proceed past the idea or engineering phase. Without raw materials, assembly machines, tools, computers, internet, steel, paint, buildings, software, engineering paper, etc. no EPC company (or any company) would ship a single product. And you no-doubt expect each step in your supply chain to treat your order with the respect and care due the main thing.

At a less philosophical level, the procurement definition checks out, too. EPC projects are Engineering, Procurement, and Construction by definition. Without procurement you have engineering – which is ok actually. In fact most EPC companies start out as Engineering companies and grow into EPC companies, adding procurement and construction sometime later. They are driven to vertically integrate downstream processes into the business model because EPCs get the biggest contracts, the most control over the execution of the project, and the glory and recognition at the end of the project. Since success begets success, the EPC continues momentum winning more projects as their resume grows.

 

The next component as we define procurement is a months or years long struggle. This timeline is literal, especially in the EPC industry’s definition of procurement. Building a bridge, power plant, skyscraper, or offshore production asset can take years. These are millions or billions of dollar projects that take time, thought, and often global teams to produce. The struggle is real too. In a high stakes EPC project, there are often hundreds or thousands of people involved. Engineers, managers, schedulers, cost controllers, HSE teams, commercial teams, quality surveillance teams, logistics teams, document controllers, auditors, regulators, construction teams, inspection/completions teams, partners, consultants, and clients are trying to coordinate and measure progress and performance for years on end. Unfortunately the makeup of a project team evolves over the life of the project. People come, people go. Market conditions change over the life of the project. Copper prices climb, oil prices plummet. Requirements change over the life of the project. 4 elevator banks changes to 6.

The struggle isn’t dealing with these changes or keeping the good people that work these projects on task. The struggle is coordinating these groups, balancing their competing priorities and directives for years at a time while managing the changes and typical factors that derail a project. Understanding and responding to the duration and struggles in the EPC procurement definition is absolutely paramount to profitable procurement execution. In fact, the companies that demonstrate understanding and mastery of this struggle tend to deliver higher quality and meet client expectations more reliably, which leads to more repeat procurement business, more independence, and bigger contracts.

The third part of the procurement definition is to obtain the equipment, supplies, and services. This may seem like the most obvious part of the procurement definition. While obvious, this is not always a simple feat. Obtaining equipment, supplies and services sometimes requires substantial expenditure which opens companies up to substantial risk. Good procurement departments understand this and actively work to mitigate procurement risk. This means working with engineering to produce the most complete and specific technical definition for equipment, working with suppliers to ensure competency, working to provide the most specific commercial terms, and working actively with other groups (suppliers, logistics, quality surveillance, construction, scheduling, cost controllers) to eliminate unknowns.

Along with developing specifications and eliminating unknowns, Procurement for EPC has a duty to ensure these teams work together effectively. This means each group needs access to the latest information and appropriate communication media. This may seem like a simple task. In fact most procurement departments figure that if somebody needs information or has questions – they will simply ask. By overlooking strategies to improve collaboration among the contributing groups, the procurement process struggles to centralize documents, process approvals, gather bids, and issue POs in a timely manner. This struggle in most cases is not because any one team or player is incompetent, rather teams spend too much time chasing paper which extends the process.

The next part of the procurement definition is to deliver safely functioning products. This may seem like a no-brainer as well, however there are a few meanings hidden in this part of the procurement definition. The first is to deliver products that function. Fair enough. The second is to deliver a product that functions safely. The third is to deliver a product safely – unharmed from transport, packaging, and receiving.

To deliver functioning products, procurement teams must rely on engineers to design quality products and the suppliers to build those quality products. Obviously, engineering documents must be reviewed by internal teams, suppliers, and clients. Consensus on proper and specific design is key. There should be little room for improvisation on the supplier side and confidence in the design on the client side. While not every procurement department will manage the process of gaining consensus, they should be assured of it. Further, procurement departments should be involved in the quality surveillance plan. The quality surveillance plan should be cost effective, thorough, and execution should be documented religiously. Proper quality surveillance inspections will ensure the equipment is built to spec and on schedule.

To deliver products that function safely, procurement teams should be aware of the HSE implications of the product. The HSE concerns should be incorporated into the quality surveillance plan. In the current economic environment that values social responsibility and is quick to litigate, there is no tolerance for unnecessary workplace hazards. This is true for the fabrication, transportation, installation, and operation of all requisitions. In other words, safety is everybody’s responsibility, even the procurement department’s.

Few situations are more demoralizing than brand new equipment arriving late, to the wrong jobsite, or damaged during transport. To deliver products safely, Procurement departments enlist logistics specialists. Logistics specialists should be tightly integrated with procurement teams. This means logistics teams should have access to relevant PO data and a controlled media to interface with the upstream technical and commercial teams (ie. Engineering and Procurement).

Finally, to deliver products safely in a timely manner, which is the final component of the Procurement Definition, logistics teams should be able to interface with suppliers (obviously), receiving, and construction teams. Communication channels with these teams should be readily accessible, recorded to each PO, and under no circumstance rely on ad-hoc emails. Logistics teams relying on emails can be dangerously inefficient and ineffective at achieving their goals. It is worth mentioning that these shortfalls are not because of incompetence, rather, shortfalls of emails as a communication medium.

Keep these principles in mind as you define procurement for your industry or company. Defining procurement for you is as simple as taking a step back from the day to day processes and strategies to look at the overall objective. Through exploring our definition of procurement for the EPC and capital construction industries, I not only have an escalated appreciation for the complexity of procurement and the value it brings, but the procurement professionals that continue to elevate the profession.

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Transmittal Templates

Transmittal Templates

For engineering-centric companies, document control is massively important. Poor transmittal management practices can lead to delays, confusion, frustration or even worse angry clients or building something from the wrong revision.

This is why you need to hire the right tools and processes to create a seamless, consistent transmittal experience for clients and partners. Transmittal Template tools in ProjecTools are a great start to producing consistent transmittals that won’t confuse and frustrate recipients.

Obviously, there is more to making clients happy than quality transmittal processes, but understanding the skills that make it possible allows your company to set the bar higher than the competition and become the gold standard.

 Transmittal Management Demo Transcript

Today, we’re going to talk about transmittal templates, what that means, the various definitions of transmittal templates, and how we pull that off in ProjecTools system. To start, it makes sense to talk about general problems with transmittals, because no matter how templated your transmittals are, if your transmittal processes suck templates won’t help at all. You’ll still be facing the same limitations.

Let’s get into that, and then we’ll move on through and at the end I’ll show you how to do it in the app.

The main transmittal problems are ones that we run into all the time when talking to clients and prospective clients. We talked to a lot of folks that have to deliver engineering, technical, commercial documents, specifications, contracts, scripts, and all kinds of things to their clients and distribute them for review, approval, or final delivery or what have you. We see a lot of different ways that people do it, we see some really terrible ways, and some pretty clever ways that people do it.

Huge problems are when people use file servers, generic systems, or rudimentary systems to deliver documents or document packages to their clients. It’s just a bad experience. Whether it’s an email with a link to an internal server on your end, or they might have to log in and try to figure out what their password is, remember it, or sift through all the sticky pads on their desk to figure out how to VPN some place. That’s a bad experience. Your clients don’t want to do that, and if you consistently give them a bad experience they’re not going to want to work with you. Since that is a cumbersome process and not a lot of people use it, especially now as technology is evolving, it’s becoming less and less common.

People are relying on emails, spreadsheets, and file transfer protocols. This is not new technology. This is stuff that’s been around for twenty years, and it’s really not a reliable way to do it. It can also contribute to a bad experience on your customer’s end, because emails are unreliable. They’re insecure. they can be forwarded to anybody in the world. Nigerian princes could be getting your valuable documents, if somebody forwards them to the wrong email address or hits reply all to a thread and thinks it’s something else and adds somebody in. It could go anywhere. It’s not secure. You can make an email template for transmittals, but that misses the mark completely.

The next problem is spreadsheets, like I mentioned. If you’re sending spreadsheets out to catalog your progress or in the spreadsheet you have links to where the actual documents reside, that’s not a very professional way to do things. As soon as somebody opens up your spreadsheet in the wrong version of Excel, edits it, or opens it up on a different computer and all the links break, there’s just all kinds of things that can happen with spreadsheets. It doesn’t make for a very good experience, or a very reliable experience, either. Just to be clear again, you can use spreadsheets to manage transmittal templates, but this misses the mark and any effort to developing or maintaining transmittal templates using spreadsheets is misguided.

Then we have, FTP that’s file transfer protocol. Its just a simple way to send files across the internet in a semi-secure way. It’s time consuming. It’s sometimes unreliable. A lot of times, they will fail halfway through. It’s just not the most user friendly experience. It usually works, but it’s not a good experience. You want to avoid those two things. Again, you could have a consistent looking cover sheet that goes over FTP and claim that you use transmittal templates, but who cares – its still a bad process.

The other things that make transmittals really bad experiences for your clients is numbering confusion, revision confusion, and disposition confusion. If you’re sending documents out using a codified system, you better be using your clients numbering system. If your using your numbing system they’re not going to know what it is. They’re going to be irritated that they have to translate what you’re using into what they think it is or what they’re using. You are better off focusing on standardizing your numbering systems before even thinking about transmittal templates. Templating anything in a broken system is misguided.

Revision confusion. A lot of times clients will receive a document, and see a revision code or just a bunch of documents without any revision codes or any indication of which revision it is. They’ll not really be sure whether they have the right revision of a document. This goes even deeper back into your company. If you don’t have good numbering system and revision disposition system, you’re internal team could be confused about what revision and possibly send out the wrong revision to a client. Believe it or not, that’s actually more common.

Disposition confusion. Basically, why are your sending out these documents to your client, your partner, or your consultants, what have you. What do you want them to do with the documents you’re sending out. Is it issued for review and approval? Is it issued for approval? Is it issued for comment? Is it for construction? Is it for use? Make codes that mean something to your client and you, and stick to them and be consistent.

Then, just a bad, confusing, or frustrating user experience. If you make your clients or your partners jump through hoops to go retrieve documents or return you some comments, they’re going to get upset. They’re just going to call you on the phone, and usually berate you and tell you how to get your act in order or just give you the response verbally. Which isn’t great, because you don’t have a paper trail or an electronic log of back and forth. There’s less accountability and visibility in that system. You want to make it a good experience.

I have been talking about electronic ways to deliver documents. Some people haven’t even made it that far. We have a guy who delivers scripts all over L.A. he was going to miss a dealing, because his courier went out of business. It was a big problem for him, because he’s used the same courier for so many years. He picked up the phone one day and nobody answered. The line was dead. He had to go find a courier that he could trust that would make the delivery in time, or he had to drive across L.A. from south side to the north side in rush hour traffic to get his deadline met. That would basically kill his day. It’s things like that. If you’re using the mail, certified mail, first-class mail, or courier, that’s a time consuming way to get things done. It’s very expensive. It’s probably not the best experience either for your client having to walk out of a meeting and sign for a document or a series of documents when they could be doing other things and get to it at their leisure.

Other problems that are more important than transmittal templates are reliability and visibility. If you send something via an email, and the client never got it; or you send it via courier, and the client never got it. But you definitely sent it, and your client calls you wondering where the documents are, you’re up a creek without a paddle. You don’t have any visibility to where that particular document went or if they’ve seen it or not. If you make some of these mistakes and run in to the problems enough, we see end clients often times tell the people producing the document that their process aren’t good enough. They have to send it to an intermediate company, who’s going to package all their work together and give to the client in a matter that’s coherent. That is a pretty good slap in the face, and unfortunately, it happens fairly often when companies can’t get their transmittal act together. I don’t want this to be you. I want you guys to have an affordable way to execute transmittals flawlessly, use templates, not be huge drain on your internal resources, have good reporting, and really make the interaction with your documents a joy. Make your clients happy to work with you.

How do you get this done? How do we win with transmittal templates?

The first step is to never make your clients access file servers, generic, or rudimentary systems. You don’t want to send them spreadsheets or emails. You don’t want to have them using FTP to go retrieve or submit documents. You want to eliminate the numbering confusion by having your own numbering system that everybody in your office, company knows, or department at the very least. Be very consistent about it. When you transmit those documents, translate them into your client’s document numbering system. If you don’t have it, ask for it. They’ll probably be glad to give it to you if they’re going to be getting documents back in their format.

The next thing is revision confusion. First thing you’ve got to do here is make sure your internal team knows exactly which revision is which, and is not going to get confused and send out the wrong revision. The second part of this is label that correctly so your client knows exactly which revision they’re receiving.

The disposition. This is sometimes overlooked, and very important. Like I said, just tell your clients or your partners what you want them to do with the documents. Is it issued for review? Issued for approval? Issued for construction? Issued for use? Just be consistent and be clear.

Down here there are three tiers of user experience with transmittals. The first tier of, we’ll call it, competence is the tier three. You want to make your user experience consistent. The tier two is make your user experience convenient. The first tier, which is actually pretty tough to get to, is make your user experience convenient, consistent, and enjoyable. You want a situation where your clients are working with other companies, possibly your competitors, and saying why can’t she be more like X company. We love working with them. Their process is so great. We know exactly what’s going on. They send transmittals. They’re easy to access, open, handle, process, submit, whatever. You want to be the bar that everybody else is held to. You want to set the bar that everybody else is held to. It’s going to be great for your repeat business.

Lucky for you, you guys found an affordable system that’s clever enough to handle the demands of engineering, legal, procurement, HSE, marketing, HR, entertainment, and construction groups. We do transmittals among many other things, but we do transmittals really well.

To reiterate. If your review and approval and your transmittal process relies on emails, you’re going to have a bad time. A little South Park joke here.

I’m going to show you how to solve transmittal problems in ProjecTools application. I’m really going to focus on transmittal templates, and the different definitions of each in the demo that I’m going to show you right now.

All right. What you’re seeing here is a task. This is a transmittal task. Each task in ProjecTools follows the same template and the only things that change transmittal to transmittal are the dates, recipients, documents, and maybe dispositions. This transmittal that follows our transmittal template was sent out to a client, a sample client. It’s a group of documents that need to be, according to the disposition, issued for approval. You’re soliciting an approval code from a client. This is the client view; what they would see. We can see that the clients acknowledged this particular item. They can see in big, bold, red letters that they are late. They were supposed to get this thing in almost a month ago. That’s going to help you maintain some accountability and keep your schedule with transmittals. Let’s open up a document here.

Here’s an electrical diagram that was sent out. When your clients open this up, they’ll be able to view the document, mark it up with arrows, text boxes, clouds, bubbles, and all that fun stuff you’re used to seeing. They can zoom in. They can hide layers. They can view different layers. They can select their approval code in here and add notes. They can see the review history, so if your transmittal goes out to more than one person, they can see what the other folks had to say. It’s a very convenient, nice tool for marking up and reviewing an individual document.

After your client goes to that review process or approval process internally, they can add their approval code. This is important. This goes back to that disposition. This is them being able to tell you what to do with a document. This client only has four options: reviewed no comment, review with comments, revised resubmit or rejected, or four, not reviewed. By using those four dispositions, as soon as the client adds their comments, possibly adds their scanned files, or adds more people here, and then save this is complete. Then, submits it back to your document control team or whoever is managing the document control for your project. They’re going to know exactly what the disposition is for each document or document set here within the transmittal. That’s going to allow them to process the documents accordingly. They’re not going to have to wonder, “Hey. It says approved here, but there are all these red marks. Does that mean it’s really approved?” They’re not going to be making any of these judgment calls, because there’s dispositions in here that make sense and they’re concrete.

Let’s go back here to the home page, and where your clients would log in to and access all their tasks here, your transmittals, approvals, queries, and so forth. It’s very easy to access. You just log in through ProjecTools website. Then, they can find all the things that they need here.

How does the task information get here? You might be asking. Let me show you that right now.

Here we are on the back end of ProjecTools system, where the person’s creating routings and transmittals would hangout. If we open up this draft transmittal … By the way, I talked about templates. When you go to transmittals, the working on draft transmittals like I just showed there, you can save drafts and those are really your templates. If you send the same transmittal out week after week or month after month or similar transmittals out to the same group of people every so often, you can save that as a template and pull it back up and process them very quickly.

They all end up looking very much the same except for the documents and the relative information, such as dispositions and so forth. I pulled up a template here, and you can breeze through it. You can add as much information as you want. Here’s where you add documents, move them down here to this area. Okay, they show up here, add a disposition, and then click on through the screens, and you can add a primary recipient, set the approver. You can add reviewers. You can add people to the distribution list, so they can be copied on it basically.

Finally, you release this thing and it shows up on the appropriate people’s home page like we saw earlier. We can preview it here. If you’re still working for a client that only accepts paper, you can handle that, too. You just print this out, and it’s basically the same thing but in a paper format. We don’t recommend this, obviously, but some clients that you have are going to be old school. They’re going to require this for whatever reason. The last thing I want to mention regarding templates is reporting. Here are a lot of report templates here. We have several for transmittals. We have transmittal history, transmittal document approval, acknowledgements, return, and you even have transmittal late action reports here.

If we go to the transmittal history, we can sort by our document number and narrow it down as much as we see fit. We can run reports on how many transmittals have gone out, and if they are back on time. You can do it for the whole project or subsets of documents within the project and so forth.

Those are how ProjecTools uses a templated interface to deliver consistent transmittals, consistently formatted transmittal using the transmittal templates to your clients and partners. How there’s a back end that utilizes templates with the wizard, so you can quickly produce transmittals that would otherwise take a little longer to create. Templated reporting so you don’t have to go through and export a bunch of data to a spreadsheet and manipulate it to look like you want. This improves consistency in your reporting, the timeliness of your reporting, and your ability to keep your document control under actual control.

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5 Skills that get Document Controllers Hired

See the five skills that make the best document control hires. See how to tease these skills out of candidates or articulate them to interviewers.

5 Skills that get Document Controllers Hired

For engineering-centric companies, document control is massively important. Poor execution can lead to delays, confusion, frustration or even worse angry clients or building something from the wrong revision. This is why you need to hire the right team that can flawlessly handle document management in this online, big data era.

Obviously, there is more to finding the right document controllers than these 5 hard skills, but understanding these skills allows interviewers (and candidates) to zero in on the skills that make all the difference.

 5 Skills That Make Excellent Document Management Hires Transcript

Thank you for joining us to talk about the five essential skills that make a great document control hire. This discussion is aimed at folks hiring document controllers and should be useful for document controllers as well. I want to hit on the 5 key skills that interviewers need to understand and be able to have a conversation about to really determine if candidates are going to be a bust, simply good, or a freaking superstar. For document controllers this is a good look for you at the hard skills interviewers should be focusing on. By joining us today document control candidates will be able to articulate to your future employers or your current employers, whatever the case may be, the skills that you do have and the vision that you have, and what you bring to the table. You can frame the conversation and articulate your value in a way that’s going to get you hired, promoted or even kept on board if your industry tanks.

First it’s important to know what’s at stake with a document control hire, especially for a small company with only one to two document controllers but still relevant for even huge companies. The first step in this is acknowledging that bad document management hires hurt pretty bad. Let’s take a deeper look into this here. With a bad hire you risk perpetual confusion that effects your commercial teams, your engineering teams, your partners, your subs and most importantly your clients and your executives. There’s numbering confusion for your different teams they’re not going to know how to access the documents that they need. They could end up accessing the wrong revision and confusing that with the latest revision. They could have trouble accessing and locating the documents themselves. The same thing with reporting on progress and status. If there’s confusion about any of these numbering revision progress or where the documents are located, the reporting on the progress and status is going to come out of a place of confusion, and the reports are going to be wrong, incorrect, or late.

The second thing that you’ve got to acknowledge is that if you hire bad document controllers it can be a complete waste of money. If your document controllers are bad or difficult to work with folks just plain old won’t work with them. They’ll continue to do their own thing and really just hope for the best. In this case, which you don’t want to do, you’ve hired a document controller for absolutely nothing. It’s a wasted expenditure that creates more hurdles for your productive team members that it brings down.

The third way that bad document management hires hurt is that clients notice. Document control is a big interface point between your company and your clients, or your company and your important partners. If that interface is lacking, cumbersome, not accommodating, or just plain old not a good experience – clients are going to notice and it’s going to reflect on poorly on your company. There is good news to this though, there are tons of great document controllers out there. It’s just on the hiring managers and interview team to know how to find them and tease the skills out of the candidates.

Let’s take a look at the five skills that the document management hiring team needs to looks for. The first one is numbering and nomenclature Skills. This can be broken down into two parts, internal numbering and client numbering. With internal numbering, if you’re numbering is inconsistent or numbering confuses your teams and leads to duplicated effort rework and spotty access for other team members. In the same vein, being too tricky or fancy with document numbering can cause confusion among your team. We work with folks who really wanted to think out of box their document numbering systems and transmittal numbering and so forth. They went with it for a while but they found that it just added a confusion and didn’t work out in the long run. Look at the industry standards, they’re standard for a reason and go with that. That’s the response that you want to hear from your candidates. You want to hear that they want everything to be consistent. They want everything to be within the norms in a format that will work for multiple projects and all the teams that are working within the project and on multiple projects. Document controllers who think like this are incredibly valuable because they realize that engineers and commercial teams are going to work on multiple projects throughout the day, month or year – so making it easy for teams to plug right into a project is key.

The second part is client numbering. You want to hear things from your candidates like they want to accommodate clients by giving the clients the option to view and search using the numbering systems that the client is familiar with. This might just be a condition of doing business with your clients. If that is the case you probably want to have a conversation in the interview about some strategies that your document controllers have for making that happen.

The second key skill to ask your document control candidates is distribution skills and their approach to the document distribution aspect of document control as well. You want to stop the file server apologists in their tracks. Just providing access to a server and a folder structure where teams can have self-service to documents, look for the latest revision, the latest rev folder, the past revisions, the mark ups, and other folders someplace else. That’s not a good way of doing things, that way has been around for about twenty years and there are better ways out there that make things less confusing and just better.

The second thing in distribution skills is online distributions. We live in a globalized world so you have suppliers on the other side of the world, you have inspectors on the other side of the world, you have engineering teams in India perhaps, and your client maybe in a whole different country so couriers and emails, the traditional way to get things around they’re super old school, they’re untraceable, and they’re unsecure. You want to hire document controllers that can see that and understand that couriers and emails and file cabinets and file servers just really aren’t the way to do things anymore. You want to tease out their ideas on how to get you guys moved past using these outdated systems and methods.

The third thing here is self-service. While you don’t want to have just a file server for people to go access documents, there should be some component of self-service so people can go an access what they need to, and find the latest revision very quickly and easily. You want to tease out some of the ideas they have for making this happen. There are a lot of good tools out there, ProjecTools offers one of them that makes self-service very, very easy to attain reality.

The third skill to look for you in your document management hire is markup and review management. I think the most important thing to assess from your candidates here is that they should be accommodating to however folks want to do it but with that accommodation also be able to work that into a process. An example is, letting your tech affirmative folks do online reviews using whatever system you choose, where tasks get distributed to reviewers and approvers and all the mark ups on the documents get logged back to the revision and so forth. This is good because the tech affirmative folks they probably want to do this online. They think printing and marking up and scanning back into a system is a wasteful pain in the neck, and I fall into that camp. You want your document managers to accommodate the paper pushers too. While accommodating the differences in preference here but still making sure that the two methodologies fit into a standardized coherent review and approval process is very much key.

Additionally, in the interview you want to ask a couple of questions about dispositions. How they can avoid things like somebody walking by them in the hallway handing them a stack of paper and the person handing the documents over just says, “Looks good to me,” and hands a stack of marked up documents to the document controller in the hallway. That’s not a good clear disposition and that’s going to require the document controller, who probably doesn’t have a lot of technical expertise in this area, to make some judgment calls. You want to figure out what your document management candidate strategy is for avoiding that and gathering back the consistent and clear dispositions so that they know what to do with the technical information that they get.

The next thing here is history. You want to ask the candidates how they’re going to implement a systematic way to collect each reviewers mark ups and log those against the correct revision and make them accessible for the life of the project, and even thereafter as long as they need to be accessible as well.

The fourth thing you want to look for in a document management hire is their ability to integrate with other teams. I have a couple of examples up there, procurement and cost control and inspections. Document controllers need to integrate with procurement because suppliers and vendors do need the latest revisions because building from the wrong revision in the case of engineering procurement construction or architecture or oil and gas or anything that costs some serious cash, like hundreds of thousands of dollars generally. You want to dig into their ideas about how they can integrate your document control processes with suppliers, and vendors and even the commercial teams that are building these requisitions so there can be seamless transfer of knowledge and basically ensure that all the parties have the latest revision all the time.

The second example here is cost control. You want to figure out how your document control team and your document control candidate plans on supporting a business group like cost control. Cost control is probably going to need some progress and status reports from your document controllers, especially if you guys are billing based on earned value. Communicating that progress and status and it can really be a pain for the cost controllers. They don’t really want to be beholding to the document control schedule. You want to dig into your candidates ideas about integrating the progress and status updates with cost control. How they can transmit that information or automate the transmission of that information in a coherent way that can support that business group.

The third example here is inspections. Very much like the suppliers and vendors. The inspectors need the right revision otherwise they could be across the Pacific Ocean in Korea sitting ideal at the suppliers plant trying to inspect a piece of equipment or something and not have the latest rev. Just some guidelines here, as you dive into this specific situation what you don’t want to hear from your document candidate is that, the document controller wants to use file transfer protocols or emailing a flash drive or mailing the physical documents. You don’t want to hear things like online distributions and nothing about emails, nothing about file servers. You want to hear online distributions that can be packaged in online tasks.

The fifth thing you want to tease out of your document control candidates is if they are a reporting genius. Somethings to think about are consistency. The first level of consistency is delivering consistently formatted reports. Really the driver behind this is how good are they going to be at developing a standardized process that could be tracked and managed and aggregated in the system with all the meta data that’s there to report on things like due dates, overdue tasks, document progress and document status for any grouping of documents and being able to group those documents for the statuses as well.

In consistency part II, this is really having everything in one place. The ability to allow other groups to go in and view your data at a limited level. For example, if your cost controllers wanted to go and pull the document progress from your database, or if their database is linked to your document database so they could pull progress easily you want to figure out how they can make those two things consistent and just explain the real bummer here if this doesn’t happen. Say your client requests your document register status from your document controller and then also a progress report from your cost control group. If they both deliver the reports and the reports don’t jive your client is going to ask you some questions that are going to be pretty hard to answer. Neither team is going to look good and the company is not going to look good and your client is going to be pretty upset. Which in turn means your executives are upset and your project managers are upset and everybody is just really angry.

The third thing to really tease out to figure out if your candidate is a reporting genius is ask him about client friendliness and how they’d make the reports that you send to clients friendly. It’s probably a condition of doing business to report in your clients format. It’s a good idea to ask your document controllers to draw on their experiences and ask them how they’re going to deliver those reports using client document number formats.

I hope this have given you a good idea of the things you can look for. Just a couple of other words of advice for folks hiring document controllers. Understand that good people need good tools to execute. ProjecTools happens to have an excellent one that handles a lot of thing that we’ve talked about today. I would also like to mention that we aren’t a recruiting agency but if you’re really looking for good document controllers there’s a lot of talented individuals right now that are out there looking for work. If you can’t find anybody fill in a form on the website and we can probably help you out and point you in the right direction. The third thing is we do have a couple of good document controllers on staff, actually a lot of them on staff and they can help you out, part-time, full time, long-term, short-term, whatever is right for you guys. Sometimes for the right clients we’ll manage their whole document control operation but that’s a much deeper conversation and if you want to talk about that fill out a form on our website and we’ll contact you.

For the document controllers that tuned in, I just want to mention wouldn’t it be great to talk about perspective employers that really wanted to focus on the skills that actually matter, and dive into the vision and the details behind how to execute document control in a way that really adds value to clients, executive, to partners, to vendors, to inspectors, to everybody involved in the process. It just would be really great to talk to people on that level and if you can talk like this like in an interview you’re going to been seen as the premier subject matter expect and they’re going to see us indispensable. They’re probably going to call people back in for second interviews and force them to talk at your level which is going to be great for you and you’re probably going to get that job.

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  • Review and Approvals

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Document management is massively important for engineering and construction projects. Take the approach and use the tools that add the most value.

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Completions and Commissioning Mastery

Completions and commissioning mastery begins with strong coordination with the completions team during FEED to facilitate effective data transfer.

Completions and Commissioning Mastery

For groups managing construction and completions of large projects (Oil & Gas, EPC, Energy, Architecture) its massively important to organize and manage data effectively. When done incorrectly teams/inspectors end up sitting idle or working on the wrong things which leads to blowing the budget or cutting corners – neither are ok in today’s business environment.

To prevent execution problems in construction and completions the best solution it to get organized and manage data effectively. This means having a central engineering data store, automating the construction and completion workflow with dependencies, making engineering/technical documents available to construction teams and inspectors, automating check sheet generation, and being able to report on progress and status.

 Completions and Commissioning Mastery

Today we’re obviously going to talk about construction and commissioning mastery, but we’re going to talk about it from a data management perspective.

Let’s discuss a few tenants of mastering all of the data management for your construction, completions and commissioning. Obviously there’s more to construction and commissioning than the data management portion, but true masters use project data to automate things like inspections, the population of inspection data, check sheets, progress and status reporting, so really in order to achieve a safe, optimally operating asset, you need to use your existing project data in a way that will allow you to blow your competition out of the water, and deliver the best operating assets.

Real quick, let’s talk about some of the typical problems that we see in construction and commissioning management. The biggest one is using patchwork systems, so managing and commissioning the spreadsheets and generating ITRs in Microsoft Word is a fairly common method of commissioning management. This method has a low barrier of entry but presents huge cost in terms of management and administration stakes and general inefficiency. Spreadsheets containing data for fifteen to a hundred thousand check sheets and certificates, they get terribly complicated and unmanageable very quickly. The end result is only one or two people know the spreadsheet well enough to manage the commissioning process, lots of mistakes, and poor organization are usually the results.

Similarly producing ITRs and certs in Microsoft Word, it’s time consuming and it leaves too much room for human error, so even if you have a well established system of templates to manually produce the ITRs and certs in Word, you’re still spending ten to fifteen, maybe even thirty, minutes producing each ITR. We’re looking here at the typical problems and we see spreadsheets, Word, mail merge et cetera. Those are all bad ways to do it. Not the most effective way to manage your data in commissioning.

Another problem is applying the right checklist to tags. It’s time consuming and oftentimes it’s complicated and it gets done incorrectly, and it’s hard to track down when things have been done incorrectly.

Another problem is loading and managing completed ITRs is very time consuming and since it’s time consuming it often gets put off and that means you can’t report effectively.

Another typical problem is that certs aren’t smart. They don’t have ITR dependencies, they don’t have punch list dependencies, and they don’t have predecessor cert dependencies. That means your team could be doing things in the wrong order and you don’t really know until it’s too late and they have to go back and do a bunch of re-work.

Another problem is that reporting on progress and status falls short oftentimes especially if you’re experiencing the problems that we’ve talked about before hand. You’re either reporting on bad data, reporting on outdated data, or you don’t have a system to pull the correct information from your data.

In order to be a master of commissioning and completions management you’ve got to take the pain out of generating a lot of ITRs, and you’ve got to apply the right tag information to your ITRs, and you’ve got to be able to load your completed ITRs back in the system very easily, and you’ve got to make certs smart using workflows, and you need to be able to report on progress and status.

Let’s take a look at some ways to do this. By automating your ITRs and certs and using smart forms you can pull data from your engineering data store and load it onto your check sheets, and you can use smart workflows to ensure the right data goes on the right check sheets and gets sent to the right person, the right inspector. These workflows can also help you complete these things in the right order and the same thing with the dependencies and the auto assignment rules, will get the check sheets in the right person’s hands and make sure that the tests are performed on the right equipment.

You also want to integrate with other disciplines and applications. You need to have equipment in engineering data store that is cloud based preferably, but you want to centralize all of your engineering data into one central spot and have that be integrated with your ITR and cert generation so you can save time on your ITR and cert generation and increase the accuracy of the engineering data that gets applied to those check sheets.

The second thing is punch list here. You’ve got to associate your punch list items with tags and ITRs to ensure that the critical punch list items are completed before issuing those certs, because otherwise it breaks your process and your equipment might not operate optimally.

The third thing is the distribution matrix. Big engineering and construction projects have a lot of engineering drawings and spec sheets and so forth, and if your inspectors or your construction team doesn’t have access to the latest revisions of the engineering technical vendor and procedure documents, they can’t work effectively. If they’re working from the wrong revision, just a simple, simple issue to fix, working from the wrong revision can cost a project hundreds or thousands of dollars, even millions of dollars if they, say, build something from the wrong revision or are testing from the wrong revision.

Now I’m actually going to get into ProjecTools’ commissioning application, and I’m going to show you how to exercise this tenants of commissioning and construction and completions mastery in our application and show you a real world look in how to do it. The first thing I wanted to take a look at was ProjecTools’ equipment manager. This is your online engineering data store. This has all the tags for your project and all of the relevant metadata behind the tag.

There are a number of systems out here that do similar things, but here are the things to look for when you’re deciding on a system, or when you’re setting up a system. You need to have a system that tracks changes. Every time somebody makes a change to a key piece of information, the metadata on the tag, they need to enter in a reason, and your system needs to track that reason and the change that was made and who made it. The other thing to think about is smart numbering. You want to, if you’re numbering … If system and subsystem and location are part of your numbering scheme, make that determined by the metadata that you have in here. If I was to change this system in ProjecTools for instance to subsystem eleven, the system up here would change.

The next thing to think about is consistent numbering. Everybody who’s contributing to your engineering data store needs to be using the same numbering system for the whole project. It also needs to be accessible by global teams. That’s why a cloud based application is a good idea. It also needs to be permission based, so the right people are in there changing engineering data and adding engineering data, and they should also be able to batch up this engineering data as well. Like I said before, you’ve got to account for the relevant metadata for your project, so if you need to have criticalities, cable loops, weights, co-ordinates, and so forth, you need to make sure that you can log all of that data to a tag and then if it makes sense to put it on your check sheet, that your check sheet generation tool can pull on that data and place it correctly. We’ll touch on that a little bit later.

Now let’s get into the systems completion part of the application. This is really the icing on the cake. What we saw before with the engineering data store, that’s super necessary and the meat and potatoes. This is where the art happens so to speak. Let’s go over here to the set-up and take a look at our project ITRs. Let’s pull up a check sheet for our mechanical equipment. Let’s take a look at this M003A. We’ll download it. Open it up here.

Here’s a generic check sheet for a project and you can see here these blue fields. These are fields that are linked to our equipment manager module that we showed you. When we associate this with a tag or a set of tags or a system, the system’s going to match this check sheet up with the appropriate data in the equipment manager, and it’s going to pull the tag number, and the location, and the tag description, and the system, and the subsystem, so really by defining this check sheet to be dynamic and then making the assignments and the connections, I’m able to plan better for how I’m going to manage all of this data and merge all of this data, and if I plan correctly and I plan it right, I can set it up so this is basically automated. It’s pretty impressive and it’s great. If you want to see more about it, fill in a form on our website and we’ll take you through a more in depth look.

Now that I’ve shown you that you can have check sheets in the application that have fields it’ll pull, let’s demonstrate how we do that. Let’s come over here with the execution tab and go to the ITR assignments. I’m going to go find that same ITR and see what it looks like after the assignment’s been made to a tag. Here’s the ITR that that check sheet with all the tag data that’s pulled from the engineering data store. We can see there’s a project name, the client, the project, the form name, and the ITR type and the face, and all of the relevant data that our inspectors are going to need to go and get this thing done. They can even see the PID and the drawing numbers in the schematics so they can go pull those out of the document data store and hopefully be looking at the right revision of the technical documents while they go and do their inspections if they need to refer to any of that information.

That’s a good demonstration of how ProjecTools does all that for the check sheet portion of it. I talked a lot about certs earlier, so I want to go take you in to look at the certs and the progression dependencies and the workflows that are available there and the things that you need to think about as you move forward into being a completions and commissioning data management master.

Let’s take a look at this certificate list. Let’s pull up any one of these here and add it to the certificate. You see there’s a lot of information you can define about your certificates, but here’s the really awesome portion that a lot of our clients go nuts for. This is how you build the workflow. We can say that this particular certificate has some dependencies. All of the B pre-commissioning ITRs need to be completed. All of the category A punch list items need to be cleared or accepted, and the predecessor certificate is A01, discipline acceptance certificate. It needs to be certified … This certificate needs to be issued already before this one can go.

By setting up a few simple rules you can ensure that your commissioning has a smooth flow and you don’t run into any of those costly problems like re-work, and certifying equipment, and having to back it out and explain to your client why you have to start this all over. It’s going to save some really awkward conversations, it’s going to save real money, and it’s going to make you guys look awesome. Things to think about as you work down your quest to be a certificate management and commissioning management master.

ProjecTools Product Information

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Standard Project Management Features

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Security and Reliability

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Construction Project Management Services

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ProjecTeams is proven for flexible on-site or remote project deployments. Each ProjecTeam specialist has deep work history with a career of improving project execution, information management processes, with tools that make projects efficient, timely, and profitable.

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Document Management Software ROI

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Document management is massively important for engineering and construction projects. Take the approach and use the tools that add the most value.

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  • Review and Approvals

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Document management is massively important for engineering and construction projects. Take the approach and use the tools that add the most value.

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Master Service Agreement Management Demo

The key to developing effective contracts is implementing a consistent, coherent master service agreement management processing unit.

Master Service Agreement Management Demo

For Oil & Gas, EPC, Construction, and Architecture companies, processing and managing contracts can be a slow-moving, wasteful, and costly proposition. Unfortunately, there is no solver bullet to processing and managing Master Service Agreements  – Its a necessary evil.

Since there is no way around it, so you may as well have a system that helps you process and administrate MSAs like absolute pros. Join us to see how to win the contract management game.

Master Service Agreement Demo Transcript

Today we’re going to talk about contract management in ProjecTools and contract management at large, and talk about how to process your Master Service Agreements (MSAs), how to distribute your Master Service Agreement and get them back with signatures on them, and issue work orders and make that whole process very coherent, very accountable, very visible and somewhat automated.

Let’s get in and look at how we do this. First we have to acknowledge that there’s some problems when you’re working on your Master Service Agreements. Typically when folks come to us, talk about it, we find that their workflow isn’t enforced or optimized for contract processing, so they never know what’s due, and when it’s due, and from whom it’s due, and they end up looking for things like the reviewer’s notes which are nowhere to be found. Their Master Service Agreement development process isn’t developed enough, that these are a problem. They also tell us that teams are working outside of a system, which means that there is really now workflow being applied other than what people think they should be doing. There is no system to manage all of that and add that layer of accountability and visibility on top of the contract processing and administration process.

Sometimes we hear that folks are running into this horrible problem that we hear about all the time, where teams work from old revisions or superseded revisions, because there’s no place for them to go and quickly find the latest revision. When they do go to the place where it should be, sometimes it’s not there, or they look at the wrong one, and there’s just general confusion.

We’re also hearing that it’s difficult to deliver administrative Master Service Agreements via email. We get that. There’s no control with email-centric process. Shoot emails out and you just don’t know if they’re going to get back, you don’t know when they’re going to get back, people add the wrong attachments all the time, or no attachment. It’s a really clumsy way to manage an important process like contract processing and administration.

Finally, I think we can all acknowledge that emails and spreadsheets, they aren’t effective. The amounts of data that we deal with in 2015 are too big and our processes are too complex, we have too many people working together and specializing on different things, that emails and spreadsheets just aren’t effective ways to manage groups of people to interact with each other. Homegrown systems, sometimes we see great homegrown systems, but usually they have really limited functionality, and they always have huge hidden costs.

Let’s dive into this a little bit deeper and see what we do to address these typical project problems. The first thing we do, is we integrate your teams into a single system. This is something you should look into, definitely. We recommend a cloud-based application which we are, because it gives all of your users, all of your players in the game, on-demand access to the documents and the reports and the tasks, etc, all online, in a place where they can go get it and have some self-service. Then the system actually tracks what they do in there and allows you to report on it.

Also you can use things like rule-based permissions, so you can allow access to people to go find what they need without actually sacrificing the security, without leaving it wide open. People can’t go into your folder structure, just throwing that out there, and get into folders where they don’t belong, and stick their nose in something that they probably shouldn’t.

The third thing that’s great with integrating your teams into a single system, is that you can have supplier and client integration. You can actually have your clients participate in the review-and-approval process, where you’re developing and processing your Master Service Agreements, and then you can integrate your suppliers into the process by delivering them the Master Service Agreement and then delivering work orders corresponding to that Master Service Agreement.

The second thing that we do, and that you should really think about getting, is an optimized workflow. More than that, you want to enforce the right workflow that supports development of quality Master Service Agreements. Spec out what your workflow should be, and then find a system that’s going to work and enforce that workflow that you define, so people aren’t just relying on what they think is the right process to complete things. Actually have a system to make sure that steps are completed in the right order by the right people at the right times, etc. That’s really the workflow automation portion of it. If you have a system that enforces all of that, it really reduces the touches by the people that are in charge of shuffling documents around and verifying the revision of the Master Service Agreement is correct. It also eliminates a lot of the chance for human error and confusion, and things that cause the process to break down, or mistakes to be made, or money to be lost or exchanged unnecessarily, or wrong work to be done. There’s a huge amount of problems that you can solve by making this process more effective and efficient.

The third thing that you don’t think about with an optimized workflow, is in-application task and task management. This really gets rid of all the emails. When you have a system that will, when you want to send a Master Service Agreement out for review-and-approval, rather than going out in an email, letting people just work on it and send it back when they’re finished, it’ll create a task. A time-bound little segment of work that’s clearly defined, so there’s no ambiguity, get sent to a single person, and they go in, they action that, and submit their work, and it’s all accountable, it’s visible, there’s breadcrumbs and paper trails.

Moving on to number three here, you want all of your teams to have easy access to latest revision. I’ve said this a couple times now, and I’m probably going to say it a couple more times, because it’s massively important. If there’s not one place to find all of the latest revs, there’s a chance that team members, a very real chance that team members are going to work from the incorrect document revision. That’s going to cause some errors, it’s going to cause a lot of rework, and it’s going to cause a lot of frustration. People are going to take that home and bring it back to work the next day, because nobody wants to be doing that. You can totally eliminate that if you can have easy access to the latest revision.

How we do that is with the document distribution matrix. You’re users have online, permission-based access to the latest revisions. They might be able to see the previous revisions, but we put a watermark over it. The system automates that and only allows people to view superseded revisions and not download them. There’s some controls built in that make it so people always have the easiest access to the latest revision.

For number four, with Master Service Agreement administration, when we actually get into the demo I’m going to talk about contract delivery to your vendors, and keep them in a single application with all of the approved revision, the customer-signed revision, and the both-parties-signed revision, and how you can deliver that final one back out. Then I’m going to show you a little bit about the flexibility. We might not get there, but we do have the flexibility to manage your evergreen contracts and I’ll actually show you how to build and issue work orders in ProjecTools’ application.

Let me show you ProjecTools’ contract management. I’m going to prove to you guys that ProjecTools aligns your teams, enforces and automates an optimized contract management workflow, it provides a single place to quickly find the latest rev, and provides contract administration from the same application that you’re processing your Master Service Agreement in.

Let’s get in here in the application. This is the homepage, this is all online so users log in and this is the first thing they see. There’s a host of things they can do, but what I want to dive into is the document distribution matrix .This is a great tool. This is for every single user, all the documents that they have permission to is going to show up in this register. Then they can sort by latest revs, all revs, they can see the standard document number, the client document number. They can filter by project, PO, system, contract code, release date, supplier, etc. A very powerful tool that allows you to search, sort, segment, all of your documents. You can either download them, print them, review them, view them, whatever you need to do. There’s a lot of stuff you can do in here.

Real quick let’s take a look at, let’s go find an Master Service Agreement in here that I’ve been working on. We can see some things about this particular Master Service Agreement. We can see that there are some reviewer’s comments, approver’s comments, and then click on these and open those up. There are some book files, so any addendums or claims that you want to add to this Master Service Agreement you can do so, and view here, and download. We also have the file itself, we have the standard and the other, which is usually just a document for the contracts portion of it, and a PDF for the standard.

Other types of information, like engineering, you get into DWGs and CAD and stuff like that, but this it’s usually documents. We can also see the routing and transmittal history. We can see that this has been routed a number of times, and has various dispositions on it and so forth. That’s just a way that people can go in and view, and segment, and filter, and view the different Master Service Agreements and see where they’re at in the process. We see this is rev A. If there are more revs there would be more showing up in here.

“How do we get to this point?”, you’re probably asking yourself, and that’s a great question. I’m going to show you. In ProjecTools, in the back end of this thing, there’s what we call the Document Manager Module. This is where the administrators, your document managers hang out. When they come in here they can add placeholders for documents and then add files to those placeholders, and revisions, and metadata, and so forth. Let’s go take a look at that particular document.

Here’s that document record. We can see here on the maintain screen we can add the document number. It’s locked down because it already exists, but we can add a client document number and another document number, a title obviously, and contract codes, we can find who this is due from, what day it’s due, and we can have expiration dates in here and so forth. Additionally we can define permissions in the matrix, so who gets to see this particular document in their distribution matrix, like I showed you. You can add new revisions and release them based on today’s date, a previous date, or a future date. You can also maintain the files here, so if you have a new revision and you want to update the file, you can come in here and do that, or if you want to add any addendums or claims as a book file you can do that. Those documents will be, well those files will be associated with your document from here forward. You can also maintain progress and make some associations, and see a detailed history of what’s happened with this particular document.

The next thing I want to show you is how to process your Master Service Agreements. Let’s go here and we’ll initiate a routing. We’ll work on a draft routing that I started earlier. You can see here, things you can do. It’s a really simple wizard. You pick some options, documents, add some dispositions, and define your approver, define your reviewers, and then you release the routing. It looks really simple because I already had it built, but it is pretty simple if you go through it.

Let’s go see what that looks like over here on the homepage. After that routing get released, we can see, well actually it sends out a task to all of your reviewers and your approver. I make myself the approver here, so I’m going to go in here and look at this particular task. I can see some information, I can see who else was the reviewer here, and I can see that they haven’t really done anything with it, they haven’t even acknowledged it, but they’re not mandatory so I can pretty much get rid of them if I don’t need them to review it, if it’s just me. I can view their comments, view the comments of the individuals here that have reviewed this particular thing. I can consolidate the comments and click on the document and view it all at once. I can even download them and do a manual markup if I’d like.

After the reviewers have done their work, if they’re mandatory, I can indicate whether it’s rejected, approved, approved-as-noted, and so forth. That will send the document back to the document control group and they can process it, add a newer revision, or whatever they need to do depending on my disposition. We’ll just say that was approved, and internally, ready to go out to our supplier or our client, whoever’s going to approve it or sign it. We can, I’ll show you how we do that. It’s basically the same thing, there’s a wizard that’s very similar to the routing wizard. You run through the steps and define out who this is going to go to and what it’s going to look like and so forth. You add your documents, your disposition, and the team that’s going to work on it. That’s a good way to deliver your documents, your approved document to your supplier. They can sign it and return it to you, or your client if you need an extra, if they need to review it. They can either do that via an email task, which we don’t really recommend, or they can do it through a task like I just showed you on the homepage which makes everything trackable, very neat and concise, and not ambiguous at all.

I’ve taken you through the process of how to process your Master Service Agreements in the application, and get them out. Let’s take a look at what work orders look like. We usually suggest to work in a different project, a contract administration project. I have one here. We’ll go find the particular work order that I’ve already started. This is a request-for-purchase order, basically a work order in this context. For this thing we have various commercial information, planning, negotiations, any queries that have gone back and forth. What I really wanted to show you was how this integrates with the documents.

I found my Master Service Agreement and I’ve clicked over here, and associated this Master Service Agreement with this particular work order or request-for-purchase order. What this is going to do, is it’s going to associate this work back to the contract, in the distribution matrix, if I want to go see what Master Service Agreement this PO applies to I can filter it either by the Master Service Agreement or the PO and I can see all of the relevant stuff all grouped together. By linking these documents I can give the supplier access to the technical documents and filter the documents very easily on my end, by contract, contract details, or PO.

The process I’ve showed you today is pretty cool, and this process really allows you to process contracts and Master Service Agreements internally, distribute your Master Service Agreements for signature or distribution, or distribute your signed Master Service Agreements. It also allows you to link work orders and their associated documents and costs back to the Master Service Agreement, and it allows easy access to Master Service Agreements in the distribution matrix based on permissions that you define in your system.

ProjecTools Product Information

  • 817

ProjecTools Client Spotlight

September 24th, 2015|0 Comments

ProjecTools Client Spotlight "I don't see how companies can manage projects like [...]

  • 568

Standard Project Management Features

September 2nd, 2015|0 Comments

ProjecTools subscriptions provide valuable standard features that support projects. ProjecTools standard features are available to each user to complement core application functions and business processes. Utilize the modules below to increase top-down visibility, communication, accountability

  • 545

Security and Reliability

September 1st, 2015|0 Comments

Users need a secure, reliable environment to access project information and perform work. All applications and client data resides in a private cloud network with data replication and failover to geographically diverse datacenter equipment. ProjecTools provides 99.5% Network Availability

  • 492

Construction Project Management Services

August 31st, 2015|0 Comments

ProjecTeams is proven for flexible on-site or remote project deployments. Each ProjecTeam specialist has deep work history with a career of improving project execution, information management processes, with tools that make projects efficient, timely, and profitable.

ProjecTools Resources

  • 1872

Spreadsheets and Email as Project Management Tools

March 9th, 2017|0 Comments

Projects have too many moving parts and too many players to be trusting critical data to spreadsheets and emails. You need a spreadsheet reduction strategy.

  • 1811

Project Management Assessment

November 15th, 2016|0 Comments

Project Management Assessment Assess your project management practices against the best project execution teams in the Capital Construction, [...]

  • 1716
  • Review & Approvals

Document Management Software ROI

October 5th, 2016|0 Comments

Document management is massively important for engineering and construction projects. Take the approach and use the tools that add the most value.

  • 1357

Aligning Document Control and Cost Control

February 15th, 2016|0 Comments

Align Document Control with Cost Control and create seamless progress and earned value reports to stay on budget and improve cash flows.

ProjecTools Videos, Demos, and Webinars

  • 1519
  • Review and Approvals

Optimizing Review and Approval Processes for Engineering

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  • 1716
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Document Management Software ROI

October 5th, 2016|0 Comments

Document management is massively important for engineering and construction projects. Take the approach and use the tools that add the most value.

  • 1631

Document Distribution and Access for EPC and Construction

August 24th, 2016|0 Comments

Global projects have global teams that need to be in the loop. Cloud technology takes the pain out of giving teams on demand access to project data.