First, the typical problems that we hear about is TAG data’s all over the place. The TAG data is on spreadsheets that are on file servers. It’s on people’s desktops. It’s on flash drives. It’s just hard to centralize everything because it’s all over the place. The main problem that derails a coherent tag management strategy is that different groups are working on TAGs and TAG data, so the data ends up fragmented, living wherever it pleases.

The other typical problem we hear about all the time is that people are using spreadsheets. At the end of the day a TAG list is just a TAG number with a bunch of data associated with it, but when you use spreadsheets you encounter some of the inherent problems that always exist when teams use spreadsheets for project management. These problems are revision control, data quality, and duplicate copies, and rectifying duplicate copies, and so forth.

If the TAG data is fractured like this, engineering may produce multiple designs for a piece of equipment which wastes money. Or commercial groups may purchase too many, too few, or incorrectly spec’d things. Finally, the completions team won’t have the whole story – they won’t know the specifics about what they are testing which could lead to inoperability, shutdowns, or major delays.

Another problem that we hear about all the time is that there’s no rules or workflows. So once stuff does get changed, and this spills over into the revision history, you’re not sure why. Sometimes numbering doesn’t make sense, or different groups use different numbering sequences and formats, and it’s hard to get all of those things to work together.

The final big problem that we hear about all the time, just so ubiquitous, is that your TAG lists, they don’t connect with document management and they don’t connect with procurement, completions, or commissioning. This is a huge problem because all of these disciplines either rely on the engineering data in your TAG data base to do their basic job functions or they use tag data to complement their work.

The best solution for managing your TAG data is one that centralizes global TAG data for a project (or even an organization) in a single application. Further, the ideal system enforces and automates a workflow for numbering and naming. This system maintains accountability and visibility by tracking who makes changes to tags and what changes they made. The ideal system natively integrates with procurement, document management tools, and completions & commissioning.

The main objective is centralizing all TAGs in a single application

When users from across the world can log in to a tool and contribute to the TAG lists and equipment data from anywhere, there’s really no barrier to collaboration other than having an Internet connection. The main benefit is everyone is on the same page. There is one list that everybody woks from – no more decentralized spreadsheets. Further, if you have central repository so all of your project TAG lists are in one app you can drive some really awesome inter-project collaboration. For example, if you have a repeat project, you can duplicate the TAG list and pull over metadata and so forth. This is a huge time saver both in terms of administration and data entry, but engineering hours as well.

The second thing was an Optimized Workflow.

Rogue TAG numbering is bad. It confuses engineers, buyers, and throws a wrench into completion processes. More than standardizing TAG numbering you should look to smart numbering. If the system will build the TAG numbers based on the properties of the TAG, there ends up being a 100% confusion free and 100% duplicate free system that makes sense for all teams using the tag lists. For example, if ‘system’ is a level your TAG number, the system that’s logged against the TAG should populate that level of your TAG number. In the same way, a good system can translate a tag into the client’s number so you can produce more meaningful reports.

The third thing is Accountability and Visibility.

Engineering projects need a system that ensures a clean TAG register. The ideal system will clearly show who edited which TAG information, when they did it, and so forth. Then there’s revision history. Similarly, someone changes critical TAG data, there needs to be a reason so if somebody who looks at that tag later, they can be like, “Why did this particular piece of information change?” Just click over the “history” tab and you can see right there that I’m the person that changed it, and that I’ve entered a reason for why I’ve changed it. It’s just another level of control that projects in the 21st century should have.

Why we’re talking about this today is that when we show this to people they really like it. We’re getting a lot of responses about this. This is really just a small part of what ProjecTools does for engineering and design projects, but when we show it to engineering groups, they just love it.

These system to system interfaces are traditionally managed through emails and spreadsheets and little interface matrix apps to manage the collaboration among the different groups. Those don’t work, they definitely don’t work well because there’s no control and conversations aren’t pointed. There’s no real end point and it’s hard to log the conversations back to the project or the system. Beyond those very high level problems that are systematically there, there’s more in depth problems that we should talk about before we get into system to how system interface management should work.

When we talk to people about system interface problems, occasionally smaller engineering companies who are putting a lot of effort into segmenting conversations correctly come up with a question, “Is what we’re doing right?” It comes down to the distinction between inter discipline or intersystem communication. Inter discipline is really if you have a small shop, that might work well for a while, but if you’re working on a big project or have a big team, intersystem communication is really what needs to be tracked.

You need to figure out who’s talking to who on which teams regarding which systems. If you can track all of those conversations, log them to the project and make sure that they happened so you can go back and reference them and so forth, that’s a huge plus. The other question we get is, “Who drives the interface management?” We deal a lot in oil and gas, EPC, engineering, capital construction and so forth.

Usually it’s the EPC contractor, whoever is in charge of the project, maybe not the owner, but one level down, the contractor that’s responsible at the end of the day for delivering an asset or a deliverable. If your butt’s on the line and you face the big penalties if systems fail or don’t properly integrate, you’re probably the one that needs to drive interface management. You implement the process and make sure that everything’s tracked.

The other topic that comes up is traditional interface matrix apps, they break down because they don’t get specific enough and they don’t track the conversations back to the project, so things are just floating out in the ether, the internet of things. Emails get shot out and they copy the wrong people or people that don’t matter and people chime in that shouldn’t be chiming in and it just gets messy. You also have offshoots, where the email chain gets forwarded to someone for sidebar conversations and then try to bring that sidebar back to the group. This fragments the conversation and derails the progress that the larger group has made. I should point out here that this problem is not specific to engineering groups, it is a systematic flaw in email communication used to form a consensus or align teams. It just doesn’t work well.

Having to go find all of those branches of conversations and then wrap them back up to the project, which is often becoming a deliverable on it’s own, gets very hard to do. It’s very time consuming and oftentimes people can’t deliver complete, properly segmented because it’s just so far gone and so confusing. The other thing we hear is that most interface management tools that are even specific to engineering system interfaces, they’re incomplete and they don’t provide the specific interface points.

What I mean here is that true engineering centric system to system interface – the underlying thing that we’ve kind of talked about are traditional systems, they aren’t effective. These ad hoc interface management systems, emails, spreadsheets, Skype, phone calls, et cetera, they don’t get the engineering groups systematically logging and tracking these communications, which can lead to one, design issues and two, confusion.

Both of those things can cost you serious cash down the road, especially if you can’t defend the work that you’ve done or if providing system interface communication is a deliverable for you, so you could end up running into a bunch of trouble. The best solution for system interface management is one that provides interface points by system and there’s a workflow that will enforce that.

The system needs to aggregate system interfaces into a single place so you don’t have to track down a bunch of emails and ask people, “Hey, where did all this correspondence go? Where can I find it?” It should be found in a single place have a workflow that bounces around to the appropriate parties depending on the disposition of the last correspondence until there’s a definitive acceptance of the conversation or it’s closed. The system would prevent the logging of these conversations prematurely so requests end up resolved and other teams can go back and reference the conversation.

The ideal system to system interface management tool has accountability built in so things get done. Things are in tasks so if I get an interface request, I have to respond to it by the due date or my name is going to show up on a Late Action Report.

The system to system interfaces should be set up so that systems communicate with other systems. Moreover, system owners talk with other system owners. Your engineering groups should be able to define the systems that need to interface and how the systems interface. Then they can automate that workflow.

The first thing we’re going to talk about is numbering like a pro. There’s really a few components to this. There’s internal and external numbering that both need to be mastered to achieve professional status. Internally, you want to use a consistent numbering scheme, because inconsistent numbering confuses your teams, makes reporting a nightmare, and makes you look like a dunce. Also, you want to think about simplifying your internal numbering systems. Being too tricky, clever, or fancy can cause confusion among your team which means they won’t follow the rules or can’t find what they need. Keep it simple. The second aspect of this is external or client numbering. Your clients are clients and that’s where the money flows from. You want to accommodate your clients by giving them the option to view and search using the numbering that they’re familiar with. Obviously, you want to report to your clients using their numbering format as well. True professionals make this happen and the best professionals make sure this is automated. If you want to know how to automate this process email us and we can set up a consultation.

The second thing that you can do to prove that you’re a document management pro is distribute documents like a pro. The first step of mastering distributions is stop with the file servers already. Making your clients or your partners use VPN or remote desktop to log into a server or Dropbox to go look for files in a folder structure makes you look JV (Junior varsity). You want to take it up to varsity, so stop making your clients fight these backwoods systems. The second thing to think about is online distributions. Couriers, emails and all that is super old school. It’s untraceable and it’s really unsecure. If you use an application to distribute documents in a task format, you’re going to be ahead of the game. The third thing is self-service.

Document distribution isn’t just a push mechanism anymore. It’s also a pull mechanism. You want your teams, your partners and your clients to be able to go into wherever he has your documents and, like we said before, it shouldn’t be a file structure on a server or in a dropbox like application. You want them to be able to log in and access what they have permissions to see very quickly, very easily. Documents should be in a register with filters, NOT A FOLDER STRUCTURE. They should be able to export live data and download documents in batch. I’m really inclined to think that they want on-demand access so they don’t have to view document control as a gate keeper or the arbiter of documents. These are your clients after all, so you really owe it to your clients and your partners to make it easy. If you succeed in being easy to work with, they may want to work with you more often.

The third thing to think about is how to handle markups and reviews like a pro. There are a few different things that you need to think about here. The first one is letting your tech affirmative folks do online reviews, markups, and approvals. You have people in your office, I’m sure, that really just like printing papers and marking up documents by hand and scanning them back in to their desktop and then uploading them back into a system. All that printing and scanning sounds like a huge pain to me, but some people do like it, which is why you need to accommodate your paper pushers, too. As the saying goes, “different strokes for different folks.” What does this mean? It means you want to be accommodating and make your teams comfortable with your process – otherwise they will just do their own thing or sabotage your process. It is simply human nature. On the other side of the coin, when you are accommodating it builds your reputation as good a good document controller. It also builds your departments reputation as a good document control group.

Intertwined with distributions, reviews, transmittals, and submittals that make up the daily life of a document controller, it is also important to have a history. Have a systematic way to collect each reviewer’s markups and log them to the document in the correct revision. You also want consistent and clear dispositions. When somebody walks by the hall and says, “Oh, this looks good,” and hands you a stack of documents that are all marked up, that’s not a very clear disposition. You need to know whether it’s approved, rejected, approved as noted. You need to have that document electronically in the system with all of its revisions, markups and dispositions. Preferably the logging and categorizing of these documents is automated all of that as well. If you can automate that – it’s a sure sign of a pro. If you want details on how to make that happen, email us and we can set up a consultation.

The fourth thing that you can do to handle document management like a pro is to integrate like a pro. Here are some areas that you want to be able to integrate with. Procurement, for instance, you want your suppliers and vendors to have the latest revisions because if they’re building from the wrong revision, that’s going to cost some serious cash and it could definitely come back to your document control group and make you guys look bad and cost your company money. Obviously, that is not good, so you don’t want to do that. The second area is cost control. When the cost team is preparing progress reports, it’s really a pain to go back and forth and find the progress for your document register. Cost controllers, they don’t really want to beholden to your schedule and your list of tasks to do. If you could integrate your data with your cost control system so your progress transmits automatically, you’re going to be a step ahead. You’re going to get mad respect from your cost control group.

The third area of integration is inspections. Your inspectors, like your suppliers, they need the right rev to do their job. If they don’t have the right revision, they’re either not being effective or they’re sitting in the field at the inspection site idle with nothing to do. You want to provide them with the right revisions. You also want to add an element of self-service like we talked about earlier. Nothing breeds frustration like unreliable FTPs or waiting for a thumb drive to arrive in the mail from New Orleans when you’re in the fab yard in Korea.

The fifth thing we’re going to talk about is reporting like a pro. There are three parts to reporting – consistency, consistency, consistency. Pros deliver consistently formatted reports. Otherwise it looks like the reports are just cobbled it together every week at the last minute. You look unsure and disorganized. Consistency part 2. You want to pull your reports from a central document database so all your reports and status jive. We mentioned integrating with cost control. If you produce the progress report for your client and your cost controllers produce an earned value report that breaks out document progress and the numbers don’t match, they’re going to ask the questions that are going to be pretty hard to answer. Consistency part 3. When it comes to reporting, you want to make sure your reports are client friendly, ie. Consistent with their numbering. We mentioned this earlier as well. You want to report using the client’s document numbers and make it very simple for them to see what the progress is in their own terms.

Welcome to the Procurement Boot Camp. We are going to talk about some things you can do today, to shape up your procurement operation, and make sure you are ready to kick some butt in the coming year.

So first it is going to be beneficial to identify some things that a lot of procurement groups don’t quite get right. Let’s get into that first, and then we will go into some things he can do to remedy those problems, and really dig into the boot camp.

As far as the problems in procurement right now, it’s just a really tough environment. It’s very price-focused climate, all you hear from the top is cut costs, cut costs, cut costs. Especially if you are in some uncertain industries right now. Like some of our clients are in oil and gas. They are hitting their vendors hard, and they are hitting systems hard, and it’s affecting their ability to maintain a relationship with their suppliers and it’s affecting the buyer’s moral and ability to execute. It’s hard to keep functioning at a high level, when you are just focused on price rather than value. So that is one problem.

Another problem that procurement groups run into, is that they are hearing that time-to-PO is too long. They are taking too long to get the information from engineers, legal, clients, and suppliers to assemble the requisition, and run it through the commercial review and approvals. The bottom line is that the building of the procurement package, and cutting the PO is just taking too long.

We are also hearing that PO development is too labor intensive. This is true, and it is mostly because of some stuff that we are going to talk about following this. Really the keys to reducing labor on building out your requisitions is standardizing and making repeatable process, getting everybody working together in a system, and making sure teams are accountable. If you can supply your buyers, or your buyer team, with tools or a method make all those things happen, the labor per PO is going to go way down, and you are going to be cutting POs way quicker. Your procurement team is going to add a lot more value to your company.

Some problems that cause the first three here. We see all the time that some procurement teams are constantly rewriting the book with what they are doing. They will cut one PO and feel really great about it, and then they will go work on another requisition, and they will basically start from scratch, maybe reuse a couple of things if they can find it. If they can find the last spreadsheet with the terms and standard lists and all that stuff, they will use it. This isn’t a good repeatable process. A repeatable process uses category specific templates and a pre-defined workflow for processing a requisition according to category.

Another problem is the inability to commit to standards and templates. All of these you see probably relate to each other, but when you commit to standards and templates, you are not constantly rewriting the book because you have standards and templates that you can draw from and develop your requisitions quicker, and get them out the door quicker, and make sure that you didn’t miss anything very important and critical.

Another problem is siloed teams and information. If teams aren’t communicating effectively one doesn’t really know what the other is doing. This is an age old business problem: siloed teams can’t work together, they are off in their own areas, doing their own thing, just really hoping for the best. With the amount of information that we have in the business world now, information is the same way. If these groups that are over here doing their own things, have their own big, vast silos of information, and the other teams that need them can’t get to them. A great example here for the procurement boot camp, is if your engineering team has all this detailed technical data that you are going to need for your requisition, but you have no way to access it, other than picking up the phone, or shooting an email, or sending a smoke signal. That is not an integrated situation. That is siloed information, and that is not going to help you guys cut POs quicker, or reduce labor, or add more value.

The following problem here, is non-integrated data and applications. Your data is very important, and having visibility in your data is what allows you to make, good, logical decisions in the procurement world. Not being able to see the full picture will all of the data in one place, you are operating at a disadvantage. It is a huge problem.

The next problem that we see all the time in the procurement world, is that suppliers give us the runaround. They are generally pretty slippery. They could be on the other side of the world, they could be speaking your language as their second or third language. It’s just hard to keep on track and have some visibility into their progress, what they are doing, and how they are adding value to your procurement operation. If you can prevent your suppliers from giving you the runaround, you are going to have a massive advantage going forward.

Another very common problem is numbering confusion, revision confusion, and all that. This really speaks to your internal process. How developed is your internal process, do you have standard numbers? How do you maintain revisions? How do you know which requisition revision is the latest? Do you even use requisition revisions? These are all questions you need to ask yourself, and evaluate how you are doing it, and wonder if there is a better way. Even the most robust, and established procurement operations, even world class operations, they have room for improvement here as far as standardizing your conventions and process and optimizing that process.

The next one here is exporting PO information to a spreadsheet and sending it to Quality Surveillance. This speaks back to the integration of your applications. There is kind of a two parter here. Do you have a procurement application that is going to manage your quality inspections? If you do, how are you going to get that PO information over there to that system? Do you send a spreadsheet, do you just call them up and say “We have cut this PO, here are the PO dates and delivery dates that we have agreed upon” or maybe even set a meeting to communicate this information. I put these up here because these are very typical things, send around spreadsheets, calling people, or setting a meeting to just update people on status, and need dates, and where you are at. I view these activities as a waste of time – or put more delicately – room for improvement.

There are certainly better ways to this, and it all centers around tools, processes, and teams. If you have the right team members, with the right ideas on how to run procurement, and the right tools to implement those ideas, and get these teams working together, you are going to be at a massive advantage in the procurement world going forward. I heard this the other day, when I was on a call with a prospective client, and he said procurement teams without the right tools, spin their wheels, eat profit, and make themselves miserable with stress, frustration and uncertainty. That rung with me, and I put it in here because it is true. If your very talented buyer teams, are going into the process without the right tools, and processes, they are going to spin their wheels, and that is going to eat profit, and your teams are going to be miserable, frustrated, stressed out, and they are not going to know what is going on possibly in their own department, and certainly not in other departments if applications aren’t integrated and you don’t have regular communication protocols.

Now that we have identified the problems, let’s get into boot camp mode and see how we can fix them. The first thing you should work on right now is you need to get your suppliers working in your system. This gives you an incredible advantage being able to have visibility into what your suppliers are doing, and the progress they are making on your products. You can also gain insight into and pull metrics from what they are doing and rate your suppliers quantitatively.

The next thing you want to do is standardize and enforce your lists, your numbering, your categories, your workflows, etc. You want to define your process, because if you don’t define your process, there is no way to improve it if it is not documented. Once you define your process. Whatever the process is at first is fine as long as you can define it, standardize it, and enforce it. The problems are going to rear their head with your process, and then you can go about fixing them in a logical, assertive, positive way.

The third thing to do, is to eliminate silos and disconnected systems. Like we talked about earlier, you don’t want to have teams that are separated and can’t communicate with each other, and use the different groups data to their advantage. Starting around 2006 and on there is no reason that we should be hiding data from folks critical to our projects that it could definitely benefit. Especially if they work in the same company as you.

The fourth thing that you really ought to think about is using a task based system that will maintain accountability and reduce confusion. There is a few parts to this. A task based system means that chunks are built up by the procurement staff, and send out to the authorities, the reviewers and approvers, in a nice contained little online task, that they can go in, and complete, and notes to, and send back to the system with a clear disposition on what needs to be done. This will maintain the course and the schedule, and provide a clear path to move that requisition forward, and eventually become the PO that is going to make you guys a bunch of money, and get delivered on time, and operate beautifully.

ProjecTools, we actually have an application that does this, and we have an application that does this incredibly well. It was really built around standardizing your procurement framework, your templates, your lists, and your categories, and all of that. Building a workflow that matches your process, and will really enhance your deliverables. Number two is, it gets your suppliers and your subs working in your system, in a very coherent way that adds visibility and accountability. Number three, ProjecTools integrates with other applications. It integrates with our document application, our cost application. It integrates with scheduling and quality surveillance, and logistics. It also integrates with equipment manager, so your engineering can actually feed your commercial teams on the procurement side. Number four, ProjecTools provides accountability, and visibility so thing get done, they get done on time, and if they don’t get done on time, or in the correct manner, you can go in and see what happened and report on performance. It is very important to have each of these, to remain competitive in this environment and elevate the conversation past cost to value.

These are all really important things to have when health, safety could be on the line. You want to make sure that your process is as tight as possible, because health and safety are so important from moral, social and economic standpoints. The market demands that you have sound HSE practices. Clients demand it. The industry demands it. The government demands it. The people at large demand it. It’s for this reason that HSE and HAZOPS are very important things to think about and have completely under control.

ProjecTools HSE is for oil and gas, EPC, and engineering companies who are dissatisfied with the traditional HSE and HAZOP management system, which, as it turns out for a lot of folks, aren’t really systems at all. Rather, they’re using emails and spreadsheets that get unruly and don’t promote teamwork or automation.

The idea is to give you a confident stable HSE and HAZOPS management system that will get your teams working together, automate your work flows and your tracking, reporting, and followup. It will stop all the vicious cycles of dealing with revision issues, guarding spreadsheets under lock and key, having no visibility into your process and having team members circumventing the agreed upon HSE and HAZOPS workflows. Ultimately, it’s going to help you down the path to improving safety and reliability of assets and what you’re building and what you’re designing, without having to manage every little process and spend nice weekends in the office organizing and auditing what people have done and the path that information flows through. Let’s get into some of the problems.

As soon as we start talking about HSE problems, something jumps into my mind. It makes me think of a client that we have, Carl. Carl is HSE coordinator for an oil and gas, EPC project. He saw that there was a grayed out button in his company’s ProjecTools instance. He called us up about it to figure out what it was all about. In that conversation he was telling us about the issues he was having, how much time he was wasting and how unbelievably frustrated he was. He was saying the people on his team were breaking the workflow they agreed upon. The email chains and the spreadsheets that he was relying upon were being compromised.

Carl had actually come back from vacation and his HSE tracking spreadsheet had turned into seven tracking worksheets. It was unclear what changed while he was gone. He didn’t know who made the changes and why they made the changes and so forth. He was really worried that he didn’t have the latest revision. It appeared that while he was out, his staff made various updates to his spreadsheet and just kept “saving as.” It took him quite a while to straighten it out and a long time to get the process back under control.

After diving into those issues that he was having, he wanted to know what our HSE and HAZOP app could do for him. After showing him the application, and how to import data and set up the app and the players and the workflows and then after some basic imports, setup and training, his staff was using the application within a couple days.

They haven’t looked back. They don’t use email based workflows. They don’t use spreadsheets. They can report on everything they do. They always know what’s the recommendations are. They don’t have to track anything down and have off on conversations to figure out what happened. It’s all here. We, basically, completely solved his problems that he was having

Let’s take a look at those three critical competencies of HSE and HAZOP management.

The first one is, use HSE workflows. You got to have a workflow that’s optimized for your industry and what you’re building and how your organization is set up.

The second thing is integrating your HSE and HAZOP stakeholders. Bring in everybody who might be working from different offices across the globe, bringing them together so they can work together better. This does not mean using emails to transfer emails back and forth and complete studies. That is definitely not what I mean. I means having an online system that accommodates your global team’s partners, clients and contractors. This shouldn’t involve spreadsheets, which are unreliable and really confusing when you have multiple people working in them.

The third thing is maintaining accountability. How you do that is with task based workflows, reporting ability, various types of reports that are going to support the HSE and HAZOP management process.

Let’s take a look at each one of these. We’ll talk about them for a couple of minutes. Then I’ll get into the application and I’ll show you just a quick snapshot of what we do and how we support the efficient and effective completion of HAZOPS. Really, what I want to give you guys today is an idea of how to use these critical competencies to improve our HSE and HAZOP management process.

First we’ll talk about workflows. What we’re looking at here is a very simple internal workflow. Your HSE admin sends out a study. It goes to responsible party. It goes to a reviewer who can reject it. If it’s accepted it can be passed on to the approver who can either reject it or accept it and it’s closed. This is very simple. For a lot of studies, this will work great. You need more than that. Let’s take a look at how we can build on this workflow. I’m really showing you these things because you should be able to document exactly what your workflow looks like. Then you should enforce that workflow. You use the same workflow every time. You can report on that workflow. It’s just something you can’t do with emails.

Taking a look here at this second workflow. It’s basically the same workflow, but the approver can say, “Yeah, it needs more work, but I agree in principal.” It goes back and kind of repeats the same thing with the notes, adding evidence and so forth. The third workflow is very important. This is where having your house in order really can benefit you. It’s when you have to add your clients. Here’s a whole HSE workflow that will pretty much work for any HSE/HAZOP study. The typical workflow with the agreed on principal, if it needs more clarification, and then sending to a client. You might follow this workflow anyway. It’s not enforced and it’s not delivered to the client with all of the comments wrapped up in a nice, neat package, it could be confusing. If you send it out in an email and it is confusing, you guys are going to look JV. They’re going to wonder, “How solid is this process if what they’re giving us is something that’s sub-par?” Anyway, if you’re going to include your clients in your HSE workflow, you got to have it in order. Make it task based. Pay attention to the next couple slides.

The second critical competency is integrating your stakeholders. How you do this is you have an online system that uses task based workflows. I’ll say it again. Online system with task based workflows for integrating your teams, partners, contractors and clients. A great example of this is our application ProjecTools. All of these users log in and as the studies make their way through the workflow, they get tasks on their homepage right where they log in to the application. When they see they have a task, or if they get an email notification saying, “Hey, you have a task,” they’ll log in and they complete the task. They don’t have to go digging for the supporting documents. They don’t have to read down through thirty emails bounced back and forth between the folks. They can see a nice, neat, concise history and all the things that they need to complete their review approvals, suggestion, whatever it is, wherever it’s at in the process.

What the online system offers is consistent presentation of information, clear communication of the expectations. Is this a review? Is it approval? What are we asking you to do? Where is that in the process? Let’s spell it out. Then that clear communication of expectations, it will remove the ambiguity, which often causes the inaction, people just leave it there because they don’t really know what to do with it, and the confusion. Finally, the revision control. When you use an automated process to integrate all your teams, you know exactly where it’s at. You know exactly where each study’s at. You can track things the whole way through.

All right, moving onto the third critical competency of HSE and HAZOP management. That’s maintaining accountability. Most folks are pretty good at this anyway because HSE is so important, but when you have a system, you’re able to automate this accountability maintenance. With task based workflows, you can have due dates. Due dates are great when you have tasks because they’re not just arbitrary. You can really report on them. There’s no really skirting around responsibilities and due dates when it’s in a system like ProjecTools. You have reporting ability. You can see delayed action and prod people along. You can see the progress and make sure that you’re on schedule for completing your studies. You also can see the status. Like, where are we at? How can we speed this up? Really get into the metrics of your HSE management. Also, the system should retain all the mark ups and the conversations and the threads and the history, et cetera. For quick reference, either at the end of the project or as your HSE coordinator is coordinating the HSE study.

As I mentioned, ProjecTools does have an HSE application that integrates your suppliers, your subs, clients, partners, et cetera. It gets everybody working in the same HSE system. It enforces and automates the optimized agency workflow. It centralizes HSE data and automates all the tracking. Let’s take a look at project tools application right now. I’m just going to show you a little bit of it here. When you log into ProjecTools from the ProjecTools website, it is a cloud based system that you access through a browser. Here I am logged in, has the project manager here. I can see that in my incomplete tasks area I have an HSE action review. If you go back to that workflow with the initiation and the responsible party and the review and approval client review and closeout. Right here, the task will tell me where I’m at in the workflow, when this thing is due. It will give me all of the relevant information about the HAZOP study so I can go in and complete it without having to dig for all of the additional information. I can see that there’s a description, there’s a recommendation, there’s reference documents, reference files. Then there’s a history and a log of all the things that have happened. I can see the last thing that happened is the Quality Surveillance (QS) manager has completed their response. They attached the LS4 Valve 51. It does effect the operations manual.

Taking into account all of this nice, neat HSE study package, I can make an informed contribution to this conversation. You just add it in here. You can add supporting files and so forth. Then you make a disposition which will indicate to the workflow in the application what it should do. Does it affect the operation manual? Yes. Okay. That will keep, it’ll note it here going forward. If I accept this, it’s going to move it on through the workflow. It’s going to go to the approver. If I don’t approve this, I can send it to the approver anyway, or I can send it back to the assignee. The approver, on down the line, he would have the ability to, he or she would have the ability to either approve it or send it on to a client and have the client review it as well. There’s a lot of flexibility. The workflows should adapt to whatever the needs of the study are, which is something I didn’t really talk about before in the workflow section, but keep that in mind as you think about how to optimize your HSE and HAZOP management

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.