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.

 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.

 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.

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.

 Transmittal Management Demo Transcript