Nobody Reads Your Gantt Chart

Robert: Welcome everybody back at the Context Exec Podcast again this week. new friend Carlos here from Aphex. I am excited to you know find out more about Aphex. I just had some folks on in the civil world. but you're across the pond as they say, and so it's your it's your afternoon, it's my morning, and we're just gonna kind of start throwing this down. How you doing this morning, Carlos?

Carlos: Very well, thanks. It's yeah, it's my afternoon here. It's summer seems to be over, it's already started to rain back in the UK, which I appreciate is the stereotype that people hear too much. It probably isn't as true as they say, but yeah, how are you doing?

Robert: I'm doing great. you know, I'm like I said I was I'm in Denver today, going to the CDA conference with a client of mine. So this is gonna that's gonna be fun.

Carlos: Nice.

Robert: to see all the new the new gear, and those kind of things. So I run a little I run a little I don't know what you call it, it's it's a carpentry shop but we make acoustic products and we install them.

Carlos: well.

Robert: Yeah, so I've never been to this show before, so I'm kind of excited to go. I think it'll be fun and to do and see kinda what's going on. But really I'm here to find out more about like what's going on at at Aphex and i am I pr I'm pronouncing that right, right? Okay, very, very good.

Carlos: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bang on Aphex

Robert: So I I I did a little bit of research background on it, but I wanna kinda hear it from you. It was like You know, w why why Aphex, why the short term planning, like how'd you get how'd you get started in this? Just give us little background.

Carlos: Cool, we're going back a few years. So I guess

Robert: Here we go, that's totally fine. I love it. Yeah.

Carlos: Yeah, yeah. I guess to set some context, because yeah, I appreciate people listening to this podcast, they might have been there and delivered projects, they might have more of a backseat and they might have l little to no knowledge. But if we think about projects around the world, complex schemes, whether it's infrastructure or building, they all run like these what we call like a master schedule, like a a plan for beginning to end. How are we gonna build this job? And there's a load of activities that get you from from from beginning to end. and that's owned by planners or schedulers or whatever the term is for the region that that you're from. And

Robert: Mm-hmm.

Carlos: then you have the actual construction team, and they were almost entirely reliant on Excel, PowerPoint, whiteboard, sticky notes, WhatsApp, emails, whatever they can get their hands on to try

Robert: Hmm. Right.

Carlos: and Rather than on like a monthly basis updating this this contractual schedule, it's every

Robert: Mm-hmm.

Carlos: day. What are we doing? What's changed? What do we need to replan? What do we need to re-sequence? What's the plan for tomorrow? What happened this morning? Like

Robert: Right. Yeah.

Carlos: there's there's a thousand things that change every day. And you can imagine how difficult that is on spreadsheets where everyone's in their own plan. You don't see this oversight of everyone's plans together. If my plan's

Robert: Right. Right.

Carlos: delayed, that might kick out your plan. You have no idea till I turn up to a meeting and shout about it.

Robert: I would say I would say a spreadsheet yeah, a spreadsheet is where a plan goes to die. You know, it's

Carlos: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And like low barrier to entry, right? Like any of us can pick up a spreadsheet and and put him some dates. Yeah, exactly.

Robert: That's right. And and anybody can screw it up. Right, yeah. Absolutely.

Carlos: And I spent the first part of my career working for like a tier one G C in the UK called Costain, like typical sort of infrastructure contractor. so worked on a scheme called Crossrail or the Elizabeth Line, a big new tube running through central London and then a bit of high speed too. And I was shocked that I went to one of the biggest, supposedly most glamorous projects in the world, and it was the same, same old set of spreadsheets. Steve's template from tw 2008 gets knocked about, and you change the name and off you run. So there's a few of us, I guess when the founding team of Apex that went through that experience and realization firsthand. I also personally spent a long time in something called project controls, which is how do we actually use that in? information to then report progress and and value and that good stuff and collecting that data manually is even worse than trying to to plan. So that was really what kicked kicked us into gear and drove Apex because we needed a tool for the construction team. No one they don't like the big complicated schedules. It's things change every day, not every month. So it was something suitable for the guys on the ground. And that's like easy to use, but gives gives them value rather than just another reporting tool for people to monitor what they're doing.

Robert: Well, I like the way you're thinking because I am you know, I'm I'm all for the field guys. That's where I got started. That's where I spent a lot of time, you know, working out in the field. And to your point, it's that it's the surprise that you end up having when you walk even on a big job, small job, doesn't matter. It seems like we're still using those same old tools, no matter how fancy it is, you know. and

Carlos: Yeah.

Robert: and we're f it's like the fallback for some reason. Of, you know, well, we don't really have time to implement something new or improved, so we're just gonna go back to the old fallback. Maybe we'll get it next time. You know, and it seems Yeah. Yeah, and it's still screwed up, right? Because then we wonder

Carlos: Yeah. Yeah. It's familiar and it's yeah. It's yeah.

Robert: why we're still screwing it up and why, hey, we got a master schedule over here which I Master Schedules to me, and I've written about this, is they're they're absolute fiction. You know, it's it's it's all fairy tales and

Carlos: It's a snapshot at a point in time based on a a list of assumptions, right? It's yeah. Yeah.

Robert: a a a very large list of assumptions on a very large list of assumptions about how much it's actually gonna cost. so I think it's funny. so is it like I mean, e g again, I'm big fan of kind of lean construction and and kind of pool planning, things like that. So I it seems though you kinda come from that kinda same kind of background, yeah?

Carlos: Yeah, exactly. There's a there's a lot of when I was on projects, there was a lot of consultants that they bounce around, we're doing now doing lean, now we're doing last planner, now we're doing pool planning, now we're doing tact planning, now we're doing lots of lots of processes with heavy sessions and lots of consultants. We've embedded the the principles of a lot of these practices. So some would say it's a last planner tool. The way that we we take milestones, team plan to those milestones, they deliver those, we track progress against, we score, and we we learn from it and we and we replan and re deliver. So they are the principles that it's built on. the thing that we're really focused on as a team on how we make this not just another schedule that sits under a schedule that gets updated every week, but it's how You then take the schedule and give it to site because as you said, then like you started on site, people on site have way more knowledge and understanding of a project than the people in the office, and the best project managers I ever worked with were the ones that always had the foreman or the superintendents in their ear every day, keeping them like afloat with all the best information, the most relevant stuff, the issues and the and the challenges. So it's about how do we actually distribute that plan, the daily plan. out to the guys actually building the job and then get their their notes, their photos, their comments, their progress updates back in a food back loop that means we know what happened yesterday, not we're scrambling to recover something that screwed up last Monday, if you know what I mean. So

Robert: Yeah. At a buddy of mine had a bunny of mine, Kyle Nietzschean, from Lawton is I think the company he works for, but he and I were talking, we were at a conference one time, and he goes, He's like, you know, my job as as the PM is to just turn on all the green lights for all the guys in the in the field, like my supers and my foreman. I'm he goes, I'm there to provide green lights if if I can. And I was like, Man, makes all kinds of sense, right? He's like a traffic director. And if if you don't know, you know, who's driving the cars, right, you can't direct traffic.

Carlos: Yeah yeah. I like the saying. Yeah, I mean ultimately it's have you got a design, have you got documents? Have got permits? Have we got have the has it been safety checked? Do we have everything in place so that they can actually build the job? So you're continuously trying to keep those lights green and and fight the fires that might be delaying those green lights. So yeah, it's a it's a good way to to explain it. I like that.

Robert: Yeah, I thought it was. I was like, okay, yeah. You know, that's a great way to put it. so you've got you're in London now, you've been doing this in the UK for like how long has Aphex been in the UK for right right now?

Carlos: So we first the first sort of you can imagine the first like couple of years you're doing largely product development and things like that.

Robert: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carlos: we first went to market in the UK in twenty eighteen. and we were fortunate enough to large land some pretty large schemes, like one called Thames Tideway, which is the supersur under the Thames to to pull all the wastewater to avoid flooding. And we were pretty focused on the UK for the first sort of two to three years. We then launched in Australia and part of our founding team are Australian. and they would become our sort of two sort of home hub markets, if you will, where w we've got

Robert: Sure.

Carlos: large majority of the teams based. and then It was sort of last year we sort of saturated those those markets. Most major schemes in the UK, Australia, New Zealand run with Apex and we're with like eighty percent of the G Cs within those regions. or

Robert: Okay.

Carlos: the tier one GCs I should say, so sort of major or complex schemes. So

Robert: That's true.

Carlos: each hub is sort of broadening their horizons and then I'm part of the team that's gonna go and head up North America, which is why last year we sort of soft launched over in Toronto. So 'cause there's a pretty intense concentration of major schemes in one city there. And then I'm actually pulling the family away from London and moving them to January to Toronto in January, where we'll spend the majority of next year. So yeah, quite excited for that. and yeah, a ton of opportunity. That's I think it's the the most it's gonna be the busiest construction city in the G seven for the next ten years or something like that. which is super impressive. Yeah.

Robert: Toronto is. Wow. Okay, that's that's

Carlos: I think it's two hundred it's over two hundred billion dollar worth of committed pipeline just in Ontario. And that doesn't include the new high speed rail from Montreal to Toronto, which is adds a lot more onto that. So yeah, a ton of work.

Robert: Yeah, right. So I had a couple of questions kind of based on your yeah, that path. And I wanted to know kind of the two biggest takeaways. You know, you come out of a project or you come out of R and D basically while you're developing your your product, and then you get that first job, right? You're working on that first thing. What was if you will tell me, I don't know if you will, but what was major lesson learned, like you know, kind of right off the bat you got into it and you went, wow, okay, we really need to work on this

Carlos: Yeah, there's there's a ton of I guess literature that you can read and there's one or two books in particular that talks about how you go to market and how you sort of take that first leap. because you need to go and get those early adopter type personas on board to sort of drag you through those first stages where you you're ultimately selling them a vision. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robert: You gotta get somebody to beat you up. Yeah. Somebody's gotta beat you up for a little bit so you improve. Yeah.

Carlos: Exactly. You pitch the vision and they beat you up until you get there.

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: and everyone always says if you go to market when it's done, you're too late. So going to market but then landing a s a six billion dollar job as like our third client was a slightly stressful encounter. Yeah, yeah.

Robert: I can imagine they call that hook and the whale, right? Is it how do you get the whale in the boat?

Carlos: Exactly. but you kind of I guess it's been enough years now to say it, but you you kind of have to fake it to you make it. There's a lot of things you're doing behind the scenes to make sure that everything's still turning and and delivering value. And like happy to say that all the GCs on those projects are now large customers of ours, sort of eight years on. So there were no bridges burnt, but there's definitely I had a full head of hair when we started on that project. So it's it's definitely taken its toll. but it's all about like Aren't these initial sort of pioneers, if you will, they really are buying into the thing that they you're you're pitching that you can be and they like to go on the journey with you. And as long as you have the mindset of constantly iterating, and I mean thousands and thousands of product iterations to make sure

Robert: Uh-huh.

Carlos: that it's a tool that the the industry wants, not a tool that you think they need. Because there are way too many super clever PhD students coming out with systems for construction teams. And then when this massive form lands on site and everyone goes, no way am I filling that out every day. Why why does that benefit me? you need

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: to be super tight on yeah, they know better than us. How can we help them? And if it's a tool that genuinely helps them, then they will use it and then we can use the data. Then we can we can do the reporting and the things that should be secondary, not I want a report, so go fill this form in.

Robert: Yeah, that is fantastic advice for anybody out there that is planning on a starting anything up and and doing anything in construction. Make sure that the tool works for the the user. It doesn't it's not some, you know, pointed solution that it should work this way. I think a lot of times there's areas where, you know, and I'll call kids just because I've been doing this for thirty five years, so when

Carlos: Yeah.

Robert: you know, kids. I think they get in the into the into this just because you have a great idea, I would say be prepared to have it shot down. Right? And

Carlos: Yeah.

Robert: and be prepared to, as you said, thousands of iterations of of changes and little tweaks and things. Be prepared for heavy, heavy feedback on this. So thinking about that and thinking about the feedback that you got, obviously it's been a success in the UK. Now you're moving And and Australia. You're now you're moving into Toronto, lots of lots of business. Is that because the folks that you're working with, like the the bigger folks are working over there and they're like, hey, we need to use this over here on these tools? Was that kind of the driver?

Carlos: Yeah, there's a combination of factors really. obviously North America is a huge market that we we obviously want to serve. So it's kind of a question of where where do we establish that first sort of beachhead and and build out a f a team. and we work quite extensively across Europe, for example, and a large percentage of jobs within North America are delivered by the big European contractors that that they are everywhere. So we are going across with existing customers. That want us to be supporting their schemes over there. So it's a combination of where do our customers customers pull us to, where's the concentration of work? It's really important for us to actually co-locate where the work is because you can you can see the projects, you can meet people, and and that side of it is so important rather than just sort of pushing something on them from over the pond and saying, Hey, this is how everyone else does it, and we think you should do this too. You need to kind of immerse yourself into everything.

Robert: Well it's

Carlos: and the language and the culture, everything changes quite substantially.

Robert: It's different and it is yeah, you're absolutely right. It is different and I think that you've got make a great point in the fact that where you are in the region Like everything feels very local. I've always said that you couldn't take a road crew from Texas and go drop into North Dakota and expect the same results. You know, it's it's a totally different environment and you're still in the same, you know, country, right? it's a totally different environment, in in both. And it's kinda like you said, it There's a different asset level there as the number of people that can be working, there's a different, you know, weather conditions, there's different everything. And you really kinda gotta be a part of that to kind of see where the where where you fit.

Carlos: Yeah, definitely. And then just logistically it's it's quite an accessible place to to travel around East Coast, US and Canada. so yeah, it made a ton of sense. It allows us to be close to the work. and ultimately we need to go and build out a team that would serve serve that market. So yeah, we've we've got a bunch of schemes already up and running in Canada. we're working with a few of the biggest contractors already and we've been doing that sort of remotely, but now it's go and be there and and build out the team, really understand the market and do what we've done in these these other regions.

Robert: So You you picked, you know, short term planning over over do you when when you start working with a company and you've kind of got this thing going on, do you get some butting of heads when we start talking about, hey, the master schedule says this, but hey, my Aphex program over here says this and this is why. Like I kind of Give me that because I've been on a few very, very large jobs where, you know, the word comes down from on high, you know, well the master schedule says this. We should be here, here, and here. Tell me why we're not there. Yeah.

Carlos: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. This is a conversation I reckon I've had five hundred times in the last two years. And it's something that we think quite deeply about because projects don't normally fail in one big moment or one thing that happens on site. they normally drift. You end up with these two sort of the the the master schedule and the construction plan, they sort of just drift apart and they become less and less aligned over time. and even harder is to explain why it's drifting. so As that sort of gap is, I guess quietly getting wider and wider, it kind of gets the point where it's really hard to realign and and course correct and bring those back into sync. So the tool is designed in a way that makes sure that we have this cadence of the construction team can plan how they need to plan without being too restrictive over like what is in that contract schedule. But the two are intrinsically linked. So a lot of teams will take like the next two months worth of their months. Schedule, they dump it into Apex and the construction team break it down into more detail. So you go from like a two-week long activity to five three-day tasks or whatever that sort of adds up to, and then you get down to the like daily shift briefings, but everything goes back through the chain, so it's this succinct sort of data string from contract schedule all the way down to like your shift report or your diary. So,

Robert: Uh-huh.

Carlos: and as part of that process, every time that the team like extend a date or Delay a task or make changes to the programs. We track the changes, we track the reasons why they have to enter that information. So we can say to the project manager, hey, your project, there was 15 delays yesterday, seven of them are because of subprotractor resource issues. Four of them are plant failure, and the other three are the weather. So we're giving people information to course correct on a 24-hour feedback loop rather than master schedule gets updated, and then you go, shit, we're three weeks late, and that's information that actually surfaces. Seven weeks ago before it made its way through the ranks. So exactly, yeah.

Robert: Right. Yeah, the lack of information loop, right? The lack of inform yeah it's it's a terrible thing.

Carlos: Yeah. So we're still aligning that you want that common incentive of everyone trying to aim for the same milestones. But we're giving the construction team that that freedom of flexibility to plan in a system that suits them, but keeping those two schedules in sync is the ultimate hack and that's why teams get so excited about the tool, because I've seen some projects where they literally print the contract schedule, give it to site and go deliver this. And it's like well the reality is that's that was a point in time and actually this is happening

Robert: Yeah. Okay.

Carlos: on site. And we're actually here and then they do drop lines which are a zigzag, which makes no sense 'cause it should just be what's happening today. So yeah, it gets quite

Robert: Right. Yeah, you wanna confuse yeah, you wanna confuse a guy on the a guy on the field. Just give him the master schedule. I mean he just sort of he'll look at it and go, Yeah, this means this means nothing to me.

Carlos: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Thirteen layers of WBS, different types of logic, all over the place. You're like, What the hell is this? And then you've got to communicate that to your supply chain. And they just wanna see a map of work areas of who's working where today so they can manage their interfaces. And that's like the output that we give to them. So it's this visual planning piece because no one wants to look at a gant chart at seven in the morning. It doesn't matter how sexy your gant chart is, it's seven in the morning and no one's looking

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: at it, give them a visual map. So

Robert: Yeah, there is

Carlos: Yeah.

Robert: there is something to be said for like again, I always loved a good looking Gantt chart myself. Just, you know, that looks fantastic.

Carlos: Yeah.

Robert: But i i it again, if the if the details not there but like what 'cause really when you're in the field it's like, what are we doing today, tomorrow and the next day? And that that's really what I need that's really what

Carlos: Exactly. Yeah.

Robert: I need to see. And what's gonna screw up between then and there or you know, what are the what are the glaring, obvious, you know, things.

Carlos: Exactly. Have I got a permit? Do I know which crew I'm using? Which subcontractors am I handing off to next? Like the basic details to keep sight moving every day, and to stop it grinding to a halt.

Robert: Yeah. Well, I always found that in I call it the difference between the plan and the build, right? Every aga yes, you need a plan. Obviously you've got a set of prints, you know, I don't care if they're on your iPad or if they're wherever they're at. I don't care. You got a set of prints. A pr set of prints, again, is part of the plan, but it's not the plan. The plan is really, what am I building in steps to get You know, how do I get the concrete in the ground first? You know, how do I what are we digging first? What is was the soil test already done? Did we get all this part finished? Is that ready to go? Is the inspection done? And that those are increments

Carlos: Exactly.

Robert: of time, you know, and all those little snapshots have to come together to kind of try to match up with the big snapshot over here.

Carlos: Exactly. And if we think about history We might have some snapshots, but they're they're everywhere. There might be like a a C D, there might be emails, there might be markups on drawings. There was no central pool of this this information. And a lot of what we've spent the last couple of years thinking about is what we call a site diary. A lot of people in North America call it like a shift report. So like that that thing that's created at the end of the day, this is what happened, these are the issues. Quality, safety, and that's normally the thing that commercial teams use. Use to justify like claims or variations, or could be the thing that is used in court to prove what happened each shift. And even those forms, it's always in some system, there's ten boxes and you just have to sit there and type information in. And these are people at the end of their shift, they just want to go home and they now had to fill in this document, which also doesn't really help them deliver their job. It's a record for someone else that that might need it in the future. So we've tried to like flip that on its head, remove the friction of creating them. So now with our mobile, you just talk to your phone and then you take a picture. And at the end of the day we use AI to take the notes from everyone on site and then write to report every shift which is tagged to the actual task that it's reporting against. So it's all about removing that that friction because these are time poor people with a hell of a lot on their plate, but they have the best information. So how do you harness that information without another report that they have to fill in? because yeah, they're the they're the guys

Robert: Yes. That manual portion Yeah. That manual portion of filling in the report is the is the huge thing and the lack of detail that you current solutions, you know, say pen and paper or even if you're writing if you're typing it on your iPad or if you're you know, whatever, it's it's very, very difficult to get that t information to the right s space to then be able

Carlos: Exactly.

Robert: to use it ever again. 'Cause I think if something important that you said was, hey, we're collecting the best information. And that best information can be, if possible, used again to kind of see where the pitfalls on the next one that may be similar to it are coming from.

Carlos: Exactly. Or just to understand that okay, on this job, we said we were gonna we're gonna pour five hundred cube of concrete per day and we now know we're doing four hundred cube per day. So the next tender We better not undercook it because the project's gonna run longer because our our production rates aren't are aren't on. So it's it's everything from detailed metrics as to what we're doing every day to surfacing trends of issues that actually could be tackled quite easily if management were actually aware of these issues. And when you

Robert: Mm-hmm.

Carlos: aggregate all those reports together and and use AI to read them all every day, every morning, and drop a message into the the project leader's inbox saying, Hey, this is probably the biggest issue for you, you can surface

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: that pretty quickly.

Robert: So I love that idea. again, I'd love you know, I love being in the age of AI. It's it's scary for some folks, but it definitely is a utilizable tool when it starts to talk about aggregating massive amounts of information. Which seems to be the thing that we haven't been able to, you know, get everybody on board with of, you know, I need this information, where do I get it from? It's going to take me hours. to now if you're using utilizing AI correctly as far as I can tell, use that agent or whatever you've created to summarize that stuff for you. Like you don't need to be going through all that stuff. That's a waste of time. but I did want to talk about we're still I know it'll it'll come along, but you know the productivity thing is always an issue. with with some companies. They're like, how do I I don't understand why y you want me to track productivity. and I'll hear that from the field too, because and I feel like it's a you know, these tools that we've got like yours are they're an accountability tool, but it's an easier way to hold people accountable to what you know, kinda what they say they're gonna do.

Carlos: Yeah, definitely. just like just thinking about say production rates, like what volume are we doing each shift compared to what we should have done. it's obviously important for the G C because you can rebenchmark what you're doing to under have a good understanding of where we're going and then where do we focus our time because that's actually the thing that's now gonna kill our program, whereas we actually thought it was this. But then you've also got suppliers or supply chain members who also have contracts with you, who also made commitments to output

Robert: Mm-hmm.

Carlos: and now you you have a good idea about where they're going and it's the only real way to uncover how we're gonna progress through this contract because that if you don't do anything you would probably suggest that things won't change and it's gonna be a a relative constant assuming you've got your crews on site and there's no like adverse weather that's killing you. So the only way to get a real good understanding about output and and production rates is to capture that information each day from the workforce saying, hey, today we did fifty tons of rebar, we tied, and that should have been sixty, or actually we're overexceeding and and we should have done forty. So going down to that very simple granular metric But then when you roll that up across a company or across a b a major scheme, it's gonna give you a really good underc indication about where you could best focus your time and attention rather on the

Robert: Mm.

Carlos: thing that actually you're you're smashing. So you don't need to go and interrogate that. Let's focus on the thing that's actually killing the program. So still comes back to the method of capture. You can't give a a form to site every day and say fill in these hundred fields because we wanna know where you're where you're screwing up. 'Cause they're not gonna be too impressed with that. But if there's a simple low friction way to capture that, it's absolute gold for the organisations above.

Robert: So I you're hitting on something that's kind of near and dear to my heart. And you know, we're also in this you know, in the States, even in the in the UK, I think we're in the, you know, kind of data center AI infrastructure build out. And it's extremely important that we try to align things like supply chain and and assets whether that be labor assets or equipment assets, all of those things have to be pulled together into some sort of simulation of productivity, so that we're not tripping over each other. And I I I wanna know like your thoughts 'cause it seems to me there's some real challenges ahead when we start talking about all these kind of things.

Carlos: Yeah, there's there's we spent a lot of time thinking about the execution side of of of construction. And a huge component of that. Obviously, you need a plan. Like without a plan, you're you're you're doing nothing, you're spinning

Robert: Yes.

Carlos: your wheels. but there's this massive coordination piece every day, and I think it's very underappreciated from a lot of people how difficult it is to manage. You could have thousands of people, hundreds of pieces of kit, materials coming in and out, deliveries, tickets, inspections, everything else that's going on every day. And if we think about a lot of the major technology Technology vendors, a lot of them are focused on things that are kind of away from site, all the things directly associated with providing materials and plan and and or rentals to sites. and it misses the the the real unlock, which is that how do we execute every day and keep this thing moving? So daily briefings, for us that's the that's the hub, that's the thing that that keeps jobs running every day. Daily briefings are useless without good information. Like What did we do yesterday? What do we have on site to use? What what documentation is in place for this thing to start without issue? so we're trying to feed as much super relevant and useful information to those teams at the coalface to be able to run that without issue is the unlock of everything above it from a program's perspective. so we see that as the main event. It's that daily execution piece. How do we give the team everything they need? need and as you said earlier, a full set of green lights so they can go and execute to the plan is a bigger unlock than trying to find a re-sequenced programme that might deliver the job quicker, but then you go back to what's your output and do we have the people to do it and can we clearly communicate that plan in a way that means everyone get behind it.

Robert: Yeah, I so speaking of the we you know, the green lights thinks great. I w I wanna talk about, you know, like when the red lights hit, what, you know, again, like if from an Apex standpoint, the red lights hit, everybody gets notified or is like, Hey, by the way, your top priority, top of the day is is right here. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Carlos: Yeah, exactly. So earlier when we mentioned like project drift, like why does

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: the schedule keep moving to the right? Built into the tool are all these flags and notifications and everything like that. So each day, the when the site team do their progress updates, and for us progress updates, each task is a thumbs up, thumbs down. Are we still gonna finish on time? Thumbs up, all good, there you green lights, thumbs down, delay reason. And then each day that is pushed immediately into those who need To say, hey, yesterday, here's the issues that we experienced. It's in these sections, it's this supply chain member, these are the task names. This is the knock-on effect. Your milestone has shifted two days, and we're trying to surface surface the like it's almost like a a chain of information that that that led to this exactly.

Robert: Right, like the domino. You were trying to prevent the domino effect. You're trying to maybe remove a domino. Yeah. I get ya.

Carlos: Yeah, and and surface that in a in a way that you're not digging through a huge dashboard to work out the underlying like issue. It's we give you the issue first hand, this is where you need to focus your time, this is what's gone wrong. And tightening that feedback loop to twenty four hours is key there because these issues become they're just gonna compound each day that we sort of ignore them or don't address them. So yeah, we're we're trying to nail the execution piece, but also capture all the information around why plans aren't happening. So we can go back to that idea that yes, we plan and we track progress, but how do we then replan with everything learned from the previous shift and the previous week to make sure that we're not making the same mistakes?

Robert: See, I love that idea. and yeah, I've dealt with a lot of the I've a lot of times what happens is and I Not trying to insult anybody. I'll call them the bean counters or whatever, the financial guys. And you know, the way the way they've been doing things, and I'll call it the process, is to count the

Carlos: Yeah.

Robert: dollar, to count the dollars and cents, right? Well, as long as we've we've got margin on this, and I've got you know a buffer on over here, and I'm gonna make a little bit of money on that. That's to them, that's is success. And I think maybe that's where some of the discount disconnect is to the between that and the folks in the field. The folks in the field, yes, of we want to make money but you know th just because you've put some fluff in it doesn't mean the build still fits in that fluff. Right? It's it's so strange to me where we have this processed disconnect of well don't worry about that because we're covered on the money, right? Well, maybe on this one you're covered on the money, but if we run into this again the next time we're running the same process, we haven't really corrected anything. We're just creating more and more buffers and for me that I feel like that just inflates cost and and and inflates the risk even more, even though you're trying to to prep for it. You're not fixing anything in your in your process.

Carlos: Yeah, for sure. I mean my previous role I was in commercial teams, a professional bean counter. but from a contractual point of view, there's you're you're I totally agree with you. there are a lot of individuals or teams that if something makes money and even if it's wrong, it's it it might be deemed as this success. the thing that you'd start to question is we must be sacrificing quality, safety. or something else in order to make that mishap or something that's technically incorrect profitable. So you're gonna always gonna have this pull in different directions from different people with different incentives. The I think the ultimate hack must be for aligned incentives f through through the tiers of of the supply chain on the job as well as the the departments either side because pulling to that end goal gets really difficult if people's end goal differs on a team by team basis. Yeah. yeah.

Robert: Denominator. Yeah, yeah. When the denominators are different, yeah, you you measure differently.

Carlos: Yeah, yeah, for sure. and I remember schemes where in particular the client side commercial teams They just want to hit a milestone because they all get a bonus. And then that pull projects in odd directions because do you please the client or do you do what the contract says? And then you get into a very murky world which can leave you in a a a bad spot.

Robert: Yeah. Well this is the thing and this is a great point because and and this is the thing that I investigate the most because we all know that it happens. When you're in construction, there's these it seems like there's these two sides. We get the ownership side, we got the builder side, you know, GC side, and then you got the supply chain. So there's kinda like three different sides. And Oftentimes and I've seen this happen on recent stuff, so it's not it's it's been happening for a long time. When the owner's side over here is going, Hey, I need you guys to get and I saw it happen at you know, right in front of my face. Hey, I need you guys to jump over here and get this done today. Or this has to be done this week. I need ten more guys over here to do this. And I'm I'm just standing there, just dumbfounded, because I'm like, Do you realize what you're doing? You and I know why the guy's doing it, you know, to your point. I've got some bonus that I've got to meet, and I if I get this done over here, or I get some perk or I get the attaboy, whatever it is. When you get in the way of those kind of things, you have no idea the impact that you're making on the entire job. Again, it's it could be that domino that causes you know, that that you're not able to remove anymore.

Carlos: Yeah. But that also ties back to Yeah. It it also ties back to what we were speaking about earlier. So Pulling people off a task and putting them on on another task might actually be a great call, but you have no idea unless you're actually you actually have the the data and the information to make the call. So, yes, in your example, obviously it's a bad thing because that's the wrong incentive, which is someone to get a bonus somewhere. But the reality is we don't know that the plan that we were originally on was actually the right plan because we have no way to uncover what is right, what's the right sequence, what does output mean for this schedule without actually tracking that underlying information in the first place. So it's quite an interesting yeah, you could get into a right hole thinking through that one at pace.

Robert: Well again, I think we're in the we're in times where we're able actually to aggregate that kind of specific

Carlos: Yes.

Robert: data to maybe y again to model the output at some level, right? Where you say, and you could get you could get really granular if you've got the data, you can get really granular on, you know, task, environment, those types of things. So I always tell people is I I did a lot of smaller you know, work and restaurants or, you know, little buildings coming out of the ground, those types of things. And then they start planting in April and by the time they're ready to go, you know, it's it's end of August, you know, for these these short term Periods and they're well, we want to pour, start pouring concrete in December. And I'm like, that's a bad idea. You know? I was thinking

Carlos: Yeah. That's the worst time of year to start. Yeah.

Robert: why you know, why don't we why didn't we start planning a little bit earlier or you know, do something different to kind of figure this out? Can we pour in September? That might be a better idea. Like we, you know, I don't know. So I always just found it's like, but it's again, they they started this whole thing without kind of the It seems like they start with the out the end in mind or or where the you know, how a build should really come together in kind of best case circumstances. Because we didn't

Carlos: Yeah, yeah.

Robert: have enough data to kind of aggregate all of it. You've got some experts, you've got some people that like, hey, that's a bad idea or hey, this is a good idea in this area. But now we're in a

Carlos: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Robert: it got you were just in that era where we now could aggregate a lot of data.

Carlos: Definitely. And it's gonna be interesting how that affects the like construction's always been an experience industry. You hire someone 'cause they've done twenty years and they've they've they've they've done that piece of work or that type of project over and over again. It'll be interesting to see how the data unlock changes that that mindset. Do you then do you then hire problem solvers, maybe not ex experienced but can like a s like shit heart of running schedules and looking at data and using AI to work out the best sequence and I wonder how ch much that would change the sort of I guess the average age of a construction leadership team?

Robert: Yeah, well I think you know, I I get the feeling that that expert level, you know, field team, you know, that guy that's got a lot of the experience, I think if we spent a little bit more time training him on areas that he didn't know or needed to be advised on where, you know, the the stream of communication just kind of wasn't there, but now

Carlos: Mm.

Robert: it can be there, man You imagine how powerful that tool could become for them. I mean, your tool especially, stop and think about it, that just the communication level where it's you know, you're pushing it to the right people that can actually make a decision. And I think that's, you know, the kind of the biggest thing that we're looking at is We've got all kinds of communication, we've got all kinds of data, right? And we can make tools to aggregate it and look at it, but we still need those people with the expertise and the education to know we're gonna make a decision to move this direction. Which kinda, you know, gets us back. It gets us back to the Yeah.

Carlos: percent. Yeah, yeah. We're just we're equipping them with information so they can use the experience to make decisions faster.

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: and yeah, it's there's there's far too many variables in construction for a system to decide what the plan should be, but we can at least give them the data to show like how we're performing on the plan so far and and what the potential issues could be. But that

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: experience is never going to be replaced, for sure.

Robert: Yeah, I think you can really empower your your your staff, your people in the field by giving him the tools to do that, but also you can really empower them by getting the the decision making capability as well, because I think that might be the biggest driver of I'll say delay, a lot of times, because it's like, well, I know this information, I get it. But I can't make a decision on that. That's you know, that's above my pay grade. How many time have I heard that? that's way above my pay grade.

Carlos: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, then no decision is sometimes worse than yeah, a bad decision.

Robert: That is right. That is right. Well, Carlos, man, I really appreciate your time today. You know, time flies when you're having fun and you're talking construction.

Carlos: Yeah, it's come really quickly. No, really nice to speak to you, Robert.

Robert: Yeah. Well I hope to have you on again sometime. good luck with the move. in and good luck in Toronto. Sounds like you've kind of got the the the wheels already turning over there, but yeah, good luck with all that.

Carlos: Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I'll I'll leave you on this note, it might make you laugh. But we I took my wife over to Toronto in July to show her the city and when it was thirty five degrees. And when we move in January, I think it's gonna be minus twenty five. So it's

Robert: Yeah.

Carlos: gonna be Ask for forgiveness, not for approval. I will. Yeah, I'll

Robert: Call me on that. Call me I tell call me on that and tell me how that goes.

Carlos: let you know. Awesome. Thanks, Robert.

Robert: But see, you just have to remember, yeah, you just have to remember though, man, there's always Texas, you know, it's always warm in Texas. All right. Have a good one.