Dan Farber: Greg, Thanks for joining me.
Gregg Davis: Thank you. Appreciate being here.
Dan Farber: Webcor builders is a major force in the construction industry especially in California and yet I don't often think of the construction industry as something associated with high tech.
Gregg Davis: That's true. Construction is over a third of the U.S. GNP by some people's calculations. It is really a high tech industry today to build some of the complex and large projects that we're involved with but it doesn't get the fan fare and attention of some other industries.
Dan Farber: I noted when I was kinda reading up on Webcor that you have this notion of virtual buildings and that's very much involved in using technology to design the building before any concrete is even poured.
Gregg Davis: Correct and it's a fairly new technology and we have been working with several vendors to really break through some technology barriers and we literally put the buildings together completely virtually before we build anything. And some of our larger projects, we found over 3000 conflicts between pipes colliding and ducts colliding. We detail them down to as much minutia as possible and have our vendors also detail it and merge the models together to look for conflicts and all kinds of issues before actually in the construction process. Each building that we build is a unique structure a unique project. We're not duplicating anything and so it's inherent that you are going to have issues and conflicts and some of the larger structures have 30, 40 architects working on them simultaneously so to bring all those puzzle pieces together and bring all the subcontractors together, we build them all virtually now with multi dimensional technology including time and cost and space conflicts to ferret out as many of the issues as we can in advance.
Dan Farber: Now is this custom software that you have written or worked with the private sector to write?
Gregg Davis: We worked with the private sector. It started off as custom software. It started getting a lot of ground over in Finland and over in Europe and we have worked with two vendors to actually bring their products together. They have recently just spun off into another company so and the product is..
Dan Farber: What is the product and the company?
Gregg Davis: It's called Constructor, and it's written by Vico and it came out of ArchiCAD which is a Graphisoft company which is out of Budapest. So we brought over a lot of technology from other countries and merged it together to create these new virtual buildings.
Dan Farber: What is an example of one of the buildings that you've worked on where the technology really led to some breakthroughs in terms of the ability to build to spec and also to innovate?
Gregg Davis: Probably the first one that led to, and there was the owner actually pushed it very heavily was Lucas Digital Arts and they actually hired an outside company to do the modeling and then we kind of followed suit with our own models for that project. That was really the one that pushed the envelop of virtual building in many ways from the owners standpoint and from ours and that one led to a lot of breakthroughs and the project was extremely unique being built in the presidio, had a lot of environmental challenges as far as what we were allowed to do on the site cause it was a federal government protected land site and it really brought about planning and logistics and timing and all the things that virtual building can do for us. It really pushed it to the edge and led to a lot of new innovations and new features in the software package and then we brought all those suggestions over to Vico Software and they actually came out with a whole new package early this year which we're using on the California Academy of Sciences with a lot of that new technology and features built in and it's working fantastic.
Dan Farber: When you get the plans on the site, and do they always match reality in terms of as get the construction going?
Gregg Davis: No and they are often not complete or we're getting partial sets of drawings and then each individual trade then sometimes goes ahead and redoes the drawing so the piping and ducting may be told that this is a ducting space for them to use and they go ahead and redraw the drawings, so we try to pull all those drawings together with the virtual technology and overlay them together. Traditionally we would use light tables and transparencies and lay 60 layers on top of each other and try to figure out where all the inherent conflicts are. Well now it's all done with virtual technology and computers. We then notify the subtrades of their conflicts and ask them to address them.
Dan Farber: Now the subtrades or sub-contractors, are they forced to basically use the same software that you are using?
Gregg Davis: We have currently issued a directive that all of our vendors, large vendors have to use 3D virtual technology. We do not force them to use our particular vendor. We have a product called Mavisworks which was recently purchase by Autodesk that allows us to view models from different applications into one viewer. So we've asked them to use their tools. Different industries, piping and ducting and so on, have their own applications. We've asked them to use their own tools but to allow us to share those models with us to allow us to integrate them into our virtual building models.
Dan Farber: Now it seems to me that what you're talking about is hundreds and hundreds of people working on a project and it's a major collaboration among a different set of contractors and workers. So how do you manage the collaboration piece?
Gregg Davis: It's a challenge. You have an industry that not inherently wanting to collaborate. There's not a huge incentive to collaborate in the industry.
Dan Farber: Now why wouldn't there be an incentive to collaborate?
Gregg Davis: It's partially some of the risk barriers and legal barriers to the industry. Part of it is that there's intellectual property that's owned by the architects, by the subtrades. Part of it is that the awards aren't given out usually till the end of the projects. They don't want to give away some of their secrets. So there's all kinds of issues that revolve around why we don't want to collaborate. But it's changing. It's changing dramatically because the projects are so complex that people are being forced to collaborate and virtual buildings is actually one of the tools that is forcing collaboration because decisions need to be made earlier on. Things need to be ferreted out. Prior to this technology driving this, people would just show up, drop off their set of drawings, and say "I'm done. I'm finished. Those are my drawings." Well now we're coming back right away and saying "Well we've got 500 conflicts with your drawings. You need to resolve these immediately." It's much less expensive to resolve them on their side and our side during the course of this preconstruction than it is during construction so they're all seeing the benefits of early collaboration but it does require us to engage those subcontractors earlier in the process, have the owners and the architects agree that those will be the subtrades on the project for them to come to the table with a collaborative environment.
Dan Farber: Now as you get onto a job site. I mean a whole different phase starts and a whole different set of technologies I would assume come into play so give me some idea about how you've used technology to make job sites more efficient, more effective in terms of the communication, in terms of moving files around.
Gregg Davis: The job sites are all hooked up just like offices are. They have the minimum of T1 lines now delivered to the jobsite trailers so we're getting the technology all the way through the trailers. A lot of our job sites use wireless inside the buildings so we have WiFi and of course we are using cellular data cards and other forms of technology to deliver the information to the end users. Some sites use tablet PCs. The size of the projects and the screens kind of limit, we use PDAs as well but it limitations on what we can view on some of those screens. So we're getting the technology out to the job sites and the way information is ferreted out though is done rapidly through these multiple devices and we issue what we call an RFI, a request for information, and it immediately gets broadcasted to the different team members. We of course use digital photography to attach pictures now. We use webcam video sometimes to show a conflict if a column is hitting a beam for example and we need the structural and the architectural people to come up with a decision about how to work around these issues so.
Dan Farber: It sounds like you're saying that each job site it's a little bit different in terms of how they approach documenting everything and communicating and collaborating. You don't really have a standardized way that from site to site, you know, these are the best practices we found and we put webcams here and use this messaging system?
Gregg Davis: We have a standardized system for about 90% of it. There's another group of about 10% which really is up to the owner or the architect and their sophistication and how they want to invest in the collaborative process. Each project is unique in the fact that the owners kind of decide how they want to interface with the team. Some have construction managers. Some don't. Some of our owners, George Lucas at Lucas Digital Arts for example, he was one to be very involved in the process. Other people don't want to be involved in the process and have outside company.
Dan Farber: So it's a little bit like herding cats in terms of getting on these projects and determining how people want to work, but I would assume that wireless technology which really has advanced a great deal in the last several years is important in terms of how you've been able to use technology to make those job sites more efficient on the communications front?
Gregg Davis: It's helped but it's still a challenge. The construction environment is ever changing and we have many many concerns that other industries really don't have. My primary concern is safety and it's a big issue when it comes to our projects. We've gotta make sure we send everybody home in one piece. If you get easily distracted with a PDA or a cell phone, tablet, and so on, you could literally walk off a 60 story building. So you are not in a safe environment. When you're walking around your office with a PDA, your brain kind of maps the hallways and knows where they are. Ours are changing everyday and you have things swinging at you three dimensionally so you have to be very very aware of your environment and if you get caught up sending or texting an email, you can walk into a hole. So you have to be very careful how we balance the technology in people's hands versus the environment that they're working in.
Dan Farber: So do you have rules in place that you can't take your cell phone if you're up on this floor?
Gregg Davis: No we just have a lot of warnings and safety cautions and instruct our users to be very careful and things. It's a balancing act of using technology in certain parts of the buildings and certain projects. Keeping wireless signals in our buildings is sometimes also a very large challenge. We don't have permanent power, so power is sometimes coming off of generators. Access points can't be left in the same place. They'll get moved, cut, dropped, changed as the building is changing so and wireless technology doesn't always penetrate, meaning cellular wireless technology doesn't always penetrate when we're pouring concrete cores and things like that and batch plants and concrete trucks and large generators are all interfering with signals; so it is a challenging environment to keep a strong wireless signal a hundred percent of the time within the project.
Dan Farber: SO as a result do you have hard wired T1 connections to these sites?
Gregg Davis: Yeah. They're all hard wired T1's at least to the job trailer and then to get into the building sometimes we're blasting wireless from a trailer site. Other times we are putting temporary access points throughout the structure and hoping that they don't get cut or moved and or stolen. We call it Darwin disease when they walk off the job so.
Dan Farber: Darwin disease is where they?
Gregg Davis: They grow feet and walk off the job. The other issue that we have is you sometimes have 12, 13, 14 hundred people literally on a job site at any one time with all the different trades working so if you have a piece of high technology and set it down for a few seconds it may occasionally walk off the job so you have to be very careful as well with these pieces of technology.
Dan Farber: Now what have you been doing in terms of measuring the value of your IT investment. Is that something you track for your company?
Gregg Davis: For the virtual building, we are trying to track it very carefully. We are trying to look at the number of conflicts and issues and we can track these RFIs or request for information that we have to send out to the architects and the others trade to say ‘Well this appears to be an issue. How do we fix it?' So we're working really hard right now to track the number of issues that we come out with when we are building the model. Our largest one so far is over 3000 and then we're trying to compare that to how many actual RFI issues we end up with at the end and compare that to a relative project. So we are seeing dramatic drops in RFIs that come out due to the virtual building technology and that is what we would have hoped to expect so we are resolving these conflicts, these issues, in advance of actually going into the field and we don't stop building so if we issue an RFI for two pieces that are intersecting, we may stop building in that one area and keep building around it and the ultimate fix may be to rip out all the stuff around it so we could in essence be wasting the owner's money and time by continuing to build if its taking five to seven days for answers to come back to those issues. So clearly by resolving them before we actually start the construction is a humongous savings of time and money and it varies dramatically depending on when that issue would have been found. So a lot of the issues and conflicts may have been found before we actually started but you don't know that for sure and if they're actually found when the two trades are standing there on the ladder and looking at each other, then it's a very expensive issue.
Dan Farber: Now there's a lot of attention today on green technology. I would guess there are two aspects of it for you. One is in your own IT infrastructure, are you going more green or being more conscious of how you use your CPU cycles and secondly in the building construction?
Gregg Davis: Green is very very important to us and to the owners and to the community. We take being a part of the community very seriously. Development of buildings and things has always been a. Some people have questioned some of the building and developments. So the more we can build green the more we can build efficient is extremely important. In fact the California Academy of Sciences will be a platinum rated what they call LEED building which is one of the highest levels you can get for the green building technology.
Dan Farber: How do you qualify for platinum level?
Gregg Davis: There is a set of standards that have to be met and people can go out and search the LEED or the LEED ratings and it's actually a list of exact qualifications that you have to qualify for and there are points given for using different green items within the building. You can get points for simple things like bike racks and for recycling materials on the job site. Some are given for location to mass commuting. Others are given for materials being used. Others used for recycling air and water so there are a series of points you can obtain and the standards are set for different levels of silver, gold, and platinum. So platinum is the highest rating you can get on that point system so it's actually a very defined set of points to reach the green building levels underneath that LEED program. The California Academy of Sciences for example has a living roof so it's a fully grass roof. It has windows automatically electrically operated for climate changing control, so using outside air for climate change. So there's a lot of innovations and things that may not be very apparent from the outside that are being done to help with green buildings and technology.
Dan Farber: And in your own data center?
Gregg Davis: We are using the pretty standard tools most people are using. We are consolidating data centers to save power and energy. We are using of course virtual servers and VMware and tools like that to try to cut down on CPU cycles. We are doing our best to try to combine servers as much as possible and to cut down on the energy usage.
Dan Farber: Well Greg, Thanks very much for speaking with me.
Gregg Davis: Thank you.
Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Gregg Davis Davis who is the CIO of Webcor Builders. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber Farber. Thanks for watching.
