Reducing error through connected systems

The importance of collaboration between software systems was highlighted at the February GIRI members’ meeting by a joint presentation from Brett King, director of industry transformation at Procore, Harry Marffy, senior sales manager at Inndex, and James Florey, data architect at KORI Construction.

The presentation provided a case study for software implementation and integration at KORI Construction, a fast-growing UK contractor focusing on the care home sector, which has implemented project management platform Procore and specialist site-workforce application Inndex. 

The challenge

“KORI was a relatively small contractor a few years ago,” said Harry from Inndex. “They were predominantly paper based in terms of their processes and how they managed things on site. There was relative inconsistency across projects, leading to relatively inefficient manual reporting processes. And that was manageable – when they were small. However, KORI grew fast, and when you grow fast, any cracks expand, and where you have cracks, you have risk, and expansion of risk means a lot of pain in the business.”

What KORI needed, said Harry, was a system that would give the business a clear, repeatable process that they could scale and that would enable business decisions to be made on the basis of real-time information from sites. “There isn’t one system on the market that does that, so they were aware from the start that this would be a collaborative effort between a few different systems.”

The software solutions

Those systems included Inndex and Procore. “Inndex is very much about the site management side of things,” explained Harry. “We’re interested in operative competency, organisational competency, time management, inductions – the data you are collecting at site level. Procore comes in at the project management level.”

Harry explained that often, when businesses come to implement a new system, ‘fear of missing out’ can result in decisions made for the sake of doing something, leading to the wrong choice of solution or the wrong timing. 

“There is a timing element to software implementation that is really important,” he explained. And that means not leaping straight into technology adoption hoping that software will solve existing problems. “It is important to first strip everything right back and work out exactly how you want to run your process. Establish the process, establish a belief in the consistency of that process across sites, and only once you have that baseline can you start to layer on software. Information that comes out of these systems is only as good as the information that goes into them – if your process is rubbish, your reporting will be rubbish, so step back and establish your process as the first step.”

The next step is deciding on the order in which you implement systems, said Harry. For KORI, that meant implementing the site-level focused Inndex for a bottom-up approach. “Give the people on the ground the tools that enable them to make efficiencies and collect the information you want as early and as easily as possible. Do that slowly, trial the process, establish proof of concept, then roll it out in a scalable approach.”

Once the process is captured, you can introduce the next layer. “This is where you introduce the likes of Procore and apply the lessons learned from rolling out the site-level software to the project management level. And from there you can start to pull in the information coming directly from the sites and use that to control and manage your project in terms of things like snagging and QA.”

From here, he added, if you have chosen your software systems correctly at the start and ensured they can all talk to each other, you can start reporting on information and making decisions in real time based on that information. 

Error reduction

Harry handed over to James Florey, a data architect at KORI Construction, who is building KORI’s data platform that will consolidate the information coming in from the software vendors and putting it inside a Common Data Environment.

James shared two examples of how KORI is using the data from these software solutions to help reduce error. “Working with Procore’s inspections tool and snagging tool, we can take the quality assurance checks from site and use these as an indicator of whether snags are coming down. The more QA checks we do, the more our average snags should start to reduce across our sites. Currently, we are tracking all our snagging and QA checks historically so we can look back and see whether the snag trend is reducing as QA checks go up.”

In another example, KORI has been working to consolidate the information in its drawing register and document management system to enable side-by-side comparison and identify backlogs. “These are both examples of where we can start to see the immediate impact of how we have ingested Procore data to both historically track errors and also predict where they might occur in the future.”

Key takeaways

“The construction industry is becoming more and more reliant on data to make good decisions,” said Brett King, director of industry transformation at Procore. “When you feed it bad data, you get bad decisions, so good data is the ultimate aim of the game.”

Brett had three tips for effective software implementation. “First, start small but be very deliberate. You need a good strategy. Pick a problem that hurts. Fix that first and prove value.”

Second, demand openness from your software vendor. “If you have a tech partner that doesn’t want to talk to the rest of your tech stack, it will be very hard for someone like James to fix because they will have to spend so much time cleaning and harvesting all that data. If vendors won’t integrate, ask why.”

Finally, measure decisions not dashboards. “I’m an operations person; I love dashboards. But it’s the decisions that get made off the back of those dashboards that are important.”

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