Bulley & Andrews — Q&A with Director of Technology & Innovation
Dana Erdman thinks a lot about technology in construction. Her role at Bulley & Andrews brings her in touch with the latest technology tools and an appreciation for the many ways that emerging technology can find its way onto our jobsites. She’s also surprised at how many technology tools from years past have begun making a renewed appearance on our jobsites due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Her responsibilities are across nearly all technology and innovation at Bulley & Andrews, and includes leading the company’s Virtual Design & Construction (VDC) group as well as company wide technology implementations. We talk here about the roles and responsibilities of her construction technology group, how putting the field first makes software more accessible, and why easily overlooked areas like field data entry are still some of the lowest hanging fruit for the industry.
I help construction companies build & sustain technology programs and I’m always interested in how different construction companies structure their departments. Do you mind talking a bit about Bulley & Andrews and how you’ve developed the team?
Sure, so Bulley & Andrews has been in business for over 130 years. We’re primarily Midwest-based but also have national reach with quite a bit of presence in Florida, Wyoming, California, and the Northeast.
Our work spans many divisions. We’re in education, high end residential, corporate, commercial, clubs, restoration, institutional, health care, and hospitality. We also have a separate masonry and concrete company, and we self-perform several trades of work.
My technology team started as one person and grew very quickly to six. We’ve consistently hired over the last two years and my team currently includes a senior VDC manager, a senior VDC engineer, two VDC engineers, a visualization specialist, and an innovation projects lead who’s job spans across both the VDC and company technology spaces.
In terms of roles and responsibilities, we’re involved from the pursuit of a project through project transition. In the pursuit phase, our visualization specialist can help people see a project before it gets built which ends up being a powerful communication tool. We’re also in the planning phases where we go in and scan an existing building and provide a point cloud or model for the design team.
We’ll work with owners or clients, typically through architects or design teams who hire us directly to do work for them. So our VDC business unit has really expanded from satisfying the business needs, through supporting project pursuits into preconstruction, and beyond, but also as architectural design teams are planning work for the future.
Do you mind talking a bit about your history and how you came up through Bulley & Andrews to lead the department?
Sure. My degree is not in the space at all but I got engaged with our enterprise resource planning (ERP) software selection about ten years ago when we were looking for a new project management solution. We didn’t have a person dedicated to company wide technology, and certainly not to VDC, at that time.
But as the company grew, so did the emphasis on tech. We knew that we had to have a technology team in place to compete as a general contractor. Everyone was investing in technology at that time in both VDC and enterprise-wide technology.
My position really grew when we selected a different project management solution. That was a big move for us and we did it because we had to make ourselves more collaborative, both internally and with our external project stakeholders. We had to really make sure that we were engaging all of our constituents involved in projects and that the solution met the needs of all. It also just really brought us into a space of being more future state instead of just trying to get by.
The whole journey has been built on figuring out our challenges around processes and then building around questions and solutions. Now we look at any new solution through the lens of whether this is solving for now, which is great, but is it also going to solve for us in ten years?
It’s been a change in the way we look at technology: We changed the way we evaluate technology. We’re putting an emphasis on not being so disparate with our systems. We’re more focused on a single source of truth.
With the new system in place, what’s your strategy for field implementation, because that’s where the rubber hits the road and a lot of these software tools end up lacking?
Yeah, I agree. Our previous solution did not account for the field at all and really just made our field staff into data entry people. They only had to enter the correct information in the correct place and it didn’t give them any tools to help make their job more productive or more efficient.
What we’ve found with newer solutions is that they build tools specifically for the field and that these tools are easier for the field to use. But I think that along with that, when we moved to the new system, we had to bring the field along too. We knew that we couldn’t leave them out of any sort of selection or feedback on the system.
We wanted them to be part of it, so we really spent time with a group of super users to build out the tools that would be available through the new system and that field users could use intuitively. We worked with them to customize it for the way we do work in the field.
There’s always going to be that component of construction where someone needs to physically be on the jobsite to install something. But it’s in all of those indirect services — if we’re being honest, it’s the stuff that we do, it’s the support staff — that if you look at the cost and productivity benefits of construction technology, a lot of the benefits are going to be realized in those areas. Do you generally agree with that assessment?
The one that’s actually the most interesting to us is a lot of the automation around forms and capturing data so that the field doesn’t necessarily have to go into our enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to do things. For instance, if they’re getting new people to the jobsite and they know that they’ll need to create a new person in the directory, they’d be able to automatically add that person to the directory and go from there with their daily log. Small things like that.
The sort of dichotomy of where we are right now is also interesting because you’ve got the labor shortage issues, you’ve got superintendents and craftspeople that are about to age out of the industry, and you’ve got a shortage of people coming into the industry. And then you’ve got tech trying to solve for some of those issues either through robotics or automation.
But the interesting thing to me is where the crossroads of the 3D model comes and plays with reality capture — when you start to rely on technology to help you with progress tracking and quality assurance.
Where normally you would rely on a seasoned superintendent to tell you where you are in the job and also if a product was installed incorrectly, now we’re using technology to help with that. This helps close the gap between a seasoned superintendent and new people coming in that probably have a better grasp on the technology.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Covid-19 pandemic has really accelerated things. Have you seen that in your work?
It’s crazy, isn’t it? The pandemic really forced us to look at technologies new and old. For example, this QR code is now a magic solution for everything. It’s crazy how we use QR codes now because they’ve existed forever and all of a sudden, we realized we can scan this image and get information instantly.
What else have you seen?
I think reality capture is one of the top ones. The emphasis we’ve placed on the visual aspect of progress tracking has really accelerated since the pandemic.
No longer are people at the jobsite as often as they were. Sending someone out there to either take 360 degree photos or do a full Matterport scan, you don’t have to physically be there and can now verify progress from your home or home office, even if it’s in a different state or a different country.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
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