Webinar Transcript
Scotland Foss
So with that, let's kick off and we'll do some, introductions here just to get started. I'm talking so I'll keep going. My name is Scotland Foss, and I had a sales here at Planera. I'm going on my second year here. Before that, I got introduced to construction tech. Plan grid. A lot of people know the story of Plan Grid.
It was a transformative product that took people from paper to iPads. And it's funny now, but you know, iPads weren't standard. We you know, we in the early days Plan Grid, bought iPads for people to get started. We taught people how to use an app store. But here we are, and most people are running jobs on iPads today.
And I got really excited when I saw an opportunity to really help transform the planning and scheduling space. And I'll pass it over to Emily on our team.
Emily Bastian
Hi everyone! My name is Emily. I'm a Customer Success manager here at Planera. My background is in construction. I worked as a project engineer in the field mostly for the last six years or so.
My first exposure to Planera was actually on the customer side. We were looking for, scheduling software that would be more modern and more collaborative to move away from P6. We tried a whole bunch of different software, and ultimately decided to move forward with Planera, because it was collaborative, because it was web based, because it was easy to use, and because it integrated with Procore.
So I when I left there, I had the opportunity to come work here. And now, I get to help customers drive change and improvement in their scheduling practices. One of those customers is Big D construction, and working really closely with Paul Sandberg, who's the director of scheduling at Big D and we're lucky enough to have him here today.
Paul Sandberg
So, thanks for having me here. I appreciate being here and talking, scheduling. It's certainly a passion of mine. I've been in the business for about 40 years. I've been, a general contractor. I had a small business for a few the few years with my older brothers who's an architect, and we did a lot of, single family housing, multifamily housing, that type of stuff.
I've been, scheduling director for, Big D for going on 19 years now. Prior to that, I was a scheduling director for Jacobsen Construction Company. I've been a partner in a, consulting firm where we, you know, work for both the clients we work for general contractors, and we work for, trade partners out there, trying to, evaluate claims.
I've been, expert, witness, on many claims, gone through arbitration, mediation, not the funnest part of my job, I will tell you that much right there. But I really enjoy what I do. I been an adjunct professor at Weber State University teaching scheduling courses, and currently I'm teaching those same courses to some of our people at Big D.
Scotland Foss
We're happy to have you here, Paul. And, I don't. Maybe you said it, I missed it, but I think, big D headquartered in salt Lake City, about a $3 billion GC doing all kinds of work. Yeah. We have 23 offices across the United States. Our corporate offices here in Salt Lake City. But yeah, you're right.
Paul Sandberg
We do around 3 billion, close to 3 billion a year, in pretty much the gamut of construction, except for maybe heavy highway stuff. But we have industrial rings, wings. We have multifamily wings. We have, food and beverage wings. So it's a pretty wide gamut of work that we do. Awesome. Well, let's get rolling here.
Scotland Foss
We want to talk about compression. And I think the first thing I'll just kick off with is that this is a very common and universal thing that people face. I've personally had the opportunity and very grateful to have talked to hundreds of builders, actually looked at, you know, I've done a lot of demos the other day.
I looked I have 1200 sample demo projects, so I think I've spoken to over a thousand GCS, probably. But almost everybody I chat with, I like to ask, you know, how many projects face compression? The answer is at least half. And there's some serious impacts that that come from that. You know, maybe it's more rework, maybe it's higher costs.
Margin erosion, productivity, erosion. So, so many things come out of that. But before we get there, what I'd love to do is, Paul, if you could just help define compression. What what is it and why does it happen?
Paul Sandberg
Pressure is really two things. If we think about, let's take, a multi-level building, four levels high, and we have a mechanical contractor out there, and we've allocated four weeks per level.
And in the proposal schedule or our baseline schedule, we, had one trade or one crew going from level 1 to 2 to 3 to 4. So they have, four weeks on each level, a total of, four months, essentially total duration and compression is when we go in and do one of two things, we go in there and shorten their activity duration.
So maybe instead of four weeks we shorten them down to three weeks per level. And so now they only have three months worth of total duration. Or we overlap their activities instead of a finish to start relationship, we have a start to start with some type of a lag. So if we had a start to start with a three week lag again, their total duration would be shortened by over a month.
And when we do that and I understand why we do it, many times we just get behind schedule. And so we try and figure out a way, an answer to this solution or a solution to this problem towards the end of the project. But when we do that and we don't, it certainly don't involve the trade partner in that conversation.
It can, have some serious consequences. I, I've gone through quite a few claims where, schedule compression is, has been just that. And sometimes we as general contractors don't think that we are affecting that subcontractor rate partner monetarily. But we are and, anyway, the impacts from that are tremendous. And it cost us all a lot of money.
Scotland. You want to talk about these impacts?
Scotland Foss
Yeah. I mean I think it'd be good to hear like from your perspective, you know, what are some of the impacts. And then we have them listed out there, but maybe you have some details you want to share on them. Sure.
Paul Sandberg
You know, our profit margin is always, in jeopardy in our industry.I don't like that, but it's a reality. And when we start, compressing or schedule compressing, that will eat into our profit margins. It is dangerous for our safety. On the job site, when we start compressing that time, we have a tendency to, our productivity isn't quite as good. We have a tendency to kind of skip things on a safety measure.
It will increased our costs. Too many times the quality suffers. So we end up going in there and reworking things. We've talked about productivity and quality. And at the end of the day, it really affects our relationship with our trade partners and our owners. And, that can have very long reaching effects on us, which, sometimes we don't realize that.
But, you know, we have to not only perform today, but we have to perform for the next, ten, 20, 30 years down the road. And if we are ruining those relationships with our, people, our owners, then that will impact our ability to make money. But so the impacts are a big deal.
Scotland Foss
Got it. Paul, thanks for taking us through that. I think the next thing that would be, interesting to jump into here are maybe some of your key strategies on like how do how do we avoid this in the first place?
Paul Sandberg
Yeah. That's I'm glad that we're having this discussion. There's kind of three approaches that, I like to take. But we have to start out with a good plan to begin with. One of the things I do like about planning your, is it kind of goes back in time to where I started, scheduling.
We would develop the network logic diagram, on a chalkboard, and we would go through the logic. The team would be in place there, and we would discuss how we're going to put this project together. So I like that. Ability to create a network logic diagram and, share that with all of the pertinent team members. And, and subcontractors that are out there.
So we need to develop that baseline schedule in a very collaborative way at the beginning so that hopefully we can, not have as many problems, out on the job site. As we start building this project. So that is key, getting the team together. And a lot of times we will do this and pull planning sessions.
So we will start, maybe with our structure and pull plan that first. So we'd have our excavating contractor there, our concrete contractor, rebar contractor, our structural steel or whatever that structure is going to be. And we just do a small pull planning session, in the network logic diagram with just that piece first. And I like to break those poor planning sessions up into these three sessions.
I've done pull planning before. We tried to do the whole project, and it just takes too much time and people lose interest. But if we break it into smaller pieces, it makes it a little more palatable for everybody else. So the next piece would be our framing drywall, rough MEP and the skin piece of the of the project.
And then our last piece would be the interior finishes and maybe the site work and landscaping. Or I may, we may just put that as the last, whole planning session. But when we do that and we can build that logic in front of everybody, and all of our trade partners have the ability to put their $0.02 in, and we're all building it in our heads, you know, 2 or 3 or 10 or 20 times before we put a shovel in the ground.
We get a huge bang for our buck. So that's step number one.
Emily Bastian
Well, I'd love to just have you expand a little bit on, what that collaborative environment really means to you, how you foster that collaboration with your trade partners? I know you talked about in the previous slide, the impact of schedule compression can have a negative effect on your trade partner relationships.
How does, taking this proactive approach affect your trade partner relationships in a positive way?
Paul Sandberg
Well, the first thing we have to understand is our trade partners know more about their specific piece of work than anyone out there. We're pretty good at it. Our superintendents have a good feel for it, but they are really the experts and the professionals in Knoxville, and we should be asking for their knowledge.
We should be, have them come there and impart their knowledge to us because they're the smartest one in the room as far as that piece of work. So when we do that, I think we start building relationships. Right off the bat with our trade partners. We're not in there trying to make them adhere to a schedule.
We do typically have a preliminary schedule, but we have sent out everybody that may have a little, feedback from some of the major trade partners in it, but we send that out. We have everybody look at it. And in reality, we're just kind of talking about bookends for their pieces of work. And then what we're trying to do in these planning sessions is go through the details of their work, what they need done prior to them coming on, and what they're going to complete before the next guy, comes on.
We want them to be productive. We want them to make money on this job, because when they do that, we make money also. And so it really needs to be a collaborative effort. We really want their input and need their input, so that they feel like they have a schedule that, that they've worked out in their heads, and it's going to work for them too.
You know, not every time we can give them exactly what they want. If we, if we've allocated, x amount of time for them to complete their work, we're hoping we can work within those time frames. But I will tell you that if their time frame requires a little more time than what I originally allocated or we as big D allocated at the beginning and we've got float to allow that, I'm going to give them what they need.
Emily Bastian
Thank you. I think that helps all of us become better team members and continue to go down the road, together.
Scotland Foss
That's great Paul. And we'll cover collaboration. I think, a bit more here in a in a couple minutes. And I think the next thing we had on here was accurate progress reporting to identify issues. Could you expand on that one a little bit?
Paul Sandberg
To me, that goes back to our updating process. And, for us, we try very hard to make sure we have weekly updates.
Now, we don't, disburse those weekly updates to our owner unless required by contract. But most of the time, our obligation to the owner is a monthly update. So our weekly updates are mainly used internally there, given to our, our superintendents or our field people so that they can create their three week look two heads, based on those updates.
But they need to be accurate. And, so we find if we're only updating once a month, the accuracy of that schedule is, is not as good as if we're updating it on a weekly, basis. But if we have problems, we need to make sure we address those problems. So typically on a weekly update, we will have all of our team members in there.
And we may have, a couple of, our key trade partners that are, in the process at that time. So if we're doing structural steel or we're doing concrete, we may invite them into that meeting also and talk about the status of each one of their activities. I prefer, status on remaining duration because I think that's a little more accurate rather than just percent complete.
Most of our people understand percent complete. So I may ask, what percent complete do you think you are on this particular activity? And if it's a ten day activity and they say 20%, I will always follow that up with that leaves us eight days remaining. Is that correct or does that sound about right? So you want to make sure that that progress reporting is accurate.
And if we have delays. So if we've gone through the update we've hit the schedule button. And we our end date has pushed out 2 or 3 days, then we want to just pull up the longest path, sort out everything out. But the longest path, and we work our way back through that till we get to the source of the delay.
Most of our team members already know what that is. So that's typically not a surprise to them. But then we have an opportunity to try and figure out a solution to that. And we can ask the question, is this delay based on a change from our, owner or their architect? And if it is, then we need to be really good about starting to input those delays so our owners can see the cause and effect of the changes that they make. So accuracy is extremely important in that.
Emily Bastian
He touched a little bit there on schedule impacts understanding them in real time. Can you just talk a little bit about how that might work when you're entering those impacts in your schedule and in different ways that you might go about doing that. None of us like to be the bearer of bad news, but, you know, it is our responsibility to keep our owners abreast of what's happening with their project.
Paul Sandberg
So if there let's say there was a change to the framing, on a particular project, and we're halfway through the framing, we get a change order that changes the layout of the framing. So we've got to take steps backwards. Now, demo that framing and reframe, if that came by way of change order or, an answer to an RFI that we had submitted, that's fine.
But at that point I may not have all of the answers at the very beginning, but I put in what I think is the best. It's the best knowledge that I have at the moment. And we need to think outside the box. It's not just going in there and touching on, the construction activities. And in this case, it would be the, the framing activities.
We may have to, have some redesign done. We may have to do new submittals and shop drawings. We may have fabrication issues out there that we have to deal with and procure, different materials or equipment. And sometimes we all know that that stuff is we don't go in and buy it off the shelf, too often anymore.
That can take a lot of time to get here. So when we're putting in this delay, when we start adding the activities in there, we, we need to think about all of the activities that are being affected, because we may have a month and a half worth of activity in shop drawings and redesign and procurement before we can even start the construction activities.
And then at the end, we, you know, we put in the construction activities, but we need to put in every one of those activities, and I like highlighting them as a delay. So in my, numerical ID, I will type in if it's a, let's say it's this all started with RFI 100. I will put in RFI 100 dash 0 one.
So everybody sees that that's something unique. And then in the description I will put in bold letters delay RFI 100 dash framing changes. And develop new develop submittals. And then the next activity would be review and approve those submittals. So I may have 6 or 7 activities in there associated with this impact before I even get to the, opportunity.
But at the beginning, those are best guesses. We understand that, but we need to tell our owner or let them know that there's been some type of impact. I'm jumping just a little bit ahead, but contractually we are typically obligated to, to give to, notifications to our owner of potential delays. The first one we have to give within 48, some of the contracts, say 72 hours, but it's just a notification of a potential delay.
And that's all it is. You've got, an email or you're going to send a letter, whichever way you want to transfer that information, but you're just going to say, on this date, I received RFI, 100 answer this may or may not impact, our project, with either time or money. And that's all you need to do is let them know that there's something out there that may be impacting, and then you follow that up with the contract documents at that point.
And you and you give that to the owner, you know, a month later and on the schedule side of it, you need to have a fragment schedule, which is just those activities that we put into the schedule and showing how they affected an original, schedule activity. In this case, it would be framing, and then you're going to have a narrative that essentially just explains in one paragraph or less, what happened doesn't need to be wordy.
And, then you're going to ask for, the delay. This impacted our project by, five working days or seven calendar days. And that's an important piece of this. Also, most of our contracts are in calendar days, so we have to have our own. We have to let our owner understand the difference between our schedule, which is in working days, and our contract, which is within calendar days.
So the impact of this five working days, we need to let them know that that equates to seven calendar days.
Scotland Foss
One of the things so good communication is what it all comes down to in the end.
Paul Sandberg
Exactly. Emily, it is just important for us to communicate back and forth all the time.
Scotland Foss
I was going to say one of the things that stood out to me is, like having the, the, the schedule become a tool and more than just, episodic contract obligation kind of capturing what happens when it happens so that you can get accurate reporting, you can understand the impact in real time.
And you started to go down the path of, okay, when some of these things arise, what do we do? So I'm going to go to the next slide. You know, when you do identify, a problem or you see an issue, what should we do? And so I know you touched a bit on some of this, but maybe we can dive in here when you see problems or when the team sees problems.What are some of the best practices?
Paul Sandberg
Oh, again, if we have a delay and it's not ours, it's a trade partner of ours. Or maybe we're self performing some work, but it's, it's almost worthy of having a mini pull planning session at that point. And we bring in that particular subcontractor that's, whose productivity is not where we need it or want it to be.
And we do a mini pull planning. Come in there and give them the bookends. Okay. I need to be I need to have you done on level one mechanical, by this date, how can we get there? And so we start talking about the steps. Okay. First tell me what your steps are. And he'll say, well, I'm in put in my main line trunks first.
Okay. How long does that take you? And when can you start? He'll give us some answers there. We want to ask about fabrication things for those type of issues also. You know, are those mainline trucks or are they fabricated for level one? Yeah. If they're not, when are they going to be fabricated anyway? Then we'll walk through his piece of work on a day to day basis almost.
And just kind of plan that out in a, in a mini planning session, for level one. And then we just copy and paste it to level two, three and four. But with that we will try and establish some weekly target quantities. Productivity and progress is always best done if we have, quantities in place.
And typically we're not going to load our schedule with all kinds of, you know, manpower and, one unit rates, those type of things. But when we have someone that's in trouble, we want to help them figure out what they need to produce every week. So, for an example, our excavating contractor, we have a total we got 100,000 yards.
We've got to pull out of this all. They've got ten weeks to do it. So that means they've got 10,000yd³ per week that they have to remove. And we go into this meeting, this pull planning meeting with that number already in our heads. And then we lay that out and we say, okay, for you to hit the 100,000, you've got to hit, 10,000yd³ a week.
How can we do that? What does your equipment, pull out? You know, with excavation, if you're removing, dirt from the site, it's all about your trucks. At that point, you can usually excavate as fast as you can, but you've got to have the trucks to support that anyway. So you start talking, detailed about how we can hit 10,000yd³ of material per week.
You know, that equates to 2000yd³ per day. How do we do that? What's our hourly rate? And to support that, how many trucks do you need. Except when you start talking about those. And so you establish some targets with them. And then we will ask them to report back to us on a weekly basis. Tell me what you actually took out of the whole this week.
And if they come in it's 10,011 thousand. You know, they're productive, they're making money, and we're happy because we know we're going to hit our ultimate target. Quantity, in the time frame we've, allocated. And, you know, I've, I've done this little exercise with, quite a few people. And at the beginning, they really push back on it.
You know, it's like you don't need to be into my business. You don't need to micromanage me. But most of the time, by the time we're done, they made more money than what they thought they were going to make. And all of a sudden, now this productivity report for them, gets, rolled into their whole company and, but anyway, that's a way that we can we then begin to track progress.
So every week they're coming in and telling us what quantity they hit. We both establish the quantity that we'd like them to hit. And if it gets less than that, if for two weeks they've only pulled out 8000yd³ a week, we may have to have another little mini planning session and say, how can we get that extra 2000yd³ we need per week to get us up to 10,000?
Scotland Foss
We do a report and there's just a variance on that that everybody know. So. Right. And then I know for all kinds of different businesses, there's so many like lagging indicators that they, you can get metrics. You know, for us it's, you know, as a software company, we're trying to close revenue, for example, but we always try to find what are some of those leading indicators that can help show us the way things are trending.
And, I know you shared maybe some of the we have a call called your execution reporting with some of the metrics or things that maybe you look at to make sure, things are on track. You know, are they starting when they were supposed to start?
Paul Sandberg
Yeah. That execution reporting.
You know, this is something that I think, for it is going to roll out here, in the future.
But what it is, is we want to compare last week's schedule update to this week's schedule update. And I want to see just two things. How many activities were supposed to start between last week and this week. I don't really care about the float on the activities. I just want to know how many activities were supposed to start and how many actions actually started.
So if we had ten activities that were supposed to start and only five of them actually started, my execution was 50%. And then I look at the same thing. But, activities that finished, how many activities were supposed to finish and how many activities actually finished. Let's say it was the same thing. Ten were supposed to finish. We only finished five of them.
So our average for last week is an execution score of 50 or 50%. So we established that really on week one, no later than week two. And now we're trying to, see what that trend is going to be if that trend continues to get better. So next week we had 55 or 60, then great. That's what we want it to do.
If it starts to get worse, then that's telling us what we're going to end up doing is, is stacking all of these, trades together, in the, you know, in the last 4 or 5 months of this project. And we may not have the real estate to have that many bodies out there. And so that will lead to compression at that point.
But we just need to get a feel for are we managing that schedule correctly. And that execution report to me is a very valuable tool.
Scotland Foss
Yeah. No doubt. You know, one of the things that you hit on there quite a bit was the collaborative scheduling side of things. And, at Planera, we believe that when you get more people involved and planning and scheduling, you drive better project outcomes.
That might not mean they're a complete expert in the product that you have, but at least it's presented in a format that really they can understand. And, they can get involved and you can get that buy in, you can get engagement and alignment. And the observation I have is that, you know, there's these these legacy critical path method tools that they don't have ease of use.
They're very tabular and Gantt based. And then you have some other tools that maybe bring in some of the visual, like a wall with stickies or some of the other. I don't know if you use the term legacy, but, like whiteboard tools that are out there to support, these, these pull plans, but they don't have logic or lag or flow or just kind of the fundamentals of CPM.
So I'd, I'd love to hear a little bit from you on how clean air has been. Maybe a game changer. I don't know if that's the right way to put it. To help support some of those things.
Paul Sandberg
Well, I, I love the idea of being able to develop that schedule in a network logic diagram. And we used to do that on, chalkboard.
But then we had to take the take all of that information. I remember taking pictures of chalk boards, and then we had to take all that information and try and put it into our software. And that was just a duplicate activity. With Planera, we can create the network logic diagram within the scheduling software. And it creates the schedule as we go.
And it's very visual. It's very easy for everybody to understand the logic. And when their piece of work is supposed to hit, and it's very collaborative to so that our subcontractors, don't even need to be in the same room with each other. We'd like to have them there. But, you know, they can they can be online and, they've got their little, colored nodes.
And when we need their input, they can they can either tell us what it is or if they have a version of Planera, they can go ahead and and start, you know, putting in their information, as they see it. So now it's very collaborative. And I like the idea that we have some summary nodes in there.
So kind of major blocks, of work that are going to happen. And we can all get this vision of what direction that schedule is going. This is really good on, projects where we may have multiple buildings, because we can determine, but collaboratively through with the team where we should start and where we should end and how we can make sure that the schedule is, as intuitive, as possible.
But when we do that, oh, my gosh, the conversations that we have, we're able to work out all kinds of details in, in one subcontractor can can hear right from the other subcontractor what he needs to have complete before this guy can start working productively and productively is the key word there. So we can have those conversations, you know, across the table or on a, on a, web, team meeting like that is very great.
And I think it strengthens our team. One of the things we found too, though, is when we do that, our trade partners always want to send their project manager or maybe one of their VP's, and that's okay. But who we really want there is that superintendent that's going to be doing this job, so that we make sure that that guy knows we took these information, we put it in the schedule, and now he's got to take ownership of it with the rest of his team that's out on the site.
So it's really good if we can get superintendents.
Scotland Foss
That's great. You know, one of the things I have, sometimes I'll chat with, innovation folks, and they'll say, well, you know, this, this looks easy. It's visual. But, you know, we're worried that maybe, some of our older guys in the field can't do it. And it's been funny for me because some of those folks are the ones that they actually share.
You know, the way I learned to do this, I. I had one gentleman chair that they used to put pins up on like a corkboard and tie strings. And so when we showed him Planera, I was like, that's exactly how I learned how to schedule. That's how it should be. Yeah, I remember taking those red strings. That was the data date.
Paul Sandberg
We just kind of keep moving that every week. And, you know, the problem is the logic didn't move with it. So we really understand the outcome of that.
But you know, I, the classes that I teach, I teach, this network logic diagram right from the beginning and we all hand make, small little projects, with a network logic diagram.
And then we all do a forward pass and a backwards pass. And that's how flow does establish. So it's great to be able to do that with something that is putting that into a schedule as we're inputting details.
Scotland Foss
I'm going to transition here, to chat a little bit about some of the outcomes that maybe big D has experienced.
And I don't know how many folks are really familiar with Planera. And maybe we should have done this towards the beginning, but Planera is a full stack scheduling solution. It can, run, you know, all the way from level one down to level five, planning and scheduling it can be used in pursuits and pre con, and operations.
But, we had the opportunity to speak with the big the executive level management and they, they forecasted a pretty significant savings, conservatively, around 1.5 million in the first year of, of rolling Planera out. And we're just getting started. But from your perspective, I'd love to hear if you could just share how big do you get those savings? Where did the dollars come from?
Paul Sandberg
Well, scheduling related issues, we lose money in really three areas. If we are compressed at the end, what is it that we all do? I mean, we're trying to get this job done for our owner. That's an important thing for all of us, regardless if it's a, if it's big D or whoever's out there.
So we end up throwing a lot of manpower, a lot of overtime dollars at the end trying to get that job done. So compression has cost us money at that point in overtime dollars. Some of that we can try and spread out to our trade partners. But at the end of the day, that's a lose-lose for everybody.
It reduces our legal claims. At big D, we have a legal department, but many of you don't. For many years we didn't have, in-house legal counsel. And so we'd have to go out and buy that counsel. And that's, as all of you know, a very, very expensive, way to do that. But we end up litigating some of that, trying to go through arbitration remediation first, or heaven forbid, we go all the way to litigation.
But it's an expensive thing. And honestly, at most of the times when I'm in, mediation or arbitration, it all comes down to, how are we going to split this baby? Or are we going to split it 50% for the owner, 50% for us? We end up compromising even though we may feel like we're in a strong position, we look at it and we say as a business choice, it's cheaper for us to take 50% of this loss right now and then just move on.
And I hate being put in those situations. Then the third way that we lose money is in liquidated damages. Not all. Probably less than 10% of our contracts have liquidated damages associated with them, but those that do it can be very costly and like liquidated damages, don't stop on Saturday and Sunday or holidays. It's 24 hours a day, seven days a week until that project is done.
So those are the three ways that we see or that we lose money in the construction industry, with things related to delays. So if we can avoid those, that saves us a lot of money. And, it begins to protect our margins, our profitability, jobs. When we can reduce those losses to scheduling claims, it really enhances our trade, partner relationship and it enhances our owner's relationship.
Honestly, most owners that I deal with, they're not out there trying to make us lose money. That's not their job. What they want is just for us to produce a quality project for them in a safe environment and get it done when they need. And they gave us an opportunity right at the beginning to tell them what we need to accomplish that.
So they're not trying to, hurt us. They're really out there hoping that we will succeed. Because when we succeed, they succeed. So it really improves our relationship with our owners. Big D, we're fortunate enough to, most of our work, over 90% of our work, are repeat customers. And that is a great position to be in, in our industry where we're not having to necessarily go out and bid against, every other job general contractor out there.
And then it also just improves our communication with everybody. And those are the outcomes that we are expecting to see with, with the use of Planera and better scheduling techniques.
Scotland Foss
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that, Paul. I think we've gone a little bit over, but if you're with us, keep keep hanging on. I we'd love to get to some of the Q&A so we'll, we'll do that right now.
Emily, did you see any questions come in that that we can tee up and an answer.
Emily Bastian
Yeah, yeah. So the first one in here is do you have any concerns with Planera upholding and litigation?
Paul Sandberg
No, I don't, litigation really, as long as you have a software that is a critical path. Software, in other words, it is doing a forward and a backwards pass, establishing the critical path.
The mathematics involved with that forward and backwards passes is correct. That's all you we really need to demonstrate. So I, I don't see any concerns. If we go to some type of litigation, mediation or arbitration with that.
Emily Bastian
This next one I think I can address, somebody asked, do I have to get rid of P6 if we use Panera?
And the answer is no, we play nice with, other scheduling software, it's different. Teams use Planera for different things. We'd love to definitely understand your specific use case. So if you want to reach out to us, at the end, I think Scotland will send a link. But, some folks use Panera and they export their project to P6 if for some reason they have a requirement to do so, and then we can also import from P6 and Microsoft Project.
Scotland Foss
I think just to elaborate a little bit, some of our customers are ready to do a full stack replacement, and they want Planera to be the master schedule all the way down to, you know, what you might call like a working schedule or look at weekly work plan tool. Some of our other customers want to maintain a high level contract schedule in P6 and then break down granularity and run, more weekly work plans and shorter interval planning in Planera.
And because of that export that Emily mentioned, you can grab all the status and activity from the project team and then roll it up into your, your P6, for, for updates. So we're happy to go one on one with people and meet, meet your needs, whatever they might be.
Emily Bastian
This next one asks how our teams collaborating with trades and planner. I don't know, Paul. If you want to share a little bit about your thoughts on that, and I can definitely share, how others are.
Paul Sandberg
Yeah. I mean, we've talked about pull planning sessions and that is, that is, to me, one of the most powerful tools that we have, to make sure that we are collaboratively putting together a schedule, that meets, as best we can the needs of us, our owner and our trade partners.
You know, they can either all be in the same room, but they have access to Planera, and they, they can create their mini schedule portion of this as, as we are going. And so it allows them that opportunity to do that. Planera is very intuitive. It's not difficult to understand. And what we're finding is most of our trade partners can pick it up pretty quickly to the point where we can sit down in a pull planning meeting and they can all engage through the software, but if they can't, then we just assign someone that is, the inputting guy within that meeting, and they, they take the informationthat is discussed by everybody and put it up on the board, and then we can look at it and agree.
Emily Bastian
And just to address like a little bit more technicality around that, there's definitely levels to which you can collaborate and invite your trades into Planera for. The first thing to understand is that, it's an unlimited users model.
So you can invite, your trade partners into your organization. They don't need to have their own Planera instance. They will just log in to yours. And so from there, they're invited to a project. So, I would say like the lowest level of collaboration and access might be that you create a, a separate project for your trade partners to be able to get into the tool and have access to that, intuitive platform.
And then from there, you can kind of decide how how much, permission you want to grant them into your projects. They could come in as just a commenter so that they can view your schedule and make and respond to comments. You can invite them in also as collaborative collaborators so that they can, participate live in your schedule.
So there's a lot of ways to do it. Different, different uses, different, permissions.
Okay. We have one more on here. And I hope I'm going to get this right about this question, but this person is asking Paul, to expand a little bit on, the problem with overlapping, and doing that without putting a lot of thought into the other risks, of overlapping based on like what types of activities are overlapping with each other?
Paul Sandberg
What I meant by overlapping is if we had, I used the example of a mechanical contractor, and this is a four story building. They have, four weeks, 20 days on each level.
And at the very beginning of the project, the baseline schedule end up showing one team that would finish the rough mechanical on level one, then would go to level two, then three, then four. So their, activity was 20 days long for each level, but their total duration is the accumulation of those four activities, which would be four months long when we overlap them, because we are short on time towards that portion of the project.
Now all of a sudden they need to staff a second crew, because you've got a crew working on level one, and we need another crew to start working on level two. Prior to the crew on level one being done. So in scheduling terms, it's a start to start relationship with maybe three weeks of lag. So three weeks into their four week duration on level one, they've got a man, another man up, another crew.
They may or may not have that, but that that's called compression because we took their total duration of the four months and because we've overlapped them now and required a second crew, we took their total duration of four months and, you know, shrunk it down to three months or even less. It depends on what the overlap from level to level is.
But they can claim, a compression there. It's a bit of a stretch to, to make that claim, but they can say, look, we're, not as productive as we were with a single crew with two crews now, and they shortened our total duration by a month. And, maybe the way that they end up doing that is it's bringing on a second crew in the evenings or, working weekends to make up for that.
And that becomes a cost for them. That definitely is going to be passed on to us. But that's what I mean about shortening their total duration. Well, one thing I want you to know, though, is many times, if we have to do that, if we can just bring in those trade partners that are associated with this and have the conversation, we may be able to just ask the question, do you have a second crew available that we could put on and work floors one and two and three and four at the same time? And the answer may be yes, but it's when we do that in the schedule without talking to them, it becomes a problem. And it could lead us into some type of, arbitration mediation to try and take care of the problem.
Scotland Foss
We're coming up on time, and I know there were more questions, sent our way. So we'll follow up with people individually. For anybody else that wants to see the product, you can find us at Planera.io.
You can email us at sales@plenara.io. Feel free to connect with all of us on LinkedIn if you'd like and continue the discussion. But thank you so much, for joining us. Thank you. Paul, for joining us as well, and Emily, for being here.