Digital Infrastructure Safer, Faster

[00:00:00] Gary Fischer, PE: So let’s move on to our next segment to hear from our friends at the Volt Company. If you could turn on your cameras and get ready to present. So we have Joe and Will today. Okay. And there’s Rob. Okay. Next we have the Bolt Company are here to share some rea really interesting recent experience with PR project production Management.

[00:00:25] Gary Fischer, PE: First off, I wanna make some quick introductions. Joe Fastbender is the project delivery services manager supporting complex industrial and energy projects with a focus on project production, operation excellence, and collaborative delivery. Rob over here is a production manager at Bolt focusing on optimizing construction operations through innovation, collaboration, continuous improvement.

[00:00:50] Gary Fischer, PE: Ed was just talking your language. I’ll bet.

[00:00:52] Rob Peterson: Yes sir.

[00:00:53] Gary Fischer, PE: By applying project production optimization, Rob drives better planning execution of workflow and complex projects within bolts national. Power and industrial group. And then we have Will Tic, who is the Chief Innovation Officer and ex executive Vice president of Bolt.

[00:01:09] Gary Fischer, PE: He’s a nationally recognized leader in lean and integrated project delivery methods. He’s been at the forefront of developing bolt’s integrated lean project delivery process. He’s known for his driver for innovation and reliable commitment to continuous improvement, lean processes, and problem solving.

[00:01:26] Gary Fischer, PE: So will, I think you’re gonna kick this off.

[00:01:29] Will Lichtig: I am and I think Joe’s gonna tee up our

[00:01:32] Gary Fischer, PE: slide deck. Alright. We can see it. So I’ll hand it over to you guys.

[00:01:36] Will Lichtig: Perfect. Go ahead and click ahead, Joe. And you’ve already seen our our mugs and for those of you that got to experience something exciting over the last 45 minutes, now you’re gonna see the, boring and dirty side of.

[00:01:48] Will Lichtig: Production management that actually brings those kinds of projects to life. So who is the bulk company? We’re a 130 5-year-old and business that has been a general contractor for the last 135 years. We turn over about a billion and a half dollars a year. The largest project we’re currently involved with is a $3 billion project in the city of San Francisco as part of a joint venture.

[00:02:17] Will Lichtig: And again we, pride ourselves on the idea. If you wanna go to the next slide, Joe, of being builders, not buyers. So you heard Todd make a reference to that earlier today. That’s something that, that we’ve been talking about with Todd. And we’ll talk a little bit about our. Lean in production management journey over the last 25 years.

[00:02:37] Will Lichtig: But the idea is that we are a self-performing direct hire contractor. We do a range of work with our own forces, everything bringing the project out of the ground from concrete, steel, masonry, metal framing and drywall boiler maker work. And part of what we do that’s a little bit unique as well, is we do a lot of mill writing.

[00:03:00] Will Lichtig: So we set very sophisticated. Equipment to very sophisticated tolerances within the buildings that we have built. So again, it’s everything sort of soup to nuts from the time you begin grading on your job until the time you start up and commission the sophisticated projects. Go to the next slide, Joe.

[00:03:23] Will Lichtig: We the, title of our presentation obviously is Safer and Faster. We are safe in getting safer over the course of the last 20 years. We look 20 years ago we were identified as one of the safest contractors in America, and our safety rate has continued to improve over the course of that 20 year period.

[00:03:43] Will Lichtig: We’re now at A-A-A-T-R-I-R rate of under one, well under one, about in the 0.7 0.6 range, and have been there for four or five years. We turn over about 4 million man hours. Labor hours, lemme say it that way, labor hours per year. And we’ve gone three years without a lost time incident. We’re very proud of that.

[00:04:06] Will Lichtig: So we, we are safe in getting safer as we are getting more and more productive as well. So go ahead and click forward for us, Joe. And this is a graphic, again, you might think of it as NI chart, but we use it collectively to look at what our lean journey has been. Over the past 25 years and it, lines up pretty nicely with the slide that Todd had this morning where he started in about 2000 and looked at the production management era.

[00:04:36] Will Lichtig: That’s really where you see that first red.is when we basically were. We started thinking about it as a productivity challenge, but we very quickly shifted that to a production management solution. So we began with our lean journey in the early two thousands, we began implementing the last planner system, which is foundational to the production management approach and have been using that and have evolved that production system ever since.

[00:05:05] Will Lichtig: You’ll see a second set of, or a second.in the middle of the page there. That’s in the 20 10, 20 11, 20 12 range. So again, we’ve been working with Todd Zabell and Roberto and James throughout this 25 year window, starting all the way back with some paper machine work in the early two thousands. But we also had a, very intense engagement with them.

[00:05:31] Will Lichtig: In the, that mid 20 10, 20 11 range where we worked together on a project in Sacramento and we began developing even more sophistication in our approach to production management. It’s where our first development of the tac planning process was developed, which was a first phase, if you will of, trying to regulate production in a new way.

[00:05:53] Will Lichtig: We develop methods for engaging in first run studies. How do you take the run of the, first product that you’re gonna do and really study that from a production engineering standpoint to break it down and figure out a better way to build? And we also at that point, began what we call our supplier development program.

[00:06:12] Will Lichtig: So how do we make sure that the partners we’re choosing to work with have the same level of capability and sophistication? Around production system development that we do so that we can serve as an integrated team from the time that we’re hired by the owner and move on to a job site. And then the third phase is really what at the right edge of the graphic there, which was, our effort really to focus on.

[00:06:38] Will Lichtig: What was emerging from PPI and the production management approach? So we began, a detailed effort is focusing initially in the work group that both Joe and Rob are a part of, and they’ll talk here in a minute, a little bit about what we’ve done and learned over the last three to four years as we’ve begun to.

[00:06:58] Will Lichtig: Deeply invest in the PPI approach to production management, whether it’s production system optimization, production engineering, which is actually looking at how the work actually is gonna get executed and designing. That execution and then feeding that back up to people like Ed, who can reflect the way we wanna build what we call designing for optimal production into the way that the product is actually being designed.

[00:07:23] Will Lichtig: So rather than thinking of doing first run studies after the work is designed, how do you do first run studies as the work is being designed so you can influence the product design as well? So that’s really where we’ve been, as in a look back to to give the group on the line here today an advanced look at where the bulk company has come over the last 25 years.

[00:07:48] Will Lichtig: And then what I’ll do now is turn it over to Joe and Rob to talk a little bit about the specific implementations and learnings over the last couple of years with production system optimization and production control. And then I’ll join back in at the end and try to provide some insight of where we are taking these ideas now in the data center market as we move into the, next part of our journey.

[00:08:13] Will Lichtig: So let me hand it off to you guys and to describe what we’ve been doing for the last couple of years.

[00:08:19] Joe Fassbender: Sounds good. Thanks Will. Yeah, so Will teed up, Rob and I support our national power and industrial division here within the Bolt Company. So we service the pulp and paper power generation, food and beverage market sectors.

[00:08:33] Joe Fassbender: And we have been along this PPM journey for a couple years and continuing to learn and develop our capabilities. So just a bit of a reflection on where we are today and where we’ve come from. In a really close partnership with this strategic Project Solutions team we’ve done some, a lot of learning along the way and how that’s worked for us is a lot of learn by watching.

[00:08:55] Joe Fassbender: Along with the SPS team, we’ve identified the importance of setting an optimization objective. So we started with production system optimization as the first deployments and first demonstration projects. And really diving into that importance of understanding what are the questions we’re trying to answer in.

[00:09:12] Joe Fassbender: Optimizing our production system. And then going further, how do we map that production process from a production system perspective? What are the inputs that we need and what are all the data sources that need to come together and and ultimately build that process out.

[00:09:32] Joe Fassbender: Once that’s built and we can run the model. It was very interesting to see what outputs can come from those models. So looking at capacity utilization WIP in the system, what’s the ideal WIP for, this specific process we’re looking at things of that sort, lines of balance, right? All these different outputs that we can use and leverage to optimize and modify that production system to better serve our projects.

[00:09:55] Joe Fassbender: And then moving into the production control realm. Leveraging that production management approach into the existing last planner type system that we have here within the Bolt company that we, call it the bolt production system. So taking some time and really harmonizing and integrating those two together to show that production management fits pretty seamlessly within the bounds of how we typically plan and execute our projects.

[00:10:20] Joe Fassbender: So that’s been an interesting process over the last year. And then by doing so, a lot of watching the SPS team and then really getting into it. Rob specifically has had a lot of experience, and I’ll pass it off to him here shortly to show one of the examples from a recent project on how PSO has, optimized the end result for a project team.

[00:10:44] Joe Fassbender: In, doing some of those trainings, we’ve had weekly training sessions. We’ve done some in-person workshops to really get together and say, this is the outcome we want. At the end of this week, let’s focus on building a, specific capability, and then just some ad hoc coaching as needed, as questions.

[00:10:58] Joe Fassbender: And maybe some issues have come up. Production system modeling, like I mentioned, is ongoing for multiple of our projects from small scope focusing on one or two scopes to full project production systems. And we’re continuing to increase those internal capabilities so we have a future state target of having those internal capabilities to build and model and analyze production systems on our own, where it’s part of how we operate and how we perform our projects.

[00:11:29] Joe Fassbender: And then on the production management side of things, we are in our first demonstration project right now. So we’re probably four to five months into that. Really continuing to learn that implementation and how we can like I mentioned earlier, harmonize those approaches into the boat production system.

[00:11:46] Joe Fassbender: And then that hits on that last item integrating both the PSO and PPC efforts into the documentation and training materials. So as we continue to onboard new folks to our organization and train the existing team members on these new technologies and methodologies that will further enhance how we plan and execute our work.

[00:12:08] Joe Fassbender: So with that, I’ll introduce this new project or this project that we applied PSO on. So this is just a snip of part of the production system that we modeled. So you can just get a, an appreciation for some of the handoffs and different trades that exist here within this specific project. And then I’ll.

[00:12:27] Joe Fassbender: Give just a high level introduction on the type of project this is. So this is a liquified natural gas facility. It’s a campus here in the Midwest that for this specific PSO effort, we focused on the pre-treatment and liquification facility, so the buildings that support those processes. And within that overall scope, we focused on the site civil works.

[00:12:48] Joe Fassbender: Underground utilities that you can see there. And then foundations and miscellaneous concrete. So really everything below grade that is the area that we wanted to focus on. The reasons for that, and Rob will get into this here in a moment, were in the upper Midwest snow and extreme cold are obviously some pretty significant factors.

[00:13:06] Joe Fassbender: So those underground works were intended to start shortly before the winter was really set to set in. One of the main focuses for the team was how do we optimize and get the absolute most amount of that work in before the ground starts to freeze, and we have to deal with those conditions. That was certainly a consideration.

[00:13:26] Joe Fassbender: Another is we have some mega projects in this region right now, especially with the data centers that are drawing a lot of craft labor. Again, trying to optimize the resources we have available to us and, make the most of of that capacity. And then the last piece, this project faced some permitting delays from the.

[00:13:46] Joe Fassbender: Jurisdictions really. And the owner supplied building steel for this facility. The procurement was done. So when the permitting delays happened those procurement delivery dates or steel delivery dates were fixed. They were set. So when the project slid to the right by close to two months the steel was still planning to show up on the same date.

[00:14:05] Joe Fassbender: So again, from the project team. How can we expedite our installation of, these scopes? So we have to minimize the amount of double, triple, quadruple handling of that structural steel when it shows up on site and and optimizing that as well. So with that, I’ll hand it over to Rob and he can get into some of the details on the project specifics within production system optimization.

[00:14:29] Rob Peterson: Thanks, Joe. So what we’re showing here is the four main questions that we set out as a team to answer. And I wanna just stress the importance of clearly identifying these upfront in the project productions optimization process. For this project in particular, they wanted to know how they were able to complete as much as of that underground utility and civil works as possible.

[00:14:54] Rob Peterson: Before winter arrives, as Joe mentioned with, especially with OEM and steel already procured, we also wanted to know what the impact of lowering our surveyor quantity from two to three would be, and remove layout activities for trenching potentially. And I’ll touch upon more on the importance of that in a minute.

[00:15:15] Rob Peterson: The third one is, what was the impact or what is the impact of our delayed mobilization, as Joe mentioned, caused by that, that permitting approval and on the overall duration of the project and potentially with or without a winter shutdown period. And finally, what is the impact of losing one month concrete production due to those winter impacts?

[00:15:35] Rob Peterson: If we would try to work through the winter and not take any, sort of shutdown, and if so, what kind of recovery plan would, that entail?

[00:15:46] Rob Peterson: So through the production modeling effort with a lot of help and guidance and coaching from, SPS we were able to identify a couple key ways that we wanted to work out of the system. The first being our excess processing. So we’ve, we initially found that there were bigger resources, were gonna be our bottleneck and looking that at, that analysis.

[00:16:09] Rob Peterson: And the graph that you see here is. The capacity utilization over time by week as the project unfolds that we modeled for the survey surveyors specifically. So in looking at it, we had about a 50% capacity utilization and being the bottleneck on this project we, could clearly see that surveyors were heavily used on the front half of the project.

[00:16:34] Rob Peterson: Normally that could be a huge issue. Really unfolding and looking at all the work as it could happen and would happen. Being the surveyors were a highly valued and low number and high demand. We determined that we could be just fine with this utilization. And that also led us though, to start looking at do we really need all of the layout activities that we do have?

[00:17:02] Rob Peterson: And through a mini production engineering effort, we challenged the civil contractor for the true layout needs and we’re able to, find and determine that. With GPS enabled excavation equipment, we could reduce a lot of those activities which then reduced that need to what we originally assumed would need three surveyors down to that too.

[00:17:25] Rob Peterson: That brought up another discussion point and another what if. And the question was raised by the team. What if we doubled resources across the project? What kind of support and, help would that give? And I’ll get to that in a minute here. But I just wanna stress the importance of really looking at where the bottlenecks are in the production system and digging into an understanding.

[00:17:52] Rob Peterson: Both the type of resource as well as in the duration or in the, potential schedule where those bottlenecks lie is, pretty important. This important point for for us too, was with that reduced need for additional resources on site just equates to a safer site overall as well, especially working around heavy equipment.

[00:18:18] Rob Peterson: Joe, we can go to the next slide please.

[00:18:25] Rob Peterson: So the second major bucket that we were looking at is underutilized capacity. So through our master scheduling effort. In the original P six schedule, which was incredibly detailed, and I believe we had no longer than a two day duration as required by, owner requirements in that P six schedule that we had too many finished a constraints.

[00:18:48] Rob Peterson: So with closely analyzing that and looking at specific. Linkages within our logic. And you can see the graph or the, I’m sorry. The picture that we have here is directly from our bill of materials on the project. And you can see the color coding by activities within that. That we were able to identify potential links to rearrange or to break with the project team.

[00:19:13] Rob Peterson: So we identified 10 of those links and by doing so, we were able to reduce six weeks out of the overall project duration. Hence. Letting the project unfold faster and bringing up the amount of work that would be released earlier. As I mentioned before, the question that came up was, what if also we add twice as many resources across the board to the project?

[00:19:38] Rob Peterson: So we were able to quickly model that and turn a response right around for the project team that if you doubled every resource on this project, even over a nine month duration. You would only save two days, so probably not worth and definitely proves the old adage of just throwing more people or resources at it at the problem will not help.

[00:20:01] Rob Peterson: Go to the next slide, please, Joan. So through all this we’ve, had a lot of reflections, a lot of observations and learnings. We’ve grouped those into really two, two big buckets. First being relationships and trust building, both internal to our team and external with our trade partners and subcontractors.

[00:20:20] Rob Peterson: At least they’re key to the successful deployment and implementation of. Project production management it’s critical to gain trust. And mainly it really helps to remove the contingency factor or the contingency layer that we commonly see across, projects where different trades or disciplines will add their own hidden contingency on duration or even cost on activities.

[00:20:45] Rob Peterson: So once you start stacking those in a true production system, that can really add a lot of. Fluff within in your plan or your schedule? We really are working to build a team of operational allies and that comes right along with learning by observing and then learning by doing and seeing the benefits from the effort and thinking differently about how our projects are planned and, can unfold.

[00:21:11] Rob Peterson: And we’re really trying to understand value drivers for resistors and really look at it from their perspectives and understand where. Questions and concerns are coming from and working through each one of those with them side by side. Our second major bucket is those technical challenges and just collaboration opportunities in general.

[00:21:32] Rob Peterson: As Joe mentioned, we’re really working hard and thinking a lot about how do we integrate the, these methods and tools with our vault production system that our teams operate within. I just want to make a point that visual management is a critical element for our bolt production system and showing.

[00:21:50] Rob Peterson: In the, not just the overall planning and design of the project, but the daily planning by the last planners on the site where work is happening that day and in the future. And I just wanna give a special thanks to the team at SPS for hearing and considering those needs of, both and working to address that from the technical per perspective on the PPC tool.

[00:22:16] Rob Peterson: Finally we’re iterating on production models as a team is one of the things that’s become clearly critical for us. It is important to start this early and work often on iterations and really learn through trial and error and look at all of the levers within a production system of if you pull one or two or more, what will or could happen.

[00:22:40] Rob Peterson: We can go to the next slide, Joe. And from here I’m gonna turn it back over to Will to speak to Bolt’s PPM outlook for the future. Thank you.

[00:22:50] Will Lichtig: Thanks Rob. Thanks Joe. So again, as we as we look both back and then look forward, Rob talked about the use case that we just have used it on the Liquification, the LNG facility.

[00:23:03] Will Lichtig: We’ve also used it already on, production facilities for energy. So we’ve used it in renewables in our solar work. We’ve also are using it now for the design and construction of major gas fired facilities here in the Midwest. But then the question always comes up, so how would this relate to the glut of demand that exists in the data center market?

[00:23:30] Will Lichtig: And we are beginning to use this. With data center customers as well, and we’ve immediately found opportunities with using production engineering very early in the design process to enable, to better enable engineers like Ed, to design for optimal production. I as you heard in his presentation.

[00:23:55] Will Lichtig: It’s not that engineers don’t wanna design for optimal production, they just don’t often have the benefit of those who can tell ’em what is the best way to build this. And so we’re bringing that into the early conceptual phases on in, in the development of designs for data centers to, to help with that.

[00:24:13] Will Lichtig: We’re also working to simplify installation so that we can both reduce the number of onsite workers, but also. In essence to downscale some of that work on site. So how, do we simplify the work so it makes it easier for less skilled craftspeople to actually install at a high rate of productivity.

[00:24:33] Will Lichtig: And then again, mirroring what you heard from Ed. How do we create repetition to accelerate learning? So if you have a a, body of work that where you’re gonna build the same thing multiple times, how do you get a, customer in an engineering firm? To stabilize on a design so that you can actually learn from project to project, either over the course of multiple projects that are gonna be installed at a site or across a portfolio of work that’ll be installed either across the country or around the world, so that you can really take the value of learning and get better improvement so that you’re.

[00:25:11] Will Lichtig: Time to market and your cost to market continues to reduce as you move forward. And then beyond the production engineering effort really is also the production system optimization. So I think part of what Rob was trying to make clear is sometimes customers require us to produce CPMP six schedules at a level of detail that frankly don’t make sense.

[00:25:33] Will Lichtig: And they will often if adhered to shroud. Opportunities in a way that you don’t even know that they exist. So how do we go back to the basics of this? The schedule should only set the demand for the project, and then production system optimization should begin to look at the ways in which the production system might be able to meet or beat the demand that is established by the schedule.

[00:25:59] Will Lichtig: So how do we help customers understand that so that we can then look at optimize? Optimizing sequencing, batch size, crew size, and give them the options to understand both how to move work through a project more quickly. But again, for customers who have a portfolio of work on a site, one job being fast, if it means that all the jobs go slow, may not be the way to optimize the whole rather than the piece.

[00:26:26] Will Lichtig: So how can we begin to use production system optimization to show a portfolio customer of where the opportunities lie? Across multiple projects on a site or within an arena of work. And then how do we stabilize resource demand? You heard Joe mention just in this one regional market that there are at least a half a dozen mega projects that are gonna call for 5,000 workers each.

[00:26:55] Will Lichtig: In an area that typically doesn’t have that many skilled craftspeople available. So how do we begin re rethinking the resource demand and make sure that we’re leveling the work to optimize the number of workers that can actually be made available. So those are just some of the areas that we’re beginning to experiment with, how these ideas can apply in the early phases of data center development.

[00:27:20] Will Lichtig: And we’ll be. Continuing them on as we move into both the design and production phases on these projects. So with that, Gary, let me turn it back to you and say we’re open for questions, if any exist.

[00:27:34] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah, let’s, we appreciate that. Now’s your sh now’s your shot. We’ve got some time for questions. Maybe I’ll kick the ball off with one for you while we wait for some brave person to drop in a question.

[00:27:47] Gary Fischer, PE: Do your customers care if you use production thinking? Production optimization on your projects do they, care or they just want the results?

[00:27:59] Will Lichtig: Joe, Rob, do you have a perception based on the customers you’ve been working for?

[00:28:04] Joe Fassbender: I’ll say in, our experience to date, we haven’t a lot of this haven’t, hasn’t found its way back upstream to our clients, but we are starting to use it as a, I’ll say as a sell, right?

[00:28:15] Joe Fassbender: Talking some of their language of, especially in the manufacturing space of operation science and how we how we think differently about. Production in the field of construction. I’ll say the, customers that have found it valuable and interesting are are in that manufacturing arena, and I think it’s, it’ll continue to be a differentiator for us moving forward.

[00:28:38] Joe Fassbender: Yeah.

[00:28:40] Will Lichtig: Gary, I guess I’ll, all I’ll offer is I think that, we sometimes say around here, customers don’t want anything different today than they wanted 20 years ago. They want it faster, cheaper, and better. And what we believe PR PPM allows us to do is say faster, cheaper, better. You can have all three. So it goes back to Todd saying earlier about the, idea that the iron triangle can, you know that you have to trade off.

[00:29:04] Will Lichtig: We believe you can actually get faster, better, and cheaper with no compromise it. And so it initially I guess I would say it this way, customers only become interested when you’re able to shave 60 days off of what they thought it was gonna take to get their asset in service. And then they go, how the heck are you guys doing that?

[00:29:25] Will Lichtig: And then they become interested in it and, wanna know where else it might help them solve their business problems. So that’s the way we really look at it. Most customers don’t care until they understand that there’s something else that they might gain from it.

[00:29:41] Gary Fischer, PE: Yeah. That’s really good for our contractor community that’s on this in the symposium, you need to pay attention because that’s, I felt that for so many years.

[00:29:51] Gary Fischer, PE: Why don’t companies like Bolt grab it and say, look, I can do it faster, cheaper, and better. And it doesn’t really, the owner doesn’t need to know why, really, you’re just gonna deliver faster, cheaper, and better. And it sounds like you’re doing that. Are you basing your bids on this now? Your pricing on it?

[00:30:11] Will Lichtig: So I would say we’re beginning to bring it into to that a lot of the work that, that the team that Joe and Rob work with is really, is negotiated work so that it, yeah, it ultimately becomes the basis of our pricing, but it’s not true bidding. In other words it, we’re involved in the Ffel two phase of a lot of these projects, and so as we’re helping the customer think through the concept for the project, we’re bringing these ideas forward.

[00:30:39] Will Lichtig: And even in our FAL two or FAL three pricing. We’re basing the pricing based on what we’re believing the production system will be. So it is reflected in our pricing and it is reflected in our early conceptual estimating. And we’re committed as an organization to taking it into the hard bid market as well.

[00:31:00] Will Lichtig: So we just haven’t really gotten to that level yet, or that had those opportunities yet, but that is where we believe the future lies.

[00:31:08] Gary Fischer, PE: Can you see yourself getting to the point where you just don’t take a project where you can’t be involved in that early shaping work and alongside the engineering?

[00:31:20] Will Lichtig: So let me answer that in two ways. We believe that there’s still a lot to be achieved even if the design is solidified. So even if you can’t influence the product design, we still believe that we can design the production system to be faster, cheaper, better. We believe that the. And, I’m on the panel later this afternoon, I think for the benefit of the Enlightened owner.

[00:31:45] Will Lichtig: If you can gain the benefit of this in Ffel two and Ffel three and Ffel four you, will have meteoric changes in what’s possible. You won’t just have incremental improvement, but you’ll have transformational change.

[00:32:00] Gary Fischer, PE: Yep. Fully agree. That’s really insightful stuff. We’re still I’ve seen some thumbs up, but I’m not seeing any questions yet, so I guess we’ll wrap it up and if you think of a question later, we’ll get ’em back to this team and and they’ll field them for you.

[00:32:14] Gary Fischer, PE: So thanks guys for your time and making that presentation very insightful.

[00:32:19] Rob Peterson: Thanks for the opportunity.

[00:32:21] Gary Fischer, PE: You bet.