Stanford Engineering Modern Construction Program Presentations

[00:00:00] Roberto J. Arbulu: Okay, my name is Roberto Arbulu. I’m Vice President of Technical Services for Strategic Project Solutions. And also collaborate with the Project Production Institute on certification programs that the Institute has with both Stanford University and Texas A& M. Today we’re going to talk, we’re going to dedicate the next half an hour to do three things.

[00:00:27] Roberto J. Arbulu: One, I’m going to take advantage that we’re all together and introduce what this program is about. Give you a bit of context. Number two, we invited a couple of people that have professionals like all of us that have actually gone through the first certification program. They are here to share their stories.

[00:00:53] Roberto J. Arbulu: Okay. We have two. minute presentation each, very quick. And then we are going to the participants of this certificate program are going to receive their certificates with all of us. Okay. We have about there’s a total of 11 people, but two of them are not here today with us. So have nine people that we are going to have the opportunity to give them their certificates.

[00:01:22] Roberto J. Arbulu: Okay. So three things. So let me start with the first one. And it’s an introduction of, the modern construction program. If you are interested in project administration, meaning creating a schedules to develop baselines and report and forecast progress and all the things related to project administration, this program is not for you.

[00:01:56] Roberto J. Arbulu: Okay. This program is not for you. But if you are interested in project production and how to optimize production systems and how to combine that with technology, with autonomy, with digital technologies, and really think about next practices, this program is for you.

[00:02:24] Roberto J. Arbulu: I’m gonna explain exactly the components in, in, in a minute, but before, I think it’s very important that we share with you, because you might not be aware of how did we get here. How did we get to a modern construction certification program? Because there’s a very interesting story behind it. So let me do that.

[00:02:51] Roberto J. Arbulu: About in the early 2000s. SPS was actually involved in the construction of Heathrow Terminal 5. We were I would say the designers, the engineers of the civil phase production system. And we put a lot of technology on top of that production system. And, we were doing beam technologies, 3D, 4D, production management.

[00:03:23] Roberto J. Arbulu: analytics, and a different set of elements, right? At the same time, in 2002, 22 years ago, the Martin Fisher and John Koons, who were involved at that time with PsyFie, Martin Fisher still is, John Koons retired here at Stanford, created it and brand it in methodology. that is still today is being used called Virtual Design and Construction, or VDC, okay?

[00:03:57] Roberto J. Arbulu: And through the relationship with Martin Fisher, who is gonna be later today, he’s gonna be the last presentation today, Martin saw that what we were doing there is actually very similar, exactly the same, to be really honest, on what VDC was. And we decided. to join efforts. Okay, back around once again, the first half of 2000 we decided to join efforts at the time with SPS and the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering of Stanford and launch the first virtual design and construction certification program 16 years ago.

[00:04:49] Roberto J. Arbulu: This program has actually gone through multiple countries around the world, certifying project professionals, like all of us, on the effective application of those techniques. What happened later on, is that in the year 2013, the Project Production Institute was actually formed with the objective that Gary actually introduced earlier.

[00:05:14] Roberto J. Arbulu: And the institute took that program forward and initiated these symposiums in year 2014. So 10, 10, actually 11 years ago. Okay. So these said in this setting here has been actually happening for 11 years. I know some of you said this is my first time, but the symposium has is an 11 year old child. Okay.

[00:05:42] Roberto J. Arbulu: This discussion have been happening for a while. In year 2015, the institute takes the virtual design and construction program forward with Syfy Steel and start running with it, okay? Continue today, as a matter of fact, I think there are a group of about 20 people here in the room that have been focusing on that certification here at Stanford the last few days.

[00:06:27] Roberto J. Arbulu: In 2023 Stanford, particularly what Stanford called CIGO, which is the Center for it’s a new name, Center for Global and Online Education, together with CIFI, with Martin Fisher, launched a new certification program called Modern Construction. This doesn’t mean that the VDC is actually stopping, but the idea is to move faster in the bringing into the industry next practices associated with how can we modernize construction.

[00:07:05] Roberto J. Arbulu: And so that is happening as we speak, and the program was launched actually, as I mentioned last year, and the first certification program happened this year.

[00:07:19] Roberto J. Arbulu: What occurred is that a lot of project professionals in Peru, okay, South America, got a lot of interest and they got a lot of certification on virtual design and construction. So a group of them show a significant interest in being the first ones in taking this modern construction certification. Okay, a group of 11 people, they are all here.

[00:07:47] Roberto J. Arbulu: We will give them their certificates in a few more minutes. Okay. And so we did the first program at the University of Lima just because of the interest of this group that were already certified with the virtual design and construction program. Okay. So just to give you a little bit of context, because you might not know this Facts in history and how is it that we got to the moment construction?

[00:08:18] Roberto J. Arbulu: Okay. So just, to create some awareness, these are the different groups of people back in 2008 and the group that is going to get the certificates today went through the whole program. PPI is very serious about sharing knowledge. with the global engineer and construction industry as it relates to project production management.

[00:08:48] Roberto J. Arbulu: And it’s serious because it is intending to assist professionals, all of us that we have years of experience on how they can improve performance in their projects. Okay? So you might be thinking so what is actually modern construction? The way we are framing it is through three main components. One, industrial, which means, can we industrialize the way we engineer things, build things, right?

[00:09:20] Roberto J. Arbulu: Production system thinking, and can we use digital technologies and autonomous technologies, robots, autonomous vehicles, right? But all associated with production. Okay? Why? Because if we are not able If we don’t focus on how we do work, how can we expect to improve performance?

[00:09:51] Roberto J. Arbulu: I know it’s a very simple statement, right? But if we do not focus on improving work, how can we expect to improve performance? So the whole program is a combination of a production system perspective and technology on top of it. One more thing. The way the program works is that like the group here did, we spent one whole week, Monday, Friday from eight in the morning until five. Okay. One week doing an introduction to all these concepts and techniques and technologies, right? Very hands on, right? We Let me put it this way, we open the fire hose and we hope you can drink from it.

[00:10:47] Roberto J. Arbulu: We open it, right? We open it. We don’t really care if you have 10 years of experience, 40, or 2. We just hope that you can drink from it. We share all of our experience, Stanford and PPI, on these topics. Then, we go through a period of about 6 months. Okay. Where the professionals that are signing up into the program will have to demonstrate, they will have to apply and demonstrate how they’re applying what they learn on a real project.

[00:11:29] Roberto J. Arbulu: So they go back to work after a week and then go through multiple monthly calls that we PPI, that’s what in the middle, where they prepare reports, right? And we provide some guidance when they are learning and so forth. Make sense? The last element in this program is a two day integration workshop, as we call it, which is here at the university.

[00:12:04] Roberto J. Arbulu: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the last couple of days, we held the first meeting. That integration experience, as a matter of fact, that photo right here is from those sessions at the civil engineering department here in the campus, okay, with 11 people, okay? So that integration experience is designed to make sure that they learn from each other, right?

[00:12:31] Roberto J. Arbulu: Multiple companies, multiple types of companies, right? Okay? And increase even further than that their knowledge and understanding of these sort of techniques. We also spend a lot of time, as much as we can, on how to implement this. Okay, not just what this is, but how to implement it. What is the most effective approach to implement?

[00:13:01] Roberto J. Arbulu: This make sense? Okay, so a bit of an overview, Because what we’re going to do next is, these are some photos of the sessions here at Stanford, of people working. By the way, I should have mentioned this, we had the opportunity to visit the new robotics center here at Stanford, which is pretty interesting.

[00:13:25] Roberto J. Arbulu: They just opened it in November. And and It’s pretty wild because you don’t see applications only of robotics to construction, applications of robotics to different technical fields including medicine multiple applications where they do research. Including robots that are actually working, operating underwater, like the one on the bottom right corner this is what we’re moving for, forward. This is the next practice. I don’t think we have a choice. Either we take it, or it’s gonna take us. We don’t have a choice. All this is already here. It’s not that it’s, we have to learn as professionals, how to absorb all this technology, and, but focusing on production.

[00:14:25] Roberto J. Arbulu: Okay? I would like to invite, Cesar and Oscar, with me please, come, both of you. So out of the group, we selected two of them. Cesar Guzman is actually the CEO of a construction company based in Lima, Peru. Then the company is called Productiva. And Oscar Gonzales is a project manager. At a company called IDOM that they do project management in industrial facilities.

[00:15:00] Roberto J. Arbulu: Oscar, if you don’t mind having a seat here with me. And we’re gonna let Cesar take us through a bit of his story. We’re gonna give him five minutes. And remember, that what they have done is they have applied these on their own projects, right? Cesar is the CEO of the company, so has been heavily, involved.

[00:15:23] Roberto J. Arbulu: And look at that innovation, okay? Oh, the microphone is over here. Sorry.

[00:15:31] Cesar Guzman: Okay. Thank you, Roberto, for introducing me. I have a brief presentation about my implementation in the modern construction program. My implementation is about increasing profit in building projects. This is the type of building, if I this is in Lima, Peru.

[00:15:57] Cesar Guzman: This is, this project has between five or six basements and between 20 or 40 stories. I don’t know if the chart it’s, see, but the current situation in, this project It’s it’s analyze 20 projects, and this is historical data across these 20 projects. The problem is the, lack of predictability in these projects.

[00:16:31] Cesar Guzman: In main story trade, just only main story trade it’s it’s you don’t see them. For example, in this project The duration of some projects is around 130 days and others is 50 days is a, problem. And in average this trade is 72 days from the end of the shell to the end of the masonry.

[00:16:57] Cesar Guzman: And this outcomes is not predictable. And we identify and lack opportunities. This is the three most important opportunities. The first one is compressed the schedule in 40% in this trade from 22 sorry 72 days to 45 days. Also about the cost, reduce the cost in all 0.5 percent and identify means to become more predictable.

[00:17:34] Cesar Guzman: This is the map the, first thing in, in our. In our implementation in this course is a map and a model the, production system. In, my case there are five product flow. This is the, I think this is the most important part of, the implementation. Because when you run the PPI software.

[00:17:59] Cesar Guzman: you can see a lot of information, a lot of important information. For example, in the chart of the left, on the left, you can see the capacity utilization and in, in the case of this trait, the bottleneck is the roughing but this is the around I think 90%, but there are two more very near from this, this.

[00:18:27] Cesar Guzman: bottleneck I think is a stucco and also lying, masonry. And the idea of this first part is work in these three components or these three, these three, three traits review the the analyze the flow analysis with throughput, cycle time and and WIP. Okay what levers we use for improve or optimize this current state.

[00:19:02] Cesar Guzman: In our case we review this the five levers, but in the case of the product design, we eliminate the roughing. In the case of process design, we also eliminate the roughing process the, with product design and the process also, the capacity eliminate the the crew, the tools, the equipment, and inventory reduce the batch for, the transfer batch from four to one size, and assume low variability.

[00:19:39] Cesar Guzman: And this is now how does look like our production system in the, on the left is the before you can see the, roughing in the, on the after, you don’t, you, we eliminate this this, trait, but also the bottleneck is in the lagging crew, and we need to improve again, and this is a continuous improvement.

[00:20:07] Cesar Guzman: Okay, this is the most important part, I think. What are the business implications for us? This is our next project, and this is about the cost of this project is 36 millions, and our profit is 9%, is 3. 3 millions of dollars, and the idea is increase our profit in 7%. It’s around 0. 22 million. Millions, but I put per project because we have ten projects in the, at the same time, and the idea is, and the idea is work in all these projects.

[00:20:50] Cesar Guzman: Finally the learnings of, my implementation, the first one is the real and future impact in operation science in project outcomes. I think people need to know that this operation science is a fact. It is gravity slow and you need to learn and apply in your projects. And the second one the idea of implementing technology depend of the company, not only company is at the same page in technology is progressive.

[00:21:30] Cesar Guzman: And finally, you need to training people and commitment because I think the, people is the most important thing in our companies, but it’s, this is my, presentation. Thank you.

[00:21:50] Roberto J. Arbulu: Thank you so much. I remember Cesar telling me after the course is a, look, I had a I don’t know how many aha moments. And, thinking about how, they can improve their company. He being the CEO, one of his challenges is how to create a new work environment. Okay. And one of the things that he has learned also is that it’s not about change, because change is a very negative term.

[00:22:18] Roberto J. Arbulu: He’s thinking about, I’m going to change the term. I’m going to call it optimizing. We’re going to keep optimizing until we can. Okay. The human brain reacts negatively to change. Okay. The second guest here is Oscar. And Oscar is going to, I can do it here, don’t worry. Take us through his application, what he did during the last almost a year.

[00:22:53] Roberto J. Arbulu: Oscar, go ahead.

[00:22:55] Oscar Gonzales: Let’s please imagine if you can reduce the 40 percent of the total cycle time of fire protection fire, protect protection piping production system. For this example, we are gonna take this project that is a distribution center of pharmaceutical products. It has hundred million dollars and we have twenty months to complete this objectives.

[00:23:28] Oscar Gonzales: So we are gonna center only first of how we are gonna install this fire protection system into an adaptor. An adaptor is an automate storage system. So before I can tell you how we get to this objective. We are gonna, I am going to, tell you how was the, beginning. The beginning is start with this two optimization of the cycle piping.

[00:24:05] Oscar Gonzales: So if we focus only in two optimizations, we can save this kind of time and also this kind of of cost. But, first of all, let’s think of that we have. If we only have one modification of, our project, for example a support it can, be implicates 4, 000 of supports that we have to modify.

[00:24:36] Oscar Gonzales: It gonna, has to be, Very faster because if we don’t approve the additional cost to the, contractor, they don’t start. So we have to, compress the, time. This is the, digital production system. The first part that is in the blue. And the second part is the, green that we have to execute for, we have to start with the fabrication.

[00:25:04] Oscar Gonzales: So we also have to, improve that part. Yeah, Ok. So in The way how we do this we start with identify what is the bottleneck. For example, the, that we all the, staff, we in the professional staff in my company receive like 200 emails. So it’s difficult to, read all the mails, so we have to reduce this time to concentrate in the important thing.

[00:25:37] Oscar Gonzales: For example I, need to return to the, of my vacation the, next week and. I, passed one thousand of email and I don’t know how to, read what is important. We improved that part and we are gonna, instead of use, using humans, we are gonna use some digital constructs controls mechanism to do this and we are gonna reduce to a week to two weeks.

[00:26:03] Oscar Gonzales: And also, in the part of the execution, we are gonna reduce the bottleneck that It takes to humans eight weeks, we’re going to reduce to only two weeks because we are going to use some robots to this, to get that achievement. So if you think that if at the beginning we were using 40 workers, we can replace 20 workers by one robot and also we are changing the time that we are using these 20 workers in eight weeks.

[00:26:36] Oscar Gonzales: We can reduce in that amount of cost. So now, if we pass only that to optimization, we can consider now to optimize more. If we can consider optimize 10 optimization cycles, we can consider that all the project can save 4 months, it can implicate like 20 percent in the total project and also we can save 5 million of the total amount so it can be like 5 percent in the total project.

[00:27:06] Oscar Gonzales: So in, in the future what we are consider now in our company. So we can introduce an asset for the company that is gonna be the robot. So we can replace robots instead of humans. And we can save time, not only cost of course we can improve the, quality because we are not gonna avoid some reworks in that.

[00:27:33] Oscar Gonzales: Because we are going to be more precise. And also I need to talk about the learnings that we get in this year. The first thing that I think is the found new ways to add the significant value to our company. Because we are, need to be more competitive to, again, to the other companies. For, us, another potential is the operation side.

[00:28:03] Oscar Gonzales: We can change the, engineering that we are doing right now and also the, construction industry. And also we are investigating in technology, so we must understand where we are going to invest. Now, with the skills of operation, of production skills that I gained in this course, now I can say that I can create new business offering.

[00:28:34] Oscar Gonzales: Because we are concurrently Design the new asset with our engineers, but also we are going to offer the design of the production system. That is. Thank you so much.

[00:28:53] Roberto J. Arbulu: Thank you guys. So one thing that I just, now that you heard their own stories, right? This is a condensed version of what they have been doing, obviously, in five minutes. What are we certifying people on? We’re certifying people on the following their ability to understand operation science. The ability to identify production systems in project.

[00:29:18] Roberto J. Arbulu: Map them out model them analyze their behavior and actually optimize them one or multiple times and really is almost like we’re our objective is to give them a new set of goggles so they can see things differently. That’s what we’re really doing with the program, right? And also, the adoption of technology on top of production systems, okay?

[00:29:45] Roberto J. Arbulu: What I would like to do now, just to wrap it up, I would like to invite Beth Valente from Stanford. Beth is the Director of Custom Programs, who we have been working very, close with. At Stanford at the Center for Global and Online Education. Beth, join me, please. And so Beth is going to help us to go through our certificates and we’re going to call one by one.

[00:30:09] Roberto J. Arbulu: We don’t have time for a photo. We’re going to do that. You will see us in the next break. So people are going to come in and then we continue with the next session. Okay. So Beth,

[00:30:29] Roberto J. Arbulu: Alexander is actually a professor at university of Lima. He’s a civil engineer. He’s actually from Brazil. Come for the next guy. You can come all the way to the stairs. Okay. Thank you so much. Excellent. Well done. Good. Thank you, Alexander. Please. Alvaro. He’s not here. Okay, he’s in classes. Cesar.

[00:31:00] Roberto J. Arbulu: There you go

[00:31:13] Roberto J. Arbulu: Good.

[00:31:20] Roberto J. Arbulu: Felipe, go around and go through the stairs. Oh, there you go. Go around the stairs. Oh, whatever you want. I’m not gonna say anything else. Safety Okay, Gerardo, this way. Gerardo, this way.

[00:32:02] Roberto J. Arbulu: Now I’m controlling the production system.

[00:32:11] Audience Member: Excellent.

[00:32:19] Audience Member: Justo.

[00:32:31] Audience Member: Whatever you want.

[00:32:37] Audience Member: Thank you, Roberto. No problem. Go that way, please. Congratulations. Oscar.

[00:32:59] Audience Member: There you go.

[00:33:09] Roberto J. Arbulu: That’s it. Okay. Thank you guys. Hopefully this was interesting to you. Okay. Bye.