Insiders Take | 01 - The Efficiency Is in the Planning, Not the Software

I was not on board with more tech. We’d been rolling out it for years. Apps that didn’t work, iPads you had to take back to the trailer to refresh, software that was never great all the time. You’d fade in and fade out with it. So when EllisDon called and said we have this pilot project, we’d like you to try it, I said I’m out. They said pretty please. I said fine.

Surprisingly, that first meeting with the Buildots team was really, really productive. They showed up with people who knew construction and people who were good at whatever magic happens in the cloud. Any question I had, there was somebody who could answer it. And the turnaround was fast. That was key. I’d ask them to build something and within two or three weeks it was done. You do that a couple of times and the juices start flowing. The ideas start going. You get more buy-in from other people. You leave the room doing high fives.

It 100% changed the way I plan a job. Not because the software was magic, but because it forced me to think differently about scheduling, logistics, and planning. You’re feeding the system 3,000 items on a large job. The system goes out, checks everything, and brings the information back to you. Before, you’d put 3,000 items in a schedule and update them all yourself. Now you’re doing a quick scan, checking the logic, and you’re done.

But here’s the thing that people miss. The efficiency is in the planning, not the software. If you’re not planning, you’re reactive. And reactive is where things start falling apart. Nobody wants to be in that environment. I don’t sleep well at night when I’m reactive. I sleep better knowing what the plan is before I go to the following day. That’s just the way I’m wired.

So we build what I call the CM Planner. We take our drawings, strip out all the noise in AutoCAD, and rebuild the building one layer at a time. Rough slab pour 1A, first pass, second pass. You turn layers on in sequence and you’re watching the building go up from start to finish. Those layers match the tasks in your schedule, so when a layer is complete, it turns green. Move on. Same drawings feed your staging areas and deliveries. Everything lives on one drawing. The project I’m on now is a big job with a small footprint. It has to be just-in-time deliveries or nobody succeeds. When everybody can see that on the same drawing, people start working together because they know there’s no room for anything else.

And all of it starts with the model. That model becomes my baby. That baby feeds every piece of tech I’m trying to introduce to the project. You have to give me the model at a certain level of detail so I can make everything else work. You wouldn’t give me a shitty drawing, so why are you giving us a shitty model? Give it to us properly. Give it to us early. Then hold yourself accountable from a scheduling, logistics, and planning standpoint, and it all merges together.

Once you’ve seen this work on your own projects, the natural question is why isn’t everyone doing it. And to be clear, this isn’t about Buildots specifically. It could be any tool that forces you to plan properly and holds you accountable to that plan. The point is the discipline, not the vendor. Enterprise adoption has been tough. I’m not going to lie. There are people who say they’ve been running jobs with Crayolas and highlighters and 11 by 17s for a million years and they don’t need this. Fine. There are people who focus on the one thing the tech can’t do instead of the twenty things it can. We’re rolling out robot layouts now, where you feed the machine, it prints on the floor, and you walk away. Somebody’s first comment was, did you see how long it took to change the ink? Are you kidding me? You know how long it takes somebody to get a chalk line out and chalk a line?

But once you get past those barriers and people see the results, they start to adopt. And what I’m really trying to do is make sure none of this tech takes away the thinking. You can’t take away the thought process of putting a building together with your partners. That’s the fun part of construction, if there’s such a thing.

Construction is still construction. You put the foundation in, you put the roof on, you throw the envelope on, and everybody walks away happy (hopefully). You’re just trying to find better, more efficient ways to do it so it’s not as much of a grind to get there.

- Chris

Chris Masse is a General Superintendent at EllisDon, based in Toronto.