Brandon Howell, vice president of scheduling for Layton Construction Company, LLC, has been fascinated by schedule analytics for a long time. “I’ve always had this draw to schedule analytics, probably back to my time at Intel,” says Howell, whose company joined STO Building Group in 2019. “Over time, I realized that there are almost limitless insights you can extract from the schedule. It’s so much more than just a reporting tool.”
Howell knew what he was talking about. Even before Layton had any kind of schedule analytics tools, he was using Excel to produce customized analytics and dashboards. In fact, Howell had created some very detailed spreadsheets that would allow him to dump data from his scheduling platform, automatically populating the metrics he had built. Unfortunately, it was very time-consuming to create the desired metrics, as they had to manually export the data dump and paste it into Excel—along with several other steps—to make the spreadsheet work.
At some point, however, Layton invested in a business analytics (BA) tool that Howell discovered would integrate directly with their scheduling program. Howell figured he could automatically extract the data from the scheduling program and build custom dashboards—something he had envisioned for some time.
DISAPPOINTING DASHBOARDS
While a great idea in theory, the execution was clunky. In fact, it became almost impossible to create the dashboards he had seen in his mind’s eye. “I would work with our in-house data analysts for hours and hours trying to generate these dashboards,” he recalls. “There were a number of technical issues. The primary problem, however, was that the connection between the two programs was unstable; the data coming into the BA tool was not always reliable, so our people stopped trusting it. In the end, we were doing all this work, and the dashboards weren’t even being used.”
Howell began the search for an alternative in early 2022, one that was more “plug and play.” While attending a scheduling conference, he was introduced to SmartPM, a cloud-based, schedule-analysis program.
“We ended up purchasing 10 slots to pilot it on a handful of projects,” Howell notes. “We played with those projects for about six months before we decided that this was something we wanted to make available for all our projects.”
JUMP IN LICENSES
Based on their satisfaction with the platform, the company eventually made an exponential jump from 10 licenses to 250. Now, Howell manages and oversees the scheduling efforts not only for Layton Construction but for the entire STO West division.
According to Howell, company schedulers use the program most frequently; for the three companies in STO West, that represents a total of 32 schedulers. They’re the ones who pull the schedule updates into SmartPM and review/interpret the analytics for their project teams. But interest in the platform is spreading to other personnel as well. “We have a number of superintendents, project managers, even a few executives who have shown interest in the platform,” he says. “We’ve given them access to log in and view the metrics. I’ve shown a few of the more metric-driven executives how to get onto the project dashboard and filter it for their individual business units.”
When Howell first introduced the platform internally, there was a lot of focus on the Quality Checker feature, which assigns a letter grade for overall schedule quality. “If a scheduler received a B minus on their schedule, they would focus on driving their grade up to an A,” he says. “Plus, they would try to better understand the grading system, how each of the different schedule elements was being weighted.”
“BIG PICTURE” PERSPECTIVE
Studying the results churned out from the Quality Checker has helped to dramatically sharpen the schedulers’ skill sets. Yet while Howell encourages this quest for grade improvement, he wants SmartPM users to adopt a “big picture” perspective about the platform. “It’s great that they’re looking at the schedule quality,” he says. “But if they dig deeper, they’ll see that the schedule can provide many more insights. I encourage them to look at how much compression they’ve got in their schedule, look at the changes that are taking place, and see if there are any trends. Try to determine if the data is warning about any overruns or delays.”
SmartPM is also integrated directly with STO West’s BA tool, which displays a myriad of metrics related to each project’s budget, safety, RFIs, and submittal logs.
ACHIEVING ROI
Implementing SmartPM for Windows Analysis led STO West to significant cost and time savings. Traditionally, conducting this analysis manually would have required an estimated 40 hours of dedicated effort spread over two weeks. Based on their standard hourly rates, this manual process would have incurred approximately $6,000 in labor costs.
In contrast, with Smart PM, the analysis was completed in just two hours. This single analysis saved the $6,000 in labor costs and shortened the completion time from two weeks to less than a day.
USEFUL LEGAL TOOL
Occasionally, there is a legal dispute between the company and a project owner, and having a tool like SmartPM on his side is a major plus. Thankfully, Howell hasn’t had to call on SmartPM very often. But there is one particular Layton project on which it definitely came in handy. “The project owner was focused on a metric called ‘Commitments Met,’” he recalls. “That is, out of all the activities we were supposed to start since the previous month’s update, what percentage did we actually start?”
According to the consultant’s calculations, Layton hadn’t started a whopping 85 percent of those activities. Layton’s own analysis showed essentially the same figure. However, using SmartPM, Howell tried to dig deeper into the reasons for the low score. The platform allowed Howell to filter and sort all the critical path (or near critical path) activities. “I was able to show the consultant that we didn’t hit those dates because of all the owner delays,” he explains.
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