Year In Review: What’s New, Improved, And Coming Soon

Joe Giegerich: 

Hi everybody. Once again it’s time for the ProjectReady podcast. Today we’re doing the year in review. It was a very big year for us and for the industry and what we saw out there. Just some quick housekeeping stuff, previous podcasts, Little Things Big Results. One of the things that we’re really very ardent about is that you read about the really tight margins in the industry, there’s a lot of little things in terms of efficiency that are not being done by companies or at least done widely that really add up to large ROI. So that’s what that podcast is about. Also, we recently did what we found at Autodesk University if you will podcast. Coming up this year, one of the ones that I’m looking forward to is what is a data warehouse and why does it matter for the AEC/O. 

Data warehouse, everybody goes, oh, it’s a data warehouse. It has a lot of different meanings and it really ties back to Garbage In Garbage Out, one of our previous podcasts and our podcast around metadata. Data is only as good as your ability to have a taxonomy that’ll allow you to understand it and the whole bit, but what is a data warehouse? Also, we’re going to be coming back to SharePoint. SharePoint is where we started doing web parts and custom work a dozen years or so ago, and it still remains something that we have very strong skillset and knowledge of. And again, it’s where we started. So SharePoint teams, this is all used on projects, but how do you optimize that search? It’s one podcast. Another one is SharePoint and that importance of taxonomy, which feeds her, and we’ll have a few others as well. 

I would argue that we’ll probably do a podcast on SharePoint and well, again, it’s really Microsoft 365 that we’re talking about, how to manage security at scale. Another one that we will be having coming this year is navigating the challenges of the IT professional in the AEC. Pardon me. So the AEC is renowned for having a very low spend on sort of collaborative tech and the like, and IT professionals within the space have some very unique challenges with the multiple CDEs and systems that they’re responsible for. 

So going to 2023, for one we launched this podcast. For those of you who join us, we really do appreciate it. Previous guest that we just want to call out a thank you to are Jeff Walter from AECOM, Salla Eckhart from OAC and Aarni Heiskanen from AE Partners. And these folks have attended a podcast with us. And by the way, feel free to write to us at info@project-ready.com for any podcasts that you have in mind that you would like to hear about. And we will be trying to get on some more guest speakers over the coming year. 

The favorite podcast from May certainly was Garbage In Garbage Out. It says an awful lot about what the need is at hand. I know I already referenced it around the data warehouse, but just to call that out again, it’s a modular world and in this regard, we took a look at, and Jeff and Salla were on that podcast. There was a lot of systems at play in an AEC project. Really shouldn’t the enterprise be looking at these things as modules in the context of a project rather than solutions that the project has to fit in. 

Okay, so I’m just looking at my laundry list here. No, I think we’re good to move on here. So 2023, we rolled out a lot of features. We’ll get to them sort of one by one and close with what was a big breakout for us that’s being released in January. But let me turn it over to Shaili Modi. Shaili is the mother of ProjectReady, as I always say. And so Shaili, why don’t you start with some of the features that you found particularly powerful, salient that you were excited about that we released this year. 

Shaili Modi Oza: 

Yeah, definitely. I think just overall we built a lot of great features this year and just generally as a trend across the different integrations that we have, we’ve seen a lot of great advancement with the APIs this year, which of course always enables us to build all of these great features. So with Autodesk and Procore definitely have a lot of enhancements with the features that we have already. I think a significant one to start with would be Work Bridge, where we essentially have a workflow that connects the RFIs from Procore to the RFIs in ACC Autodesk Build. So basically if there’s a new RFI in Procore, it automatically gets created an Autodesk Build and we can pass the comments, responses, attachments back and forth between the two systems. 

Joe: 

Without manual intervention, which really warrants calling out because when we’ve showed this feature to other folks, they go, okay, when am I going to re-key? And that is the point. 

Shaili: 

And even, not even clicking something, it’s just something that needs to be set up once and then it just syncs automatically. So I think that is definitely a great feature with a lot of clients who use these two different systems and there’s a lot of manual work to copy things from one system to another, which can be very error-prone. And this just reduces that significantly by just automating the whole process. So I definitely think that that’s a great feature. And just like syncing between Procore and Autodesk, we’ve also extended that to SharePoint. So the RFIs and submittals from Procore, all the attachments can automatically sync to SharePoint as well. So we were already syncing the documents across these systems, but we’ve extended that integration to sync RFIs, submittals all of those attachments as well to SharePoint. 

Joe: 

Let me just pick up on a couple of things on that as well. So year in review, we went to AU and not too long before that, a month and a half Procore, that Work Bridge feature, the RFI, there was a big takeaway. The big interest we saw in the industry was solving these problems of re-keying and the like. And so Work Bridge and sync were pretty big. The other thing that we get every time we show Work Bridge is what about submittals? So this goes to your point, Shaili, about the advancement in APIs as soon as they release them. We’re just waiting for Autodesk to release the appropriate APIs and we’re going to get that in the hopper. Talking to folks at Autodesk, if you’re listening, please give us those APIs. That should be at hand, hopefully this year for sure, sooner than later is my expectation. All right, so back to you Shaili. 

Shaili: 

Yeah, definitely. And I would think so after the RFIs and submittals, again kind of moving on with both Procore and Autodesk, we now have the ability to create the projects in both of these systems. So as a part of our Build Your Project functionality, we set up the M365 group and the SharePoint site and the team and in the same functionality. Now we’ve extended that to both Procore and Autodesk as well where we can set up these projects and it all kind of works through that single builder project interface to set up projects in all of these systems together. 

Joe: 

And there’s a lot of value to that particular one. And just responding to what our clients responded to, I don’t know, given their feedback on this. For one, we use the exact same set of metadata across those systems. So when you set up M365 or its dedicated site for the project, Autodesk Procore, they all have the exact same name, title, we support the templates. And so above and beyond the efficiency of under three minutes, five minutes to set all that up is the notion that or the quality of that data, this is garbage in, garbage out. And then when we provision all these things, we roll out a data warehouse. So the ability to have everything being described the same way using authoritative metadata is one of the big, big, big components of Build Your Project. And the ability to extend that to Procore and ACC goes beyond how quickly we do it, and back to you. 

Shaili: 

And extending definitely with our Build Your Project, we now have a new feature where we can essentially save our Build Your Project wizard as a template. And I think that is also optimizing the whole functionality where we, of course we can set up and provision all of these systems, but it’s a walkthrough wizard and we’ve had requests where users make similar selections every time. So now we have the ability to basically save this entire process as a home template and we can call it externally from a trigger as well, but even without it just reduces a lot of manual work in. And furthermore reduces the time to set up and create a project. 

Joe: 

Yeah, it actually makes it kind of zero. So outside of the provisioning, which is 3 to 5 minutes, there’s no wizard at that point. And so what Shaili’s talking about is you’re in CRM, you go, oh, we’re at a stage of sale or interest by prospective client, click a switch, the whole thing rolls out, everything just rolls out, pulls in the information from CRM, accounting, whatever it may be. And yeah, Shaili’s point was that we do have clients that go, look, we have 100, 500, 1000 projects a year and every time we roll one or two or three out, it’s always the same team. It’s always the same, same, same. Why do I have to fill out the form? So that ability to automatically trigger certainly at scale is pretty substantial. 

Shaili: 

Yep, agreed. 

Joe: 

And where to go from here? So we talked about sync and the extension to RFI attachments and the like, but let’s just jump ahead to Program Management. So this is what’s coming out in a couple of weeks, this time of year it’s what we did and what we’re about to do. And they’re pretty much the same when you’re late in the season. Program Management. So Program Management, one of the requests that we get that is absolutely akin to everything else we do in this regard on a synchronization of content is the ability to have discreet projects as part of a program. That’s all well and good, it helps with reporting and the like, but what we’re able to do with Program Management is you’ll have two different ACC tenants, two different Procore tenants, and we’re able to replicate and synchronize content across those same platforms. So everything else we already do, but now you can roll Autodesk to Autodesk and then in that project roll it over to Procore and then Procore to Procore and back. So Shaili, why don’t you just give our listeners a bit of information about Program Management? 

Shaili: 

Definitely. So as you mentioned Joe we can have a one-to-one connection at a project level that a project in ProjectReady is connected to a project in Procore, Autodesk. But with Program Management we can basically bring multiple projects together. So as a part of a program it would have multiple projects under it, and all of these projects could be connected to different tenants, different systems. But by bringing them together under a single program, we can now sync content across them. And I would say on top of syncing, it would also bring other data points together. So we roll up RFIs and issues and submittals from all of these systems as well. We can have that consolidated view at the program level as well across projects, even across systems, if we have RFIs and as an example, three different systems in Procore, we can still bring it all together in one interface in ProjectReady because they’re all connected to the same program basically. 

Joe: 

Yeah. So I think obviously by the name, Program Managers get a real big bang out of this for their book. And so let’s just take an owner position on this. You can have all these synchronizations of content and data and everything flying around. Same tenants, different tenants, different systems, and flow it all off to say SharePoint for automated closeout. Now, there’s the thing about sync, and I had forgotten Shaili about putting all the RFI and workflow information from these CDEs centrally into our client’s database, means not only are you always aware of what’s going on, you always have a record and you have an audit trail and closeout is kind of done as soon as you close the project. I mean it’s just done. Which is hugely beneficial because the notion of just, again, with sync generally, downloading, unpacking, uploading it is just an absolute time burn. Little things, big results. 

Oh, Connect and Attach, my favorite workflow. So we do some very unique things managing inbound email if you will, you know, stuff in your inbox. It has to be, it’s an inbound request for an RFI, you need to create a task from it. But one of the things that we released this year was Connect and Attach. So just set up to why I like it so much. Anybody who’s ever worked in SharePoint, let alone other platforms, if you have to send out an attachment, you will have to send out attachments. Number of problems with this, one is go ahead and select more than one document from SharePoint and you’re downloading a zip file. It’s the same on all these platforms, Procore and Autodesk. And I have to send out a group of attachments from content in any one or all of these systems to say a client or a vendor or somebody. 

Connect it, and then the other challenge you have with that is great, you send it all out, it took you half an hour to download it and find everything, by the time you send it out, is it the current stuff? Does anybody else in your organization outside of remembering to CC people know that this has gone? Is there any audit trail or any reporting against it? And Connect and Attach solves all of this. And as somebody who obviously likes to send out subscriptions and order forms and all those other things, the ability just to add it to a cart, it’s a huge time saving. We have a very nice video on our website that shows that. So Shaili, why don’t you talk about connect and attach a bit from your perspective. 

Shaili: 

Yeah, I think it’s a great extension of our content card that we have in all of our document control workflows. And as you already mentioned, Joe, it makes it very easy to browse all of the different systems that are connected to the project to just select all of those documents and then basically send them out as email attachments. We can send them out externally as well, which was a big request because not all users who need these documents would be a part of your systems who would have a login to come to a secure place if we send links, which we do with our other workflows. But this is specifically when we need to send out attachments. So it definitely has that support where we can send it out externally to the team members as well. 

And all of that with our connection to the M365 group, it sends it to the group automatically. It’s all locked and tracked and we have great reporting down to even the attachment names. We can search that was this document sent over or not? And it keeps a report of all of that information as well. So it’s much more, basically better than just sending out an email from your inbox in that sense. 

Joe: 

Pretty much in every sense, right? The video I referenced online, we have time lapsed, right? And with us it’s under a minute and a half with 7 1/2 in that video. We’ve done that video a few times. One point it was 11 minutes. Either way, if you’re saving 6, 7 minutes x 3x a day x 100 employees, go do your math. It’s easy and you know what their base salary is. Other thing, just a quick thing that I found cool that I just sort of stumbled into. When you’re in SharePoint and you click the document in the cart, it will actually open for you. And so not only you can browse them, you can actually view them. And I’ve actually gone as far as making edits in the browser, committing to save, and then what gets sent out is literally up until that second, which was a happy surprise for me, so another thing that’s really cool about Connect and Attach. 

Shaili: 

Great. Yeah. 

Joe: 

And talking about sending stuff both internally with links and external, if there’s any workflow on Earth that is the biggest pain in the proverbial it is submittals. Everybody has them, everybody has to deal with them. We do have a unique approach. And Shaili, I thought you did a magnificent job this year building out our new submittals workflow. Why don’t you take us through how that works? 

Shaili: 

Yeah, definitely. So with our submittal workflow, we already had previously where we could definitely kind of have that step through option of where users would submit documents, there would be a review process, and then finally the submittal is closed and distributed. But the updates that we did this year were specific to adding that layer of interaction with external team members as well. So again, just like with Connect and Attach, there are so many users who basically still interact through emails and attachments. So right into the submittal workflow, we’ve added that integration with both outgoing as well as incoming. We can, from the workflow, send documents out in an email as attachments. If somebody sends an email with attachments, we can bring it in into the submittal as well as a resubmission or a new version of the document. 

As responses to an existing submittal, there are a lot of different options in that sense and it’s a lot more fluid with the newer updates now where even after it’s reviewed or updated, it can go back to previous steps basically because a submittal is a very fluid functionality, it’s not like a one way step through and then it completes, it just goes back and forth a lot of times. So it’s much more flexible that way to kind of keep going back, keep going to the previous steps, but still kind of having a record of everything that happened. So there is still a process over it while making it more flexible. 

Joe: 

And the flexibility was what I was really impressed with that you had come up with because people go, well, I don’t want to send attachments, I don’t want to send links. You can do both with our submittals. And that was the other thing too, is a submittal. One of the things I had said, a submittal is done when it’s done and you don’t know when it’s going to be done, so you have to have the ability to open it up again as well. All right. Don’t want to make this too long a conversation here. I think we’ve covered everything that at least the big things, big ticket items that we’ve done this year. Are there anything you would add Shaili? 

Shaili: 

No, I think pretty much covered it all. 

Joe: 

All right. And again, in 2024, which is just around the corner, Program Management will be officially released. Oh, also we’re going to be building apps inside the new Procore ribbon, forgot to mention that as well. But there you go. So that’s the year on review. Like I said, a really exciting year and exciting not, how can I put this? The stuff that we’re building, we got validation of the industry wants and then talking to the industry, we know what else to build and solve for. And it was great this year to see this all come together as tightly as it has. So anyway, wishing everybody happy holidays and a new year and looking forward to 2024. It’s going to be a great year for everybody I believe. And as always, this is Joe Giegerich and I thank you for coming out. Shaili, thank you as well. 

Shaili: 

Thank you.