Construction Doesn't Have a Technology Problem with Amir Berman

0:00The ConTechCrew Hosts: On this week's show, The Intelligence Lab with Amir Berman from Build Dots.

0:16The ConTechCrew Hosts: All right, Amir. Good to see you. Thanks for hopping in for a fun little episode. How you doing? Very well, buddy. Happy to be here. Thanks a lot. Ah, it's good to have you. Where are you coming at us from? I always love these. When I went this podcast world, we get to interview people from so many different places in the world.

0:32Amir Berman: So I'm coming right now from Tel Aviv, Israel, which is like a nice breezy kind of evening for September right now. It's not that cold yet.

0:40The ConTechCrew Hosts: We're a little cold here, but that's good. You know, it's interesting. Tel Aviv, we have seen a lot of construction startups come out of there over the years. So maybe that'll be something we talk about when we get into talking. Hey, guys, remember, check us out. We're going to be at Trimble Dimensions in just a couple of weeks. If you want to see us live on stage and around some of the most incredible technology and hardware, come check us out on stage. Join up now, Trimble.com. Get your tickets. Look for us. Talk to us. Who knows?

1:11Amir Berman: You might be the next guest.

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2:25Amir Berman: I bring like it's awful to say but almost like 20 years in technology like I went through this today I was like 20 years so 20 years in data and technology software and for the past 10 years I've been working for various different construction tech companies so I'm kind of a weird mixture between like a data geek and a construction geek and funnily enough like the lab is like the perfect place to land if you love it on the lab we kind of look at like different performance metrics and benchmarks for like the for the construction industry for the purpose of like starting to standardize things and measure things and help everyone to to become just a bit better by trade and by background i'm like a product manager who like really loves data and and funnily enough really loves uh construction i want to say the funny part which i'm not sure if it's like karma i'm not sure if i ever told you that like my parents back in the day did you know that they had like a mom and pop kind of family business for printing out like those construction shop drawings

3:24The ConTechCrew Hosts: no i didn't know that so they back in the day of what a blueprint is you had to print it out

3:30Amir Berman: and i mean i remember like all of my summer vacations as a kid i would go as like and work there for my summer vacations like half work half like spend the time because we can't be alone at home and i was like printing and folding those like giant sheets of paper for construction company. So I don't know if it's like on the stars or written somewhere, but I find myself like in construction eventually.

3:53The ConTechCrew Hosts: Yeah. And so talk to me about that. So 20 years sort of as a, you know, more on the data and technology side, what brought you over to construction? What was that first leap look like?

4:03Amir Berman: It's an email from a friend, believe it or not. I mean, I started my journey in data and product management for online advertising. I mean, back in the day, it was online ad serving. I wasn't anything close to construction. And then I started specializing a bit more in different companies for what we called back then like big data for advertising and how do you merge together information from different data sources. And one day, I think it came across like the day that I didn't find any kind of excitement in advertising and marketing. And a friend of mine

4:35The ConTechCrew Hosts: in Israel, like everyone works in tech eventually in Israel, he came to me and said like, yeah,

4:39Amir Berman: hey, you know what? There's a young construction tech company looking for a product manager. Do you know anyone? And that's a code name for like, hey, do you want to meet those guys without him actually asking this? So my first response was like, no way. What do you mean construction tech? There's nothing to do in there. Like, what do you mean? And he was like, no, no, no, go and meet those guys. They're interesting. So I went there and I met them, like two guys, two Israelis not related to BuildOds. And that was a different company. And I met them. You're like smart as hell but what do you mean construction there's nothing to do in here obviously i was like stupid and i know uneducated and i told them like no you're smart and everything but let's wrap it up i don't see me joining you guys and sure enough i joined them eventually i met them a few more times and i joined we were doing augmented reality for the field back then that was like i think it was 2015 if you remember that era where ar was like a strong thing and this is where i kind of fell in love for the first time with the people in construction and the challenges and everything.

5:38Amir Berman: Like I've spent weeks and months on job sites and everywhere in the US and the UK, in Turkey, believe it or not, in Bangkok, in France, like all around the globe. And I just like, I know, something clicked with the people, the challenges, the problems that, and I was still very early in my journey in construction, but this is how I randomly got into it and built my third station in this journey.

6:01The ConTechCrew Hosts: It's a classic right around the time, nobody thinking that the industry was much. I'm one of those, you know, I was a couple of years ahead of you there, I think coming over and just thinking, eh, there's nothing here. I'm going to get out. And then realizing pretty quickly through the work, it's the work, it's the people, it's that the world around you is built by people and filled with ideas and, you know, hard work and real outcomes. It kind of sucks you in. And And then for our technology minds, the complex nature of the problems themselves and then the interactions has always been, it's never ending.

6:42The ConTechCrew Hosts: Every time I turn around and think I know enough about sort of how it all works, there's something new that I learned. And I think that's what's cool about this industry and continuing to peel back the layers. You keep finding more, right? You're solving problems early, sometimes not. You know, like I was on that augmented reality train, man. And we don't have to beat that one, but it was like, might be ahead of its time. And that's part of the process too. Like how many real finance or advertising or you're not in on the ground floor. Kind of gone through their, the arc. And now you're starting to look at their data and figure out how to, you know, sell somebody one more widget.

7:18The ConTechCrew Hosts: Yeah.

7:18Amir Berman: I mean, I get what you're saying. I had the same feeling. I think I was like sitting like back then in New York in one agency. I was like, I don't want to do this, man. I don't want to optimize yet another like click or somewhere like, oh, that's enough for me speaking about this industry. Like I love mine. I don't need to.

7:34The ConTechCrew Hosts: It was great, too, because it just provided a new set of challenges. So now you're over here. And what do you think surprised you coming from such a mature data and technology background when you got over here? What surprised you when you got over here into that construction world?

7:50Amir Berman: It wasn't a surprise at the beginning, because as I said, I came like green thumb. I wasn't like a veteran by any sense. So what started surprising me after a few years is that the amount of technology in construction is massive. Like people often say like there's not enough technology, there's not enough technology adoption. I mean, that's not the case. It's like people's definition for technology may be like a quirky. But think about all of the machinery, all of the information, all of the different legacy systems that you have. You have a ton of technology. It's not a problem of technology.

8:19Amir Berman: It's all around you. I think that what drives me is the fact that there's like the amount of opportunities that you had in front of us. If you start to kind of figure out how to connect the different dots, and I swear it's not like a segue for bell dots like with the bell dots. But if you start connecting the dots and you start to understand like, how can I leverage the existence? How can I leverage all the things that exist in the industry? everything that people already use, all the things that have been implemented and, you know, tested for years and years and been regulated. And people like got to know really well.

8:54Amir Berman: If you figure out how to utilize it and squeeze the lemon just a bit more and gain like new value for people, that's probably like the biggest opportunity. People often come to this industry saying like, OK, let's get like a completely something new, something that was never seen, which sometimes may work. But I think the real opportunity is like leveraging the existing and connect it and generate something new from it.

9:18The ConTechCrew Hosts: I like that idea because we did hear that a lot in the early days of disruption. And we're just going to disrupt the industry. It's going to fully change and it's not going to look like you thought it was. And like, well, are you guys really pulling your lens back and looking at how it has changed? Because it has significantly changed. And I fully agree with the technology because you're looking at the types of tools, the types of equipment. And just in the end, look at the types of facilities we're building versus, you know, you don't go to a new stadium now and think, wow, that looks like an old stadium.

9:50The ConTechCrew Hosts: Every new stadium is state of the art and hospitals. And now in the hyperscaler and data center world, like we are just building newer, more advanced, more complicated, technologically advanced buildings and structures. And so it does take new tools to do that. And we they have been doing it's but you're right. It's not necessarily fitting the definition. And then also, I think, to your point, we're not leveraging the data for the feedback loop that we really need. I think that's the component where people are like, you're behind. I don't know that we're behind, but I don't think we've connected to reach our potential.

10:33The ConTechCrew Hosts: Right. If we start doing that. So take me back for a second into, you know, sort of got to start somewhere and Build.Start started with a problem and kind of focus me there. So then we can go to now where you've taken it.

10:46Amir Berman: All right. Let's go back to the basics about like what is Build.It's a problem that we're handling and why is that we exist? So to put it like in a simple way, like Build.Start is a construction intelligence platform. The very like a build-up one-on-one is that we use AI and computer vision, obviously, to analyze what's actually being built on each and every project against its plans. So whenever like a project starts to drift, whenever things go sideways, not according to plan, the teams that run the project, everyone who is involved from the supply chain to the owner to the contractors, they seed early enough so they can respond on time.

11:23Amir Berman: And if you remember, one thing is all about generating more time for people to act on problems that will come no matter what. How does it work? Is that we analyze automatically anything that the eye can see. We capture the structure of the building, the underground utilities, the facade, NEP roughness, finishes, you know, unique. And that comes from reality capture being taken by 360 cameras, by drones, by laser scanners, anything existing in the industry already. I mean, all the techniques that have been available for a while. And we also track manpower and labor data from the project. So we kind of capture all the different project kind of data that we can to tell you like how things are actually going.

12:09Amir Berman: And we use AI to compare it to the original plan. So we will tell you whether you're on time against your schedule. And we can track individual different elements that we extract from takeoffs from the model and from your drawings. So we create this kind of unique specific data model for each and every project, which is highly detailed, highly developed, that matches precisely how the product is going to be built. And we use AI and reality capture to actually automatically tell you how things are progressing so that you can get more time to respond whenever things go sideways.

12:45The ConTechCrew Hosts: That early warning system, the early detection. It's funny because along the way, we saw a lot of drones and you kept saying, oh, we got 360s, you know, we got this. You could see this reality capture of all the elements needing to come together. And I like the idea of a project data model because every project's unique, right? It has its own unique set. It's the thing that all the disruptors wanted to change that I don't think you can ever change is that they are all unique and individual from a certain perspective, right? Certain parts and pieces, you know, should be more repeatable from a fabrication and consumption-based ability to produce faster, right?

13:27But that doesn't mean that the building itself, that the structure itself isn't unique in its operation, isn't unique in the way it's delivering value to its owner.

13:37The ConTechCrew Hosts: So in that respect, it's got to stay unique. But it also has core componentry that, you know, it's going to be the same every time. So that's it's a cool way to look at it.

13:47Amir Berman: And I mean, that kind of piece of unique, I have to say that it's conversation. It's I'm not sure where do I fall at each and every day. I'll give you that example. Obviously, each and every building is unique. Even if you run an asset class of the same thing, you're running a$2 billion asset class for healthcare. You're going to do healthcare facilities. And even if you focus on healthcare facilities for veterans in the Midwest, as specific as can be, each of your buildings is going to be slightly different, different budget, different standard, different size, whatever it is. But, and this is the funny thing, if you strip the building from its characteristics, some elements of it are repetitive, are the same.

14:25Amir Berman: You have the same kind of trade visits. you have the same MVP roughly, and you can find that thread that you can train technology and you can train data sets and data models to kind of find that repeatability. And I think it's kind of that unique mixture to understand where is uniqueness relevant and where is this repetition and try to look for kind of standardization and look for things that technology can actually do as a heavy lifting. So I'm kind of in between, to be honest.

14:53The ConTechCrew Hosts: Yeah, well, and I think that's where it has to land. If we landed in the, it was all vanilla, then it wouldn't be very fun. If we continue, and I will say continue in the wild, wild west of everything's unique from the ground up, we're never going to reach the potential of the industry. And quite frankly, we're at a precipice now where we can't afford that because we don't have the labor or the materials, to be honest. There's a lot of material waste in that process of rework, right? We were burning up people by reworking them and reinventing the wheel every project after project. And then also admin burden.

15:27The ConTechCrew Hosts: Where are we? What is our percent complete? What is our work in progress? You know, any of that. It's a yes and yes. And we need to measure and we need to standardize. And there are threads that should be the same over and over because then we can measure, right? And you can't fix anything until you can properly measure it.

15:46Amir Berman: There's like two sides for this conversation. I completely agree with you. And I think that whenever you go on the project, you look at it from the project lens. But what happens when you look at it from a business perspective? Like, let's say I'm running like 100 different projects, or it doesn't matter, but really matter on the scale of your operations. What you want to do is like to really be able to assess your level of predictability and your level of, you know, how well am I doing business? How well can I improve it? And so on and so on. And there's only one way, maybe it's too naive to say, But I think it's very efficient to try and standardize your business, which is like the fundamental base for measurement.

16:23Amir Berman: And in time, that's the fundamental base for any improvement.

16:27The ConTechCrew Hosts: Yeah. And those are different depending on what you do. If you're a mechanical, electrical, plumber, drywaller, you know, glazer, finisher, whatever you might be, it's different. And looking at your at the projects important and there's this big project lens. But then there's also, like you said, your own business lens. And how are we doing as a business and where can we improve and how can we measure that? And that's the too many, especially that midsize, too many of the leaders are working in projects and in companies instead of on projects and on the company. Like looking at it from the whole, where are we doing well?

17:11The ConTechCrew Hosts: Where aren't we? how do we approach those things instead of the old days of you know this project is fine until it's not fine and then we'll either swoop in and yell at everybody and try and fight our way or we'll like send a whole bunch of crack the black ops team in to fix it up you know you can't do that can't afford to anymore and one miss pretty short margins in a lot of areas man so a miss is a miss might be the company's profit for the year anything insignificant and at some point in time and we've seen it now, could be the business. Could be gone tomorrow because of it.

17:45Amir Berman: And I mean, I'm a bit biased because this is kind of my nature. This is how I think. This is how my company, our company thinks. But I truly believe this is kind of like the way to standardize and measure. This is like that one of the next possible leaps going forward to kind of connect different pieces together. Because frankly, I don't think that as a technology sector for this industry, I don't think that we serve our industry very well on providing that well-connected infrastructure.

18:09The ConTechCrew Hosts: I would say that's, you know, as we talk pre-call, you know, the crew and the Construction Progress Coalition are tied together these days. And we believe that, you know, I think we've always said that we need to serve this industry better by connecting more sources of data, by providing more benchmarking, providing what we can to help the industry continue to gather that. And so this is a nice segue because, you know, you guys, you've been very successful at BuildDots. It got to this point and I'm sure it was eating at you and that there was an opportunity. So talk about to build the intelligence lab and what it means to you.

18:42The ConTechCrew Hosts: And then what I think is great is and why we sat down and talked today is like what it means to the larger industry.

18:47Amir Berman: Yeah, I mean, the lab was always like was bubbling in the back of our minds, especially for the past few years. I mean, the background story for the lab is that a few years ago, I think that whenever we made that jump, we made it leap on being a progress tracking tool to like a tool that allows you to kind of track how work is being done, not only to tell you like what's the percentage complete for each network task, but rather like, is this good enough? And we started asking like, okay, so how do you determine if something is good enough? How do you determine? Obviously at the end of the day, if you're late to deliver, I'll know.

19:20Amir Berman: I want to be helpful. I want to be as providing you value as early as possible. So we had to put our minds into like, okay, what good looks like. And we were not doing it alone. Like that we always operated. It was like we embedded ourselves on job sites. But we were going to be there day in day out we're going to sit in your black hat meetings your attack meeting whatever it is and i remember those time i was sitting there and saying like okay why are you yelling at this electrician god forbid like why is this like and he said well i need him to do like three floors you know on those two weeks i was like okay why three why not two why five where you come up with those numbers and he had those like ballpark numbers in his head that's this how they operate like to the best that they can right but then we were crunching some numbers And we said, like, OK, but we kind of calculated everything towards the end based on the fact that we know precise quantities and we know, like, how many conduits you've been installed and so on and so on.

20:09Amir Berman: We said, like, if you're running up the numbers, I actually need him or you actually need him like half a foot. That's it. And he's been operating quite well. So we had this, like, very early notion of, like, we need to be able to provide numbers of what good looks like, because you need to provide that signal to make sure that you're quite accurate. and you're almost, you're like the, I know, you're like the coach or the conductor, not us, but as the lead super, you're like the conductor or the coach. You want to make sure that everyone in your team is operating in a well-coordinated manner from production standpoint, from flow, sequence, everything that happens.

20:43Amir Berman: But also you want to make sure like, hey, if something isn't going quite right, might be that something is holding them back. Maybe even if the electrician wasn't working to hit his numbers, maybe it's something that is holding him back. Like how can I unclog the bottleneck, right? So back in the day, that was the background. Years went by and then we figured out that, well, you know what? When we start to look not just as the predictive analytics and not only as a kind of risk prevention, we want to see like, okay, even if you haven't started anything on your project, how do we know if your plan, that you align your entire supply chain?

21:17Amir Berman: How do we know if it's right? How do we know if it's optimized? We had trades that we were involved in their projects from GC side, they were saying like, you know what, can we just like have build-outs tell us like what to do, when to do and where? And at first we thought it was a joke. Obviously, we're not doing it today, but we had this notion that, well, how do you know that your schedule, that your tech plan, that your quantities, everything makes sense? How do you know it's optimized? How do you know that you don't overshoot? How do you know that you're not leaving money on the table? So we figured out that we need to be able to determine if something is good, if it's realistic or not.

21:52Amir Berman: And we sat on this idea for a while and we started experimenting. This is how we operate. We experiment in-house because we have tons of data, we do funky stuff. And we started developing those methodologies and working with our clients. And we noticed that there's traction, the clients are pulling. We started doing some early work on figuring out if your schedule makes sense or not. And we started doing this by combining different layers on top of your schedule. Like we've been doing like quantitative loading and resource loading in advance because of our data model, like data is king. Right.

22:22Amir Berman: And we started like finding those insights and showing it to the same super that we sat with him on the trail and said like, hey, you know what? We're not here to judge. We're not here to say if it's good or bad. But look at your like land production curve going down the project. And he was like, no, there's no way I'm doing that. That's way too much or way too small or like. So that was kind of the petri dish in which we figured out that, well, we have this opportunity in front of us to not only track progress of projects and determine whether you're going sideways or not, we can turn the wheel into something like, can we make sure that we produce the most reliable kind of plan?

22:55Amir Berman: Can we make sure that all of our supply chain are aligned on something that actually is doable so that we know what are the precise production benchmark and numbers and everything? And once you reach that, it's a matter of asking, okay, are we happy with it? Because it's one thing to have predictability. The other thing is to have like everyone coordinated from the owner to the contractor and the supply chain. It's like, okay, this is what we can do. Are you happy with this? Does it generate enough yield margin, you know, money for everyone? Or do we need to change something? Because if we need to change something, we can play with the numbers, right?

23:26Amir Berman: I can bring more manpower, which will cost you more. I will work overtime, weekends, whatever it is. I will pay for the A team, right? But it will cost you more. So it becomes like a numbers game. And that was like the background that we figured out that, wait, we have this, all this information, we can start publish those productivity benchmarks and measurements and insights that will tell people based on real numbers, based on real projects, like what goods look like, how well can you operate in and where do you stand against this? and it gives you opportunity to say, well, am I happy that I'm positioned at the lower percentile?

24:02Amir Berman: So if like you're a mechanical trade or like you're going back to that kind of healthcare contractor, like imaginary healthcare contractor somewhere and you check your numbers and you say, well, you know what? I'm actually positioned the lower percentiles on production rates on MEP reference. Like, am I happy with it? What do we do to change it? Or if I'm monitoring like 10 different projects right now against those numbers, like is this, Are everyone aligned or do I have like a positive or negative outlier? And if someone is operating like really well, we have an opportunity to say like, okay, what's going on here?

24:35Amir Berman: Like, guys, what are you doing differently so well? I need to mimic and backward engineer to my next job. And if something is struggling so badly against those benchmarks, against those metrics, which again, it's not cited to the project. It gives me an opportunity as an executive or like a veteran in my company to say like, okay, I need to lean in. I need to figure out what went bad. It doesn't have to be necessary that teams operating bad. It's just like something doesn't click. And now I can tell because it's almost like an x-ray for that project that says, like, I don't care about what you report to me.

25:05Amir Berman: I can compare it to your peers, to your colleagues, to the industry. So that was kind of the story from growing from a project base that says we're starting with progress tracking. And then we go like, OK, how do we know what good looks like and whether you're on track to deliver on time? And then we went into like, OK, what's a good plan? How do we know if this plan was realistic from the get go? And that was like the background. I think I gave like a long history lesson about this, but that was kind of the evolution of that idea.

25:31The ConTechCrew Hosts: Well, that's the key. It has been an evolution. It's been one that we have not seen enough from the technology providers in the industry because we are the ones who understand how those patterns grow and then how we can leverage data. Need people like you with that sort of data point interaction and extrapolation to what it means working in the background, doing this stuff. And it makes sense that also the problems presented themselves. And what you've gotten to is a point that we've been talking about for a really long time is when you estimate a project and then it comes out the other side, we really don't know.

26:07The ConTechCrew Hosts: And this goes from every level. Like a lot of owners go through this. A lot of GCs go through this. And then a lot of trades go through it. Like we estimated it, but did it come out where it came out? Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes no. Sometimes we're high somewhere and low somewhere. And like you said, we don't analyze where we're great and understand why were we great here? Was it part of the planning process? And where can we improve? We always look at this like it feels like in construction, I think because it resulted in a lot of litigation and a lot of headache and loss. we look at our deficiencies as something to glass over or not look at.

26:44The ConTechCrew Hosts: And it's like, no, actually looking at them and determining, wait, was it unrealistic planning? Because that happens. You know, in your supervisor, one, it's they're using something in their head that I think, I feel that those are not good terms to go off of for data. You know, it's like the data says we're, we actually only need a half a floor. And so when we plan, we should plan for that. And so adjusting might be, this is just not realistic. We have to go back to what realistic is. And like you said, then we can tweak levers. What do you want to tweak? Do you want to get to buying out a certain scope earlier so we can get to work earlier so you get a project done sooner?

27:21The ConTechCrew Hosts: Not throw more labor at it and get into the overtime and burnout and the things that can cause other issues? Like, hey, and then, God forbid, we optimize what we're great at. That would be nice for our businesses to know that, right? And then be able to reverse engineer why are we so good there? Is it, again, the way the project was planned, the way it was coordinated, the way the super understood the reality of trades and trade stacking? And you built a great tack plan, and so the tack plan worked perfectly, and the group acted as an orchestra. Awesome, and the music was perfect. Okay, how can we look into that and recreate it?

27:59The ConTechCrew Hosts: So I think this is an awesome spot to really open up to the industry and give them this opportunity. So talk about giving it to them in two ways. So even if you're not a Build Dots customer, you can come now, right, and learn a few things, read a few things. This is what I also think is awesome is they've given us so much in the industry. I know everybody thinks a white paper, a report, et cetera, might be some sort of marketing tool. It's not, actually. We're at this phase of re-educating and taking what we've learned and what the data is telling us and giving it back. And so talk about how that is for the public.

28:31The ConTechCrew Hosts: And then maybe there's some secret sauce underneath there, too, for the customers.

28:34Amir Berman: Yeah, of course. So first of all, like the lab is publicly. Go to the Buildouts website, go to the Buildouts lab, and you find like information that we're sharing publicly. Obviously, everything is one, anonymized. Two, aggregated, statistically found. We check. Everything is fact-checked. So you can never tie anything to a specific client. There's no privacy issue, nothing like that. Why are we sharing this? Two reasons. One, there's always like a two notion kind of situation in Beldos where we want to do really well commercially. But most of us, like the veterans and the company leaders, we have this thing in our gut that we really want to have the industry a bit better.

29:15Amir Berman: Not from a patronizing position, but rather like we know it's a challenge. We know we love our clients. We love the industry. We just like want it a bit better. So we want things to improve. And the reason that we're sharing to the public is that we think it's too good to sit in it. It's not fair to know those like to find out those insights and just like, oh, no, it's just for like for our clients, like for the ones that they pay. Because it's just so good to sit in it. And I feel and we feel that if we share it to the public, it opens the door for the entire community to kind of bring it up a notch and to evolve it even more.

29:52Amir Berman: And maybe there is somewhere a company or like an entrepreneur or like a contract or a super that says, well, you know what? I actually have an idea how to improve it just to be better. If you connect that level of information or like you don't look at it the right way and we open and we invite everyone else to kind of cooperate with us and work with us. and even initiate their own ideas. And we said like, okay, let's play together. Let's find out like, how can we make the industry just like slightly better using data and information? And it's almost like an invitation. So this is obviously why we're publishing it.

30:24Amir Berman: It's too good to sit on it. And we want everyone to work with us or without us.

30:28The ConTechCrew Hosts: That's a critical component because commercial success is important, right? I tell people this all the time, like money. And I think this speaks to you guys and the companies that do well. Money is important. Commercial success is important because we don't get to be here. We don't get to do these things. We don't get to exist. But if at our core, our goal, our vision, our mission is to help and to improve and to support and be a great partner, that's great business in the end. That's that human capitalism that we need because it's raising an industry and giving an industry an opportunity and you're giving outside people.

31:03The ConTechCrew Hosts: You know you're not solving every problem yourselves and you're allowing these other incredibly smart people to solve real problems too i think that's an interesting piece here too is that this data is signaling real problem not these pie in the sky solutions looking for problems right we can go all the way back to the beginning of some of the ar and vr and you know we were like this is great and it's kind of a solution looking for a problem right i take part of the playing for that hey listen i just did if you guys didn't didn't watch it i was on another show with uh Steven Poppy, if you want to check it out.

31:37The ConTechCrew Hosts: And I said it. I had a lot to do with that in that case, too. I was way wrong and way optimistic, I'm willing to admit. And now we also didn't have that data back then, right? We didn't have those signals to really... We just knew that there was an industry that we love that we wanted to help. And now we're finding these really intelligent ways to help them. So this is awesome.

31:59Amir Berman: This is really awesome. We share. But on the other way around, as you said, it's all about commercial success and that part. So our clients, the beauty is that they not only know how the industry is doing, but they're actually able to compare themselves to those benchmarks. They can measure themselves against each and every publication that we're doing, each and every insight, each and every benchmark, each and every metric. So they know where do they stand. If you read those benchmarks and reports, you can say like, okay, this is the state of the union. If you're like a client of Belldots, you know precisely where do you stand, how competitive you are, how good you are, and how well each and every project that you have under your portfolio is doing.

32:36Amir Berman: So you're like ahead of the curve in your ability to standardize, measure and optimize year over year. And next year you're going to be better.

32:44The ConTechCrew Hosts: Yeah, well, I mean, that makes a ton of sense, right? Since you guys are the ones doing the work to do the research or taking in, you know, ideas from how to do the research and then providing it. You can read the benchmarks and do everything. But like you said, we're going to provide a strategic advantage for our customers because it's based on industry benchmarking. And quite frankly, we built it so we can leverage it. That's just a great business. And we don't say that enough. It's OK. I'm a customer of BuildDots. I want you to be successful because then I get to keep using you. And that is a huge part of the relationship and the giving back and forth.

33:22The ConTechCrew Hosts: And, you know, obviously all the caveats of secure, anonymized, everything like that. I love that, you know, that's where you first start because that's the other thing the industry doesn't have as a whole. And so the more companies are doing it and doing it well, we'll have an opportunity at some point to create some true like ubiquitous industry data and benchmarks and start to really improve the entire industry because that's the key. We're going to keep building. it's the one thing we're going to continue to do forever you know look around that's what we do right we take things down we rebuild them we improve them we change so absolutely love it and if you guys want to check it out just go to buildouts.com forward slash lab and dive into the reports we could go on forever but give one outcome like give one tangible thing before we let you go on where this has really had an impact okay so i can't disclose like specific details as we said

34:18Amir Berman: we're keeping privacy but one thing in hand so one of the booming industry right now i don't have to tell you guys but it's the data centers like anything data center right now is amazing i just like saw a stack yesterday that like companies are literally doubling their like backlog by just data centers like creating another similar company by just data centers this is amazing and you're

34:39The ConTechCrew Hosts: talking about like the biggest contractors globally so here's the thing knowing data centers it's just

34:44Amir Berman: like you build like a giant shell, right? Where you want to fill it in with racks and data holes and everything else. It's all about getting that building operating as fast as possible. And the demand right now is crazy. So if you have a place on the grid, you have enough water and everything, you build a data center. So the demand is crazy and people are building like huge amounts. And some of these players are, you know, they haven't been fully active or very, very active in construction from the owner's side, from the GC side. So there's like a new wave of business for people who are like, I want to say new to construction, but new to that scale.

35:21Amir Berman: So when we hear scale and huge demand and they think to want to operate quite fast, we look for a way for us to actually measure and standardize. And one thing that we noticed with one of our clients is that when you look at those projects and you strip like the outer walls and the structure and everything, which is like the easy part, and you look at those data holes, those huge holes filling the woods like data hacks. And we saw that there's like something fascinating. Even though that the schedule and the plan was almost kind of identical, when we measured the actual cycle time, again, like there's a buzzword for like a metric that you want to measure, like cycle time, right?

35:57Amir Berman: From the beginning of the MEP rough-ins to the finishing of the MEP work on that data hack. Like the fastest data hole on that project was like 154 days. And you had like 10 of those. I think it was eight or 10 of those. Do you want to give it a shot on what was the longest duration for the data haul? Again, similar design, similar team, same kind of scope, everything. What was the fastest? Wait, so which trade was the slowest? Which piece was the slowest? The entire MEP kind of reference for like a data haul. The fastest was 154 days. What was the slowest? Among the eight of the days.

36:32The ConTechCrew Hosts: I would say it's almost double it or more. It would be like 300 days plus.

36:36Amir Berman: You know that far you're a bit pessimistic, but the slowest was 249 days, which is like, I'm not that fast, but I think it was 95 days data. Same design, right? Same crew, same everything. And you say, what the hell, guys? It's like four months, right? And in between, it wasn't that like seven out of those were like 154 and just like one of them was the outlier. You had a nice spread. Now look at it from an executive point of view, right? Your business is selling data center construction. you're being paid for the activation, obviously. You want to run fast to activate. How do you price your job?

37:14Amir Berman: I mean, how do you plan it? Are you planning it based on 154, based on the 249? But it doesn't end up there because you go down a notch, right? You pop up the hood and say, okay, let's break it down to the manufacturing elements. How many linear feet of chilled water pipework and cable trays and bus bars and air supply and everything else? Then you break down the quantity and say, okay, how many linear feet of bus bar? Like, is my crew installing on a weekly basis? How many did you install over there and there and there? And what was like the kind of the situation on site that led them? What was the supply numbers?

37:47Amir Berman: What was everything? And almost like you break it down to the fundamental mechanics and mathematics of it and say, okay, now let's go back to what did we plan? What did we plan from a supply, from a manpower, from everything? And then you kind of, you're able to say, what's my baseline? What's my kind of benchmark for my next job? And we can recommend those guys and say like, hey, you know what? When we look at the curve, this is like your sweet spot. This is where predictability is a certain number that you can actually stand against. So whenever they plan the next five or 10, because those companies, they don't just build one.

38:19Amir Berman: They have like a huge backlog. So they want to be that company that is well known for that. So what you're able to say is like, I want to have like the best predictability and best performance on my cycle time, on my NEP reference for data hole. and I'm going to hold you on your tenders, on everything that you have as a supply, you know that I can measure you. And you're going to need to say, how are you going to be able to pull down those numbers for linear feet of bus car? Explain to me your plan. You don't just like provide me like a schedule and a drawing and say, okay, yeah, I'll get it done, right?

38:53Amir Berman: Whenever you need to explain your step in a very, very detailed manner, all of a sudden you need to be able to come up with, okay, how do I actually pull this off? How do I well prepare? How do I put it in my schedule? My resource plan, right? So I think that whenever we got to this point, all of a sudden, they, like the client started saying, okay, I'm going to work with my schedulers to make sure that we plan precisely according to that sequence and according to that breakdown to make sure that my plan, my schedule is actually planned this way against those benchmarks. And I'm going to make sure that everything in my 3D model has those precise attributes that build-outs can pull in order to measure this.

39:31Amir Berman: and they shifted their mindset into like, okay, we need to hit a certain number, right? Because we have a target in mind. It's not only, okay, we need to do it best that we can go. No, it's very, very precise. And I think that that shift, and I think that we're still very early on in the game, but this is like a really good example. Whenever you go into like, okay, let's measure everything. Let's break it down to the kind of fundamental pieces.

39:53The ConTechCrew Hosts: It changes your mindset. It really, what you're doing is you're getting people to think through the outcome, not the overall outcome, but all the parts and pieces that it takes to get to that outcome. And you're exposing it so that you can plan to it and understand it. And we were talking about this just kind of funny before on like me doing manual show notes and whatnot. And I say, hey, this gets me ready for you. And it's sort of I said, it's like getting to know a project first. This is what we want out of AI and other tools is to allow us the time and the capability to dig into projects and learn them, understand them, break them down and know them better.

40:42The ConTechCrew Hosts: If we have all of that and we can plan better, we have more visibility, we can have better outcomes, or at least we can have more realistic and measure against them. And that's what we've been doing for so many years as we plan up here, but all this stuff down here, well, it'll fall over here. It'll fall. No, we can't do that anymore. Especially because when you're talking about that group in the data center hyperscaler world, getting to commissioning, there is a, it is their goal and it can be very painful if you don't get there when you're supposed to. So sometimes you're telling them, Hey, listen, I know you said here, but like you said, unless we add some of these things and the cost goes up for you, there's no way we can do it at that cost level.

41:25The ConTechCrew Hosts: Here's realistically when we can deliver and that puts you in a better position or, Hey, look, we'll adjust, right? We'll, we'll make the changes and tweaks you want based on the outcome you want, but it's going to cost you, or we're going to have to buy scopes out earlier, do whatever we have to do. So great work, man. Thank you. That is an awesome real world. I love when we go all the way from here to all the way to tangible. You know, we've told people where to go check it out, but where can people go connect with you, learn more about you, learn what's going on out there?

41:56Amir Berman: All right. So first of all, LinkedIn, like anything else, just shoot me like a message, shoot me an email, whatever it is, get my attention. And anyone in BuildAuths, I want to say we're open to everything we hope to kind of partner with smart people. So if you have an idea, if you have an assumption, if you have anything, Shoot us a message. We're always happy to talk.

42:16The ConTechCrew Hosts: That's awesome. That's what we need. Amir, it's been too long, but I'm glad we got you on and got to talk about what you're up to. It is always a pleasure, man. I hope I see you out there in the world soon.

42:27Amir Berman: Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for the conversation today.

42:30The ConTechCrew Hosts: And thank you for tuning in today to geek out for our interview with Amir Berman. To read all our new stories, learn more about our guests and listen to this show, visit thecontectcrew.com. This is The Contact Crew signing out. Until next time, enjoy the ride and geek out.