Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

Jeff Lydon

ChatGPT (Microsoft CoPilot) for Construction Viz

News |

Microsoft Build 2023 was filled with AI Copilot (ChatGPT) features across the entire Microsoft 365 and Windows ecosystem. There is no question that AI has arrived and will change how we work going forward.

Co-Pilot_1

Times a changing with generative AI tools

“A recent report from Goldman Sachs estimates around 300 million jobs could be affected by generative AI, meaning 18% of work globally could be automated—with more advanced economies heavily impacted than emerging markets,” Jack Kelly via Forbes on March 31, 2023.

“The [Goldman Sachs] report also predicts two-thirds of jobs in the U.S. and Europe ‘are exposed to some degree of AI automation,’ and around a quarter of all jobs could be performed by AI entirely,” Adrianna Johnson via Forbes on March 30, 2023.

The impact of AI on construction

AI will have a significant impact on construction. The changes will be broad and far-reaching, from faster and more accurate designs to AI-controlled drones for mapping and inspections. AI will force organizations to change by adopting these cutting-edge technologies to compete in the world of tomorrow.

If you are on Microsoft 365 and Azure, you’re in luck. What once would take millions of dollars in R&D to develop AI models is now made available by Microsoft to integrate into your existing applications.

Co-Pilot_2

Construction Viz and Copilot AI (ChatGPT)

Lydon Solutions is excited to announce that we have started exploring this game-changing technology made available to us in Microsoft 365. We aim to revolutionize construction management by integrating Copilot (ChatGPT) with Construction Viz. Since Construction Viz uses your Microsoft 365 SharePoint lists and libraries, Microsoft Copilot (ChatGPT) allows us to incorporate AI naturally into our product.

No other construction management solution can boast what we will be able to do with AI using your data delivered securely in your Microsoft 365 tenant.

The Construction Viz AI gameplan

In the coming months, we will enhance Clover, our AI assistant bot you can activate in the Construction Viz Hub.

Our team will expand Clover to leverage your data stored in your Microsoft 365 SharePoint online and allow you, through a common language, to analyze your construction project data. For example, we are exploring enabling real-time analyses using simple language, including:

  • Scope change management lifecycle—Scoping documents, risk management, RFIs, change requests, change orders, and more.
  • Smart scheduling—What if analysis, time impact analysis, and schedule development.
  • Inspection—Inspection data analysis for delays, issues, log of vendors on site, and progress and productivity
  • Task management—Generate reports on your tasks, overdue tasks, and plan for the day

These are only some areas we will consider as part of this initiative. AI is a brave new world, and Lydon Solutions will bring this technology to a construction project near you soon.

Subscribe to our newsletter from our website footer to stay in the loop on this AI journey! Also, you can request a demo of Construction viz for Microsoft 365 here.

Improve Project Efficiency with New Schedule Views for Construction Viz

Forms |

Construction forms such as submittals, RFIs, and daily reports are tightly integrated with project schedules but can get lost among the hundreds or thousands of potential activities. To manage forms effectively, it’s not enough to just see them included in a weekly schedule report. It is essential to evaluate inquiries promptly and efficiently in real-time to address any possible schedule disruptions.

These inquiries may include the following:

  • Did the contractor adhere to the contractual obligations by submitting their documents on time?
  • Was the review of Requests for Information (RFIs) conducted within the agreed-upon deadlines?
  • Were the daily inspections conducted as scheduled?

You need a simple and quick way to answer these questions and more in your construction project management software solution. The problem is that the typical form logs found in most PMISs allow you to sort and filter on due dates, but it lacks form-specific Gantt chart views to manage deliverables.

Our new form view feature for Construction Viz solves this shortcoming.

Construction Viz gives you a clear view of your form data

With the new Construction Viz schedule views, you can visualize any of our apps in a traditional Gantt chart view accessible from within the app itself. Now, you have the best of both worlds, the detailed analysis of form data in interactive logs and a Gantt chart focused specifically on the form.

Construction Viz System Outage Request app All Items List (“Form Log”) View
Construction Viz System Outage Request app with new schedule view

Construction Viz Scheduler view sample

Customizable form-specific schedules

You can further tailor Construction Viz’s new schedule views for a specific form. For example, baseline vs. the current schedule, resources assignment, and critical path could be added to the submittal form app while not adding those features to the daily report app. And you can roll up schedule data captured in each form app into an overall master schedule.

The new schedule view keeps team leads and members focused on meeting their specific deliverable dates using an intuitive and interactive Gantt chart.

Find out more about Construction Viz features and apps for Microsoft 365 here.

Embed Power BI Reports into Construction Viz!

Reporting |

Power BI is a powerful reporting solution available as a service in Microsoft 365. You can generate dashboards, KPIs, and even paginated reports that can be embedded into SharePoint pages, Teams, and even external websites. Since Construction Viz utilizes Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online, your project data is securely available 24x7 for building your own Power BI reports. And, with Construction Viz, you can publish your Power BI reports as new dashboards to Construction Viz Hubs. Check out a few sample reports that leverage the Daily Report and RFI forms!

Construction Viz Daily Status Power BI report captures project data by phase, location, tailgate attendees, on site personnel, trades, equipment, weather, lessons learned, observations, and activities so you can analyze what occurs on site every day.
Construction Viz Daily Status Power BI report captures every piece of equipment on the jobsite by day and whether the equipment is used.
Construction Viz RFI Power BI report captures project RFI data by project, location, status, time or cost impact, company, due date, and priority.

Construction Viz can help you get the most out of Microsoft 365 to manage your projects. Leverage our existing Power BI reports or create your own and add them to your Construction Viz projects so they can be shared with the project teams. To find out more about Construction Viz, you can schedule a one hour demo here or if you need help with Power BI reports or Microsoft 365 in general, you can visit lydonsolutions.com to submit a free one hour consultation.

Don’t Let an Outage Manage You: The New Construction Viz Outage Request App

Forms |

Keeping your entire team in the loop when planning an outage can be challenging. Effectively managing an outage event involves many more steps and considerations than just placing an activity into the master schedule to identify an outage. You must consider documentation needs and the formal approvals required to manage the event effectively.

Construction Viz Outrage Request form app

We designed the Construction Viz System Outage Request form app to capture as much information as possible to prevent an outage from negatively impacting the overall project schedule. The form app captures outage information such as start and end times, location, systems affected, justification, and work groups required to plan the outage and minimize downtime.

In addition to capturing outage-specific information, users can identify assets impacted, relate drawings, add document attachments, upload images, add links, route for review and approval, issue email notifications, and capture revisions. Also, because all Construction Viz apps are deployable into your Microsoft 365 tenant, you can add your custom Power Automate workflows. For example, you could use Power Automate to automatically update team members on changes, add Power BI dashboards and reports, and update Microsoft Teams with workflow progress.

With the Construction Viz Outage Request form app, you will be better prepared to plan and manage outages while keeping your team members in the know.

Visit the apps section of ConstrictionViz.com to learn more about our entire lineup of apps for construction project management. Schedule a free one-hour consultation here to get more information about Construction Viz or how we can help with Microsoft 365 services.

Powerful and Smart Permit Management: The New Construction Viz Permit App

Forms |

Effective permit management is one of the biggest challenges I have seen organizations struggle with during my years working on construction projects. Often, effective permit management determines whether a team completes a project on time.

Managing permits should be pretty simple: add the permit need date and issue date to a schedule, and off you go. Unfortunately, permits have a life of their own and, if not carefully managed, can have substantial downstream impacts.

The above is why our latest app for Construction Viz will be invaluable to construction project managers. Read on to learn more.

Introducing the new Construction Viz Permit App for Microsoft 365

With the Construction Viz Permit App, we wanted to focus on four areas of permits management:

  1. Planning – You can create a placeholder form for each permit type required on a project. These placeholder forms capture the needed date of when that permit must be issued so as not to affect the schedule.
  2. Filing and Issued Dates – Once you file a permit, it can get lost in the shuffle and requires constant follow-up. With the Permit app’s grid view you can filter by status, see when the permit was filed, and if it has been issued yet.
  3. Expiration Dates – Expiring permits can be a significant issue on larger long-duration projects with many permits. The Permit app lets users filter and sort the permit grid view by expiration date so that you can re-submit a permit that is due to expire in a timely manner.
  4. Notifications – Team members need to be notified as soon as possible if permit need dates are not going to be met or when a permit will expire. We’ve included our notification email component in the Permit app so that at any point in time, you can easily email all of your stakeholders with an update. Also, we can include a Power Automate workflow that checks all permit need dates in advance and makes the owner aware of the due dates and expiration dates in email and Microsoft Teams.

To extend the capabilities even further, we’ve also included, by default, the ability to assign a WBS, add links specifications, connect to the Drawings app, create permit revisions, and even add a formal review process to ensure permits are dispositioned in a timely manner. We tried to cover all bases with the new Permit app, so you can hit the ground running.

Find out more about the new Permit app or any of our other construction apps for Microsoft 365 by visiting https://constructionviz.com/apps/  or by requesting a demo here.

Construction Viz Then, Now, and Tomorrow

News |

I was cleaning up my office over the weekend and found an article in ENR that I wrote back in 2017 announcing Construction Viz to the world. Little did I know what the future would hold. If you ever have a dream, think the challenge is too hard, and want to give up, I hope this article helps inspire you.

Rewind to 2017 and the launch of Construction Viz

“The only time you should look back in life, is to see how far you have come.”
— Kevin Hart

Until 2017, when I wrote this advertisement article for ENR, we had been strictly developing and hosting SharePoint-based solutions for the construction industry. With Construction Viz, our goal was to create a flexible app-driven platform that we could host or deploy into a client’s SharePoint. We wanted to use the latest and greatest technology and speed up the development and implementation times.

We knew SharePoint, but this was new ground.

In the first iterations of Construction Viz, we built custom JavaScript and Angular components connected to SharePoint lists and libraries. At the time, we had to deploy client-side code into SharePoint sites for the functionality to work.

Going out of the gate was a little rough since we were developing a completely new system while still managing our existing SharePoint clients. We didn’t know where this whole thing would go, but we knew we needed to move away from custom SharePoint development and hosting and into more of a product for Microsoft 365. In 2017, Microsoft 365 started picking up steam with Teams and the Power Platform. We knew Microsoft 365 would be the future, and we needed to change our approach.

Fast forward five years

“Don’t look back unless you can smile; don’t look ahead unless you can dream.”
— Irish Saying

While we had many ups and downs over the years, we stuck it out with Construction Viz for Microsoft 365, which has paid off! We have deployed Construction Viz for our clients on muti billion-dollar programs across many construction sectors.

So, how did we get here?

LookingBackCV_2

Bet on our people

Everyone on our team brings a unique skillset from technical architecture, UI/UX, front-end and back-end developers, and product managers. Everyone played a significant role in the direction of the product. The key was to listen to everyone and let the best idea win. The teams managed themselves; they took ownership of the product and were vested in its success.

Stayed nimble

There have been many challenges along the way that make you want to throw your hands up, like when Microsoft restricted deploying code into Microsoft 365. It literally stopped us in our tracks. We had to completely change our deployment model and fast. Construction Viz’s code now runs in the cloud in Lydon Solutions’ Azure data center while the lists and libraries are deployed into SharePoint. It seemed like a curse at the time, but now, the entire solution can be deployed into a client’s Microsoft 365 or SharePoint on-premises or hosted in our Azure environment.

Allowed for continuous improvement

We continually leverage the latest and greatest technology to compete with the larger companies still stuck on ten-year-old technology. We switched our client-side code to React JS, which has provided many needed benefits and made the entire solution a progressive web app (PWA) so a user on any device with a modern browser can access Construction Viz online or offline. We also created a portal to manage projects and programs across a portfolio.

Focused on time to market

Our clients want products quickly, so we needed to remove as many barriers as possible. We needed to scale the solution so deployments could happen the same day. We built a deployment model that could run with a single line of code and include diagnostics to ensure successful implementations.

Offered an attractive price model

Other vendors charge exorbitant prices for project management information systems (PMIS), which were still on old technology and resisted any product changes. We changed our pricing to a per-user/month model based on the applications selected so that clients weren’t paying for a bloated system where they might only use 5%.

The Future of Construction Viz

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.”
— Steve Jobs

Having an IT company that provides services and products means that you have to be ready to adjust to market conditions. Today, clients want solutions now and don’t want to wait.

Our roadmap for Construction Viz includes a marketplace to purchase our applications online. The game plan is to offer an affordable suite of apps that can deliver 80-90% of the market need. Clients will be able to buy apps using a credit card and deploy them into their Microsoft 365 tenant themselves. A touchless Construction Viz deployment model will allow clients to take advantage of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem they have already purchased.

Stay tuned…