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Logistics bill format for Supervision

action casualty lead zurich jason presley construction leader oxy and the moderator for the panel joe rendon operations manager zachary group all right good afternoon everybody come on it's after lunch good afternoon everybody there we go there we go so in order to get these juices flowing a little bit uh i have a little group exercise just take a second it's very very easy so today one of our group members is celebrating his 60th birthday he's sitting back over here so i'd like everybody on the count of three say happy birthday bobby okay one two three happy birthday bobby great happy birthday bobby okay so we're gonna have a journey here talk about the role of frontline supervision and uh performance and productivity i'd like to start off here first as this video is playing back here tell you we all use foreman and general foreman we expect them to be superheroes to be leaders to get things done we've been looking at a lot of tools and models and ultimately it's these folks that get the work done but in reality they may be a person that was a craftsman yesterday they might be somebody's brother they might be somebody's friend they may have been working in a different industry previously and are now entering the construction industry and so we need to find out what we want our folks to to do to be liked to emulate and then can they actually do these things and so that's what we're going to discuss here today this is my team here uh we do have a really good mix of contractors and owners uh we did lose some folks along the way but has a really really strong input from a from a broad band of folks in order to prevent any kind of mission creep we narrowed our research down to a couple things here first we just find that the front line supervisor is a foreman or a general foreman there was some slight discrepancies or differences in definitions but we could agree frontline supervisors are foremen and general foreman okay additionally we focused on industrial construction did not go out into heavy into heavy infrastructure or commercial this is going to center around industrial construction through research of previous cii documents and also from the various group members we boil down that there's 10 competencies that we want our frontline super superintendents supervisors i'm sorry to have right there's a mix of soft skills which you might call soft which in reality are the hard stuff and then of course craft background general construction knowledge problem solving ethics so these are the ten core competencies that we as a group thought all of our supervisors should have this was a breakthrough for us when we first started meeting as a group it was so easy to go back and revisit what had been done before where do our people spend their time we're all familiar with the pie chart that says on average there's 30 tool time and that's been done ad nauseam and we kind of got stuck there a little bit until finally there was an aha moment and it was if we had our way without knowing anything else what would we want our folks to do what do we want our foreman to be spending their time on this is foreman first and so what you'll see there in the highlighted sections this is where we want them to be spending their time there's there's 10 10 tasks here and as you look through them not all of them could be should be considered as productive but they have to be done timesheets are not productive you don't earn anything for them but they have to be done in order to keep business moving along so we defined what those tasks were and then we defined an ideal range of time and then filled in the gaps okay so you got low right high except for those two their face there and we also determine that it really doesn't matter whether this is an 8 10 12 hour shift or a crew specific this works for supervisors okay so that's our that's our foreman another way to look at it where do you really want your foreman spending time they should be supervising motivating executing work that's where we want our folks to be our forming to be not spending time chasing some other things around so so keep that in mind as we continue our journey here we did the same exercise for general foreman we boiled it down to eight tasks as again you can see it laid out by chance that that middle range of time is where we want our general phone to be spending their time okay did the same exercise if we had our way where do we want to be spending time there's a mix of non-productive and productive items in there but these are the eight things that we thought general format should be focused on another way to look at it right general foreman is supposed to be involved in a bunch of different things to keep work moving for the foreman and their crew it has to be a liaison between the superintendent some project controls project management engineering to bring documents together to bring a plan together so foreign can execute work so let's dive down now and what are we going to look at here right how did the foreman and general foreman perform against those competencies i just showed you those ten do the foremen and general foreman actually spend time where we want them spending time and are there differences across populations now that means are there differences across the united states across different contractor types across different uh work types such as uh traditional versus advanced work packaging versus lean construction those type of deals and also are there some differences between us and canada as well in order to do this we cast a wide net survey a lot of different individuals to gather information we started first at a curt round table about midway in our journey and had 67 responses there and used that to kind of start a beta test for our for our survey mechanism we then started expanding out to superintendents we wanted superintendents to tell us how they think or how they look at their general form and informant against those ten competencies that i just showed you and additionally and what we think we're pretty proud of is we received 1135 responses from across the united states and up into canada from foreign and general foreign themselves telling us where they're actually spending their time and oh by the way what kind of experience they've had what kind of training they've had what kind of work models they've been working in have they worked with with the traditional advanced work packaging open shop merit shop unions that type stuff so a wealth of knowledge that we were able to get back and start sifting through to start looking for some some things here we pursued that a little farther we actually were able to do 113 face-to-face interviews where we sat down with those foremen and general foreman some in the work area some pulled back into an office trailer where we could get some time with them and as you can see there at the bottom the different work types maintenance traditional awp work based planning so cast a very wide net so we're going to kind of follow this journey with a foreman we'll call him jason okay so first thing we want to do is see is jason qualified i mentioned here a minute ago that we surveyed superintendents to rate how their foreman and general format are performing against competencies you'll see here we're looking at the foreman first that in general the foreman could be considered as good average but there's a couple areas that they struggle and again this is measured by their superintendents they struggle in the area of written communication and pre-planning and problem solving and i don't know about you but to me those seem to be some of the traits that we really need them to excel at especially given the more complex projects that we're seeing now uh the models that they have to get into things that they have to figure out to enable to push their people to work right so we've got some folks that are struggling here and yet we depend on them to do our work if we take a look at general foreman there's some better ratings here the superintendents felt a bit better about their general foreman on average they were rated as good through very good although they do show some weaknesses in those same three areas that the foreman did written skills pre-planning and problem solving now you'll notice that the skills the scores here on these three are higher than on the previous slide it kind of supports the notion excuse me kind of supports the notion that the best foremen are getting promoted up to general foreman so the former struggling we're taking the best of them pushing them up in the general form and ranks but are we addressing some of the areas that they have deficiencies with the foreman so that was talking about competencies now let's see if jason and his brothers and sisters are spending their time effectively so for those 1135 responses that we got back from foreign general foreign we paired down here for the foreman 812 foremen responded and as you'll notice here we've got a widespread where people are spending their time and i want to zero in on three key areas so you'll see their item number five coordinating with other crews over 50 percent over half of the foreman are spending more than the ideal time during that day coordinating with other cruiser support this means they have to go find rigging support they have to go find scaffolding support or other things in order to advance their work similarly 55 of them are spending time receiving checking verifying materials things that probably should have been done or could have been done by other folks within the organization to supply them with those with those things that they need to do they need to have in order to build build a plant and finally 43 percent of them not quite half but a very very large number are spending more time actually moving into other contingency work they got shut down on something they were doing that was planned and they're having to pick up their crew and move somewhere else it's not productive it's not doing the things that they need to do and even worse could they be moving to non-priority work to something that doesn't need to be handled yet they're are they being reactive and selecting on their own where they need to go or where they want to go so you start losing your hands start losing that handle and control of where your project's going let's look at the general foreman a little bit tighter spread but there's three three key areas there where they're actually spending less than the desired time the first one planning prioritizing fallback work for those foremen kind of ties in what i just mentioned here 28 of them 29 are spending less than the ideal time less than the ideal time which is which is turning the foreman loose maybe to choose a path that they want to go and maybe they don't need to be going almost 50 percent are spending less than the ideal time on constraint management again ensuring that the foreman have what they need to advance the work the planned work the things that we've been spending time on to set that path to identify critical path items and others and yet they're not spending the time they should be there to support those for those foremen and last almost 50 percent of them are spending less time in the work package development they should be having an advanced look at what's available what the desired schedule looks like what kind of supports needed in order to provide that work to the foreman and almost half of them are spending less than that desired time so raise the question why are we struggling this may be maybe some of that explains some of that why we're struggling kind of cap that back again our foreman are spending too much time on three tasks there seems to be a correlation there where the general former spending not enough time on those similar tasks if we get that balance right would that allow that work to free up and move in a more productive manner so for our foremen who again have that ultimate responsibility that last link to push our work through to be productive we should be spending more time here with coordinating with other crafts constraint management and priority work in order to ensure or give a better chance of having that form and success so with that i want to turn it over to bill and he's going to see how this is impacting the productivity of the foreman thanks joe good afternoon everybody i'll step back a little bit and let you absorb what joe talked about there's a lot of data right there and it really shows tremendous opportunities to improve the competency levels of general foreman and foremen particularly foremen and you can see in the numbers a really wide spread around how foreman and general foreman spend their day well away from what the team considers an ideal task and think about that that's pretty powerful because what we're really talking about here is productivity now i'm sure you've all seen this curve or ones like this before and let's face it this is the great shame of our industry right and it's it's been around since 1994 actually have a curve of like this that goes all the way back to 1965 and it's something that we all have to own it's construction productivity but it's not only a construction problem it's an engineering problem a procurement problem a problem and feed and a construction problem all together right nonetheless really the motivation for this research came from looking at things like awp advanced work packaging and lean and there's been lots of productivity improvement programs for the site and we don't see them in this aggregate curve for the industry and we said well let's take a look at maybe part of the problem and let's face it's part of the problem but an important part of the problem is are the foremen and the field supervisors are they capable and do they have the right skills to drive these programs forward and to connect this with the theme of the conference we can have all the good intentions of the world but if we do not enable our frontline supervisors with the right skills we cannot sustain field level innovation disruption or transformation and so part of what we did the research on we said what are the competencies of foramen and general foreman with respect to productivity enhancing practice practices like lean or advanced work packaging and what we found out based on interviews that these competencies are fundamentally the same across different productivity programs and their core to everything now there are some things that change in specifics and advanced work packaging you know foreman and general foreman needs to know how to deal with an installation work package but fundamentally they need to understand pre-planning they need basic competency in the profession so there's some skills under here that will change but the fundamentals are the same everywhere and joe had mentioned we had 113 interviews and i can't possibly tell you all about that but just sort of the big picture is we found nothing in the interviews that conflicts with the data that we've shown you there's a wide range of skills out there a wide range of people doing things we don't see any new skills to implement one thing of note we did do a number of projects that were doing awp compared to traditional and those people we talked to on awp projects showed better more focused responses they knew their job and they knew what support they had better than on traditional projects now greg bentley this morning mentioned advanced work packaging and certainly in industrial projects we have the evidence now that awp when well implemented does make a difference in tool time and has up to 25 improvement in field productivity and even a few anecdotes i've heard more and we can see support for that in our data here is some of the time that joe had mentioned and how we surveyed how people spend their time we looked at the task on supervise motivate and execute for foremen and on traditional projects go all the way to the left you see 27 are spending four hours or less or the less than ideal time so it's more than a quarter or spending less than the ideal of supervising on awp projects that 27 went down to 15 and the actually we would say more than ideal time but that's not a bad thing really almost half are spending the highest block of time on supervising that's exactly what we want our foremen to do so we see in our data support for the story of awp but let's step back for a second and come back to thinking about foremen and general foreman competencies we asked them as part of the survey and this is their self-reporting we asked them what training did you have or education have you had in these areas and you can see supervisory skills safety very high joe mentioned some soft skills like communication in written 60 of general foreman half of foreman have had some training in there and it goes down in scheduling quality control time management and estimating how can we expect people to drive productivity for us if they don't have those skills and let's get down to lean 3d model usage time motion studies advanced work packaging work face planning under 20 across the board have had education in those areas yet those are the things that are supposed to drive productivity and so one of the basic things we have seen for this is we are not equipping our frontline supervisors for success how can we expect something if we're not giving them the skills to do that so does training actually matter we ran a couple of comparisons on advanced work packaging because we know roughly what advanced work packaging training is because it's new and so we said okay what about traditional projects and we found that statistically significant difference awp training and general form and time allocation on work package development if they didn't have any training on tradition they would almost 40 percent spent too little time with some training even on traditional projects so it's not awp projects a traditional project if they've had some training that time goes from 41 to 19 in the too low bucket and they're doing more of the right things so training can make a difference in awp projects general form and time allocation for that plan prioritize and fall back work that joe said was so important if they haven't had training they're spending too little time doing that with training the balance goes a lot more to doing the right amount of time for doing what we expect them to do and so a little bit of evidence that investing in the foreman and general foreman will make a difference that said let me turn over to darren cowan to help drive home the points thank you bill good afternoon many of you have probably been on research teams before and i've been on two and i would highly encourage you if you've not been on a research team please get on one the knowledge transfer between you and your colleagues is incredible but you'll also hear this term wandering in the desert has anybody ever heard that term before if you've been on a research team you were wandering in the desert and yes we did some wandering in the desert ourselves as a research team we've been snake bit we've been stung by scorpions and yeah we sat on a few cacti so the research team that i was on lucky enough to be invited on we came through and we found that there's two major items that need to be addressed one is the industry level training of yes craft people but also as or more important the front line supervisors isolated efforts when we talk about those those are what a single company does for itself in a closed environment if you will in other words they do it for themselves it's their training program they don't share that we found does not work so what we're going to be talking about in a little bit is what may work now the other item that we found that absolutely proved itself out advanced work packaging training is beneficial in each environment and that means each and every environment awp works it's not an argument anymore it works so while we were doing our research we had to find a little bit of an anomaly that came from a carrier and quite frankly what this little diagram up here shows it's nice and simple it shows that workers compensation losses and we'll just boil it down it's dollars okay the amount of dollars in severity and workers compensation continues to drop thank the lord it continues to drop that's our humanity that's working it continues to be driven down and i hope for the rest of my life and into the future it continues down to zero that other line that's up there however is what we have never seen before in our business and maybe you haven't seen it that's the amount of construction defect construction defect losses rising past the point of workers compensation now some people can make the point that well maybe we've solved our safety issues maybe we've solved that maybe we're on a great track and we are but the comp the construction defect losses rising since basically 2013 2014 and continue to rise is a concern it's a great concern now as a risk engineer we're a little bit like jack russell terriers on steroids we dig right down to the bottom we have to find out what is occurring what is driving this and one of the items that we find is manifesting in this anomaly this rise is that the frontline supervisors and the crafts are inadequately trained and inadequately qualified to perform their work they are putting in units systems valves and work that is defective if it is not ing to the plan and perfect basically it's defective and those costs continue to rise so we need to help jason a little bit we need to find we need to recruit train and retain qualified people we need to get them in we need to get them trained and then we have to retain them now i know about the transient workforce and the arguments that have gone on there for years first off it's not even up on the board i'd like everyone to think about construction professionalism every craft worker is a construction professional they should be treated as construction professionals we should be the biggest cheerleaders out there talking up among the younger generations what it's like to be a professional in construction and you don't have to be the engineer you don't have to be the architect you can be the professional craft worker going on to frontline supervision and ultimately who knows where it might take you that's number one number two where do you get the best employees for frontline supervisors from the craft people themselves who better to ask who better to get the nod to bring someone to a frontline supervision position than the craft workers themselves craft workers are definitely and they have great opinions on who should lead them item two we'll talk about onboarding onboarding and orientation two separate things orientation is bringing the worker the foreman the frontline supervisor in to introduce them to the company policies procedures human resources how things work that's orientation onboarding is getting that person comfortable to work in the field environment on your particular project how they will react how they should think how they will mix with the other crews where materials equipment and supplies are how the procurement process works that's onboarding onboarding should take what we found a minimum of three days that's the recommendation onboarding keep it separate from orientation last little bullet there but a very important one frontline supervisors have got to have the ability to communicate both verbally and written we can help them with their verbal and written skills but they must be able to effectively communicate to their crews to get the work done they've got to be able to communicate up the chain and down so communication skills our call to action or what we like to refer to sometimes as the gauntlet of challenge that we're setting down here is a united investment in the future that's between owners and contractors together contractors and owners establishing a common core training and to make sure that that training is available in all places especially where your companies are operating so if you're operating in the north american continent it should be there if you're operating overseas the same but a common core training developed and maintained together now the contractors they're going to perform the actual training and they're also going to hire the supervisors that's what contractors do so the contractor portion their side of the agreement is provide the training and make sure that the higher super the supervision is hired correctly but how about the owners where the owners come in what's their stake it's no longer i just want my project built they need to be part of the equation number one mandate that frontline supervisors are trained and that they are qualified to work on your projects mandate that and only allow qualified workers to work on those projects raise the bar raise the standard get it up there those are our recommendations uh for the call to action if i can get this to work there we go as a special added treat today we've been talking about jason and right now i'd like to introduce jason good afternoon i'm jason as we were putting this research team together and deciding the path we'll go with it we just took an arbitrary name and said what about bob and as we looked at all the details we noticed that okay that was me that's how my career went i started to learn to craft i became a frontline supervisor supervisor and moved on up and now in the position that i'm in i'm noticing that the supervisors that i'm seeing in the field today don't have the skill levels that i had and the experiences that i saw and was trained by in the frontline supervision and just just to share that with y'all that's how we kind of went with this path and uh i'll throw it back to joe thanks jason so we've left ourselves some time here by by design we've actually made some challenges to you the the audience right we didn't just show you a tool nothing negative there we didn't just show you a tool we're actually making some challenges and throwing trying to get you guys to think of different way guys and gals to think some stuff so with that i'd like to open up two questions please who's got the first question lights you turn the lights down please nobody has a question every owner in here is ready to demand that certain standards be set to bring contractors up to a level playing field no contractors have any issues with doing some more training here or onboarding sorry off to the right i'm sorry go ahead ma'am did you guys consider or discuss a formal certification program and would that be helpful or would that be too much of a barrier bill you want to take that sure so so we there is there are various trainings that are out there a lot of them are more focused on craft than supervisory training so we don't think of that as a barrier we think broadly it's an enabler we think we need to reinvest in that and come back as an industry standard of at least minimal standards of what people expect and various ways to fulfill that you know i think really the innovation for us and make no mistake it is an innovation if owners start mandating uh qualifications much as they did safety many years ago then that will drive the change until then the contractors don't have the money to do that themselves because they don't get paid for it but if the owners level the playing field and say thou shalt everybody has to provide and that essentially that essentially funds the challenge of training the people and we we have to address that as as an industry right now thank you question over here keith kritzer exxon mobil did you look at uh level of compensation versus competency actually we did not we did not what we wanted to do is just say a foreman is a foreman or a general forms of general foreign and they should have these skills now because we did have a mix of contractors in there that were both union non-union we did take some looks some some did a search through there but really didn't come up with anything different it actually made a little easier on us to say look this is the model of former general formula that we should see thank you yes sir yes that's sort of my question i'm an owner i'm a jack small with mosaic company i was going to ask what was the ratio between union trades and open shop trades and did you notice any differences we we had both in the survey including uh canada and north america and we did not see any statistical difference between them so we probably could have mentioned that more in the slides but we believe our recommendations apply equally to both open shop and union environments you know how they get implemented maybe a bit different in those environments but the basics are the same thank you sir glenn griffith with occidental petroleum you talk about the importance of communication skills both up and down how did you all address the issue where in the workforce may not be generally english speaking so i'll address that when we hire my company zachary we hire both we do try to ensure that that the foreman the are at least bilingual in order to get around some of that as well though we do try to mix our crews so that they can communicate across so no one's left by the wayside additionally we've been looking at uh you may have heard of i'll just throw this out red angle trying to teach some folks some key uh construction terms in both spanish english vice versa so we can uh improve on those communication skills right now i'll just say just in my own opinion some of that little bit of patchwork but we're trying to make those changes there because a large part of the construction population the workers are hispanic or hispanic descent now thank you and i just add that part of that doesn't have to do with different languages but it's also got to do with the ability to write legibly and to be able to use correct terminology and then also the verbal communication verbal communication to crews is not screaming at one's top of the lungs but yet rather communicating effectively verbally so great thank you yes sir did you look at construction graduates coming out of some of the programs as foreman or general foreman or did you find that most of the foreman came up through the craft i guess craft road into those positions because we do have institutes that have the construction management training where do they plug in um we don't specifically have data on that but as a academic educator i know most of the people coming out of those construction management programs would often target being you know a field engineer as their entry level i don't very few of them have the career track to go into the craft most of the craft and most of the foreman supervisors really come up out of that craft track so i think you guys might see differently that's what i see no agreed thank you yes sir uh juan jones within vista i was curious about some of the data you show on your time in motion studies the amount of time forming in general performance spend in uh those different activities uh i was wondering whether you uncovered any innovative ways to in practice actually capture that that time um how do you document or are there any innovative ways to really as an owner document how much time forming in general form and spend in certain activities so it's a tool that's part of our package we haven't promoted it the survey that we used is available for you to use as well and compare and benchmark against the results you know we have well over a thousand data points there to compare to and so we think that captures pretty well in north america for the industrial sector but it's there you can use the survey it's been validated we've piloted it and it's got quite a wide geographic spread also really the point of my question was um is that just a paper exercise or are there any innovations in how how we can do a better job of actually tracking that time you know these time emotion studies are rfid kinds of we did it as a paper tracker which is self reporting um you know my colleagues who do computer vision stuff the software is getting better at tracking how workers spend their time i think for a supervisor it's still hard to distinguish exactly what they're doing so probably at least for a while some kind of self-reporting whether it's on cell phone ipad or a piece of paper is probably still going to be state of the art for a while nobody else that this that i'm aware of has got quite the breakdown of data we have usually it's been more aggregated into bigger chunks of stuff yeah that time motion study would be a bit difficult because actually we they believe that we want our foreman especially our foreman to be staying with the crew right and not chasing out materials taking people to the gates and other things that would be would lend itself to that type of study we really want them staying in in one location uh yes sir you were next yeah jason you mentioned that the uh frontline supervisor doesn't have the skill set that you had are you finding that people are being promoted too quickly is that is that one of the issues yes i'm seeing that there are some younger ones out there that uh haven't had time to develop that skill set uh i feel like they're being pushed into this role i don't know if it's due to the fact of we've got people retiring faster and we're having to fill this position but i'm seeing that we're seeing some younger guys that have not seen the whole picture yet and do not have the skill set yes sir ari kemp uh flint hills resources so do you guys have a point of view on the formant craft ratio or the performance to general formant ratio to hit the optimal percentage of time for those 10 common so i think just kind of a my rule of thumb might be seven or eight to one for a craft performance now it depends on what craft it is right some of your mill crafts will be smaller your civil craft depending on what part of the work they're doing may be much larger when they're doing a mass pour with regards to forming a general foreman maybe four or five to one thank you yes sir good afternoon dean hamrick with fleur so i'll come from the contractor side i think all of us in this room spent a lot of time and effort investing in nccer was that considered you know to me that's at least the baseline for that journeyman on the open shop side sure but they also have some very robust supervisory tools there's the judgment index that i don't think a lot of us have looked at and then i think we're all guilty of when we say the tools are there become an nccer certified supervisor when they can't reach that standard we'll remove it as a requirement so did you guys take a look at some of the materials that are out there already and consider how we can use those to at least do the initial qualification before promotion or was that considered you want to try that one so so as part of our review of the literature couple of those competencies nccr materials previous ci supervisory skills broad literature review what the team had internally kind of was boiled into that list of 10 and so abstractly it's there you know we didn't explicitly study people with the nccr supervision or training or not that wasn't part of our our scope you know i think kind of our broad challenge is the industry needs to get on top of the skills we have some recommendations for how to move forward and you know like the previous research team said you know a great next research topic would be okay let's dive in a little more specifically around what that looks like and we were there all right anybody else any questions one more over here uh sophia koski texas a m question about productivity is it possible i mean right now i think you focused on the productivity within each player within each trade i'm wondering if there's a problem with the over specialization of our industry there's an expression that [Music] that projects start to fall apart at the intersection of contracts and so when we have so many different contracts and so many specializations there is going to be some loss and i was thinking about stephen mulva's comment as well about all these different players and there's each one has their own legal contracts and you have all this overhead that's associated with all those players i mean i was even thinking about the healthcare industry and how we have when you want to go see a doctor sometimes you have to see a lot of specialists and when we talk about productivity we often don't think about the length of time that you have to wait between meeting with all the different specialists but in a way that there's a lot of similarity now in construction because right there's you know you have to prepare the site the sites are waiting for the next trade to come could you could you address a little bit about that so it's a pretty broad question um but i think rather than letting a lot of these demands needs percolate down to those front line supervisors they should be addressed by other people within that organization ultimately i'll say it again ultimately the goal of the foreman is to get work done safely with his or her crew that's what we want them doing not being inundated with paperwork with having to interpret specs and drawings and requirements and all the other things that should be handled at some pre-planning stage earlier whether a work face planner whether it was superintendents whether by contract administrators subcontract managers that type stuff right so in order to address that i believe should be you should kind of segregate the work where it really needs to be and truly keep the foreman and even general foreign focused on the work at hand working your plan doing it safely keeping the people there when they need to be and also defining where they need to go next not letting them be reactive to work when something arises okay thank you okay well if there's any other discussion we'll be set at a table at the official break at 2 45 and we'd love to answer any further questions or listen to any comments thank you very much