Overall Thoughts (Bob)

Overall, I thought the conference was excellent for the following reasons:

• Met a few key Meridian team members and was quite impressed with them and the future of the product. I have additional resources to reach out to as needed.
• Met a variety of clients using proliance, especially GSA & Disney. Was happy to see them pleased with their implementations
• Based on the attending I feel strongly we made the right decision with the product and look forward to implementing it throughout Weston.
• The use of OBAs (Office Business Applications) can solve a need to simplify and streamline data entry for Weston ,vendors and clients. These are powerful but take work to put them together.
• Learned many tips on successful implementations.

How Walt Disney Imagineering is Using Technology to Optimize Major Projects (Rajeesh Agrawal - Director Management Controls, Walt Disney

Imagineering has 10,000 employees as part of Disney. 70% of work is outsourced.

Overall Process

• Blue Sky Creation Process - brainstorming - up to 6 months - 95% of ideas don't make - must be feasible
• Concept development & feasibility
• Design & Production
• Construction & Installation
• Test & Adjust
• Grand Opening - we should call our launches Grand Openings

5 advantages of using proliance

1. Standardization
2. Automation
3. Transparency
4. Collaboration
5. Historicals - cost, schedule

Hosted environment, heavy use of OBAs, use SAP & Primavera

Helping push next key feature - Workflow visualization

Integration and Adoption: Keys to Value from IT

Christian Burger, President, Burger Consulting Group

IT initiatives must be structured to maximize adoption. Best served by minimizing complexity of systems, and cutting back on bells & whistles.

Up-and-Coming IT Trends

• Project Management Integration (no best-in-class solution exists that does everything, therefore integration is required to leverage best-in-class tools across all functions)
• BIM – this technology will separate those who can from those who can’t and will be a differentiator for negotiated work
• Life-Cycle View of Projects (transition from construction to O&M – BIM is a key component of this)
• Electronic Content Management (ECM) everything is saved, managed, and searchable (including email, voicemail, recorded conference calls, etc.)
• Customer Relationship Management (tools to manage the client relationship, not just the project we are doing for them)
• Service-Oriented Architecture
• Web-Based Tools to get better utility out of all of the above
• ERP Upgrades & Exchanges (issues with legacy systems being replaced)
• Mobile Applications

Construction IT Trends

• Pressure to standardize (usually driven by management – not by users)
• Pressure to automate & provide better tools (usually driven by users, clients, or new hires who are more tech-savvy)
• Staffing better for IT (not a problem at Weston as much as smaller contractors where IT is one guy with one server)
• Degree of inefficiency remains high (most systems ~20% integrated)
• Well-chosen system poorly or partially implemented (so much energy is exhausted getting it launched and users on board that there is no appetite for 2nd tier, higher-value implementation)
• Struggling with competing systems (two groups have different legacy systems duplicating the same function – neither one will give it up)
• Many trends signal movement to a single platform (company need vs. single group need)
• Service-Oriented Architecture
• Changing methods for integration or interface will allow use of separate, specialized best-in-class systems
• Business Intelligence Tools reporting across multiple systems
• Web Services – AGCxml
• ECM tools

ECM

• Started as imaging and workflow
• Recognize that unstructured data is costly, risky, & inefficient
• Structure & governance of enterprise data
• Possibly an email-driven workflow engine

PM/ERP/ECM systems

• Building bridges between best-in-class systems instead of buying a single complete solution
• No single vendor has a best-in-class solution
• Example - Meridian does not want to be best-in class document management solution, wants to work well with other systems that are
• Does not think Oracle will be successful at this either, bought Primavera to leverage systems for other industries (health care, IT, manufacturing) and will not bother to compete too hard for Construction business – industry is too small.

Collaboration

• “Collaboration” circa 2000 over-estimated the market and capabilities
• Contractors worried about owner-driven collaboration – playing only in their “sandbox”
• Technology is moving to allow collaboration across platforms rather than all participants adopting a single platform (many linked sandboxes vs. one sandbox)

Business Intelligence

• Many ERP, PM systems come with BI functions – may not be what your org needs
• One comprehensive, well-integrated BI tool is better than a several “cool-looking” dashboards that are disjointed and poorly integrated

Meridian SOA framework

• Web Services in version 3.0
• .net platform allows for greater flexibility in applications/UI

Long-term Strategy for IT Infrastructure and Tools

• Have a three-year plan for IT strategy – where you want to be
• Get management buy-in on strategy and long-term value
• Continue discussion of value – not just cost

Improve Adoption - Effective Implementation

• Have Clear Business Objectives
• Roll out only when ready (not before)
• Have Executive sponsorship and attention
• Provide adequate support/help desk; go-to experts
• Have Effective training
• Provide integration that reduces effort/duplication (implementation makes folks more efficient/effective than before)
• Provide adequate initial reporting capabilities and resources to customize as new requirements emerge
• Training – continuous, standardized, customized by role and user level, train the “why” as much as the “how”

GSA's ePMxpress Solution

GSA tries to use Proliance on all projects but feel it is overwhelming for the smaller projects. Therefore, they built a custom web interface (ePMxpress) that has a collection of reports, OBA's (Office Business Application) and links to Proliance views. A user can select a project and its phase (similar to our PLC process) and be presented with the tools to manage the project.

Other notes

• Single Sign on - user only needs to sign in once to get access to all the tools
• They have a create project OBA that eases setup and sets up team members. I plan on following up on this.
• OBAs use lookups lists from proliance.
• Reports run against data warehouse

Weston has not spent much time on OBAs but it appears it can be valuable for us.

AECOM's Global Utilization of Proliance

AECOM

• Ranked 352 in Fortune 500.
• Began to migrate to Proliance (from Prolog) in 2005.
• Uses 80/20 rule on projects using Proliance - 80% is standard best practices/processes & 20% customized to client specific needs. Try to keep to standards so as folks move from project to project there is consistency. - this is a key reason for our standardization goal as well
• Discovery session held at the outset of a project that lasts from 30 - 90 days.
• Internal program champions established as first line of support.
• Proliance - single version of the truth.
• 100B of 342B of work managed through Proliance.
• Try to embrace UI (User Inetrface) and only use OBAs (Office Business Applications) as needed.
• Various projects that Proliance is being used for -- UAE (Zayad National Museum & Louvre Abu Dhabi), Saudi Arabia (Knowledge Economic City) & Canada (Royal Canadian Mint).
• Data Center is in Texas 24x7 - "Sun never sets on projects" - multi servers, load balancing
• 100s of users - try to get external users to use it to improve collaboration but difficult at times.
• System used more for interfacing with the client facing systems than interfacing back to corporate AECOM for internal reporting.
• AECOM uses 5 organizations in Proliance.
• AECOM uses multi-currency functionality - personally have not seen this yet.

How Proliance Supports Abu Dhabi's Tourism Asset Development Efforts

How Proliance Supports Abu Dhabi's Tourism Asset Development Efforts (Darrell Ivers, Runding Corporation)

The Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC, http://www.tdic.ae/en) in Abu Dhabi worked with Runding to implement Proliance. Some of the key goals were to have a standard and coordinated process, a fully integrated solution (esp. focused on single data capture -- no duplicate entry), and a reliable and consistent decision support system. In addition, they sought to naturally keep their investor and public-facing information up to date. It was a fairly high level view of the project.

Highlights of the implementation efforts included

• End-to-end process mapping across all systems, not just Proliance.
• A knowledge base for both user support and internal support (looked to be a Sharepoint wiki).
• Trainable and repeatable best practices which clearly identified an overview and goals, not just mechanical training steps. This facilitated both training of existing employees and onboarding of new employees, which sounded like a frequent occurrence
• Electronic signatures replace wet signatures as much as possible (big cultural challenge)
• Multi-directional integration of Cognos, Oracle, Proliance, and Primavera. The information was entered in the best/home system and then exchanged with the others.

Integrating Best-of-Breed Technologies

Integrating Best-of-Breed Technologies (Joe Poskie, Meridian)

This session was essentially best practice and common Proliance integrations they have seen. When planning integrations, one should think through the following:

• Why do you want to integrate? (e.g., eliminate double entry, extend solutions to expert systems, provide a single look and feel, improve visibility)
• Who is going to benefit? (Just because you can doesn't mean you should!)
• What are you going to integrate? (e.g., decision support data, interfaces between different phases/aspects of a project like design, estimates/schedules, budget/cost, accounting)
• When are you going to move data or interact? When does it make sense? (real-time or daily/weekly batch)
• How are you going to integrate? (e.g., using metadata fields)

Overall, they recommend that the steps should be to

1. Flowchart the process
2. Map the systems involved (field to field)
3. Identify the integration process

Typical integrations they have seen are:

Scheduling: Typical interests are baseline schedule and estimates, and the latest schedule and forecasts. From this, one may be interested in setting/adjusting submittal due dates. They have seen/performed integrations with MS Project and Primavera P6. This type of integration might be user-initiated.

Financial/Accounting: The typical need driving this is to support invoicing and/or cost controls. Where there is interplay between systems, it is important to differentiate where the actions are initiated vs. where they are approved. This type of integration might be an example of one that is scheduled nightly or weekly depending on the data.

Document Management: There is often an interest to integrate with the corporate file management standard so that new records are automatically created in Proliance when they are added to the corporate system. One might use Sharepoint for all internal and working files, and have the official RFI or Daily Work Journal files (say) in Proliance for any external users. A folder structure helps identify document type. Additional metadata fields could help identify whether something is a new or a revision. This type of integration normally occurs as soon as it can because the user will likely want to use the file immediately.

Another possibility would be to integrate our network account system with Proliance user accounts.

It sounds like information is normally added to Proliance through a "message bus adapter" they have developed. To get data out of Proliance, its workflow features can be used by sending messages to an integration server.

Something important to remember is that integrations into a system (Proliance or otherwise) require consistency in the source system. For example, if Primavera schedules are to be imported into Proliance, a prerequisite would be that everyone in the company was using Primavera fields exactly the same way all of the time.