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.

Web-based BIM Management Solution

Web-based BIM Management Solution (Jordan Brandt, Horizontal Systems)
First, a preliminary thought on Building Information Modeling (BIM). It's probably an overly simplistic view, but what works for me to provide a basic understanding of BIM is to imagine computerized fly-by views of building you may have seen at some point in a movie or a commercial. What you see is a superficial, exterior view. Imagine that each thing that you see (window, wall, tree, etc.) actually has properties to it (dimensions, cost, number, etc.). Now peel away the walls and windows to see the rooms, chairs, lights, elevators, piping, duct work, etc. and those things having properties as well. These are the base components of a BIM model.

This session was a demonstration of Horizontal's Glue application (http://www.horizontal-llc.com/?p=20). The size of BIM models has been an issue -- files may be several GB in size and are time consuming to load into desktop software and difficult to email to all participants in a project. Glue provides a web-based solution. All of the contributors (architects, designers, engineers, suppliers, etc.) load their 2D or 3D input online and Glue aggregates it into a 4D (x, y, z, time) BIM Model. Rather than loading the entire BIM Model all at once, Glue just loads the information relevant to the current view of the model. Glue integrates with Proliance, Prolog and other aspects of BIM (e.g., CAD applications)

Similar to what you might expect from BIM overall, it provides a mechanism for more efficient collaboration, identifies clashes (e.g., walls, piping, duct work that intersect with each other). It includes version control, an audit trail, and review/red-lining features. It can help with field verification tasks as well. One interesting aspect of BIM is that each virtual component has properties, including cost and sequence. Since each physical element is sequenced, so you can literally "see" how the building is built over time, improving coordination and collaboration. You can also peel away layers to see items of interest.

Adoption of BIM isn't quite there yet -- the main benefits will come when everyone uses it. BIM standards are in their early stages, but it seems like BIM is an logical conclusion to the massive coordination required for building construction projects. It should should change how one visualizes a project. The future vision of BIM is that it will extend into facilities management and building operations as well.

This may happen....

A recent Proliance implementation team member along the Potomac at National Harbor!

Iwo Jima

Here is an amazing sand sculpture made in the hotel.

Believe it or not a Peeps store!

The conference is at the Gaylord in National Harbor (only two years old) which also has condos, other hotels and shops built on the Potomac. Very nice and reminds me of Inner Harbor in Baltimore. They even have a Peeps store, the Easter time candy!

Proliance Reporting Strategies

Proliance Reporting Strategies ("Zee" Tan, Brant Carter, Meridian)

The data extraction features of Proliance are (from basic to complex)
1) Views and Filters: Views can be effective and meet basic needs. But they only allow a single data group per report (single table?), do not provide grouping or calculations, and limited formatting features are available.
2) Custom Print Layouts: More flexible, but can be hard to do include multiple data groups depending on document type.
3) Analytics (Cognos): Extremely flexible, allows charts and graphs. However, complex to understand. Uses Cognos hosted solution.
4) DBViews: Start of the data warehouse discussion...

Meridian is currently working on providing a data warehouse for POD users at no additional cost. (Q3 beta, Q4 release planned). With a data warehouse, they have seen report generation times drop several orders of magnitiude (hours have become seconds).

Three (SQL Server) databases in this approach:
Original database --(via replication)--> Mirrored database --(via ETL import)--> data warehouse

Proliance 4.01 is a prerequisite. The first part of the data warehouse tools being developed create the data warehouse tables from the mirrored database based on the DBViews. The Physical Data Model is transformed to something like the Logical Data Model. The ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) rules migrate the actual data. You report against the data warehouse, which is better suited for reporting. It includes constraints (PK, FK). Can generate an ERD from this so that the model is easy to understand. The second part creates files/information to support Cognos-specific implementations (Not applicable to us).

Size considerations: Original and mirrored database will be same size. Data warehouse typically 80% to 160% the size of the mirrored database. However, you don't need to back up the mirrored or data warehouse database.

Latency considerations: Need to select frequency of data warehouse update. Suggested that this be overnight. This is currently a drop and replace approach. A future vision is that this be deltas (only changes based on the last data warehouse update).

What was suggested for WESTON was that we download the data warehouse database down to our servers if we want to use our own reporting/BI tools.

Integrating Meridian Products: Proliance to Prolog

Integrating Meridian Products: Proliance to Prolog (Brian Rothery and Scott Wielt, Meridian)

This session was mainly about the specific Proliance-Prolog Connector that is being built for GSA, but kinds of gives a hint of what is to come.

• Proliance users are typically "Owners".
• Prolog users are typically Contractors.
• The GSA's customization of Proliance is called ePM. They are comissioning/funding a connector so that Proliance documents can be imported by Prolog Converge. (Aside: It seems like one underlying reason is that GSA doesn't want duplicate entry by contractors to be a reason for their overhead costs??)
• The Connector is currently in a pilot phase. Documents in the scope of the first phase are RFIs, Meeting Minutes, Submittals, and DWJs. They hope to go live with this in Q4.
• The user (contractor) opens the Connector application and is prompted for their Prolog login and their ePM login.
• They then select the the projects and document types they want to import.
• Only documents that the user can see in ePM are imported into Prolog. (Instance level security rules in Proliance are honored.)
• Some initial setup/configuration is needed to map Proliance fields to Prolog fields. Exceptions can be handled as well.
• The link between the two is maintained in several user defined fields in Prolog
• Subsequent imports can overwrite or update the records in Prolog

Some Limitations

• The flow of data is one way (ePM --> Prolog Converge). Updates must be made in ePM.
• There is no Proliance --> Proliance connector
• Attachments and linked documents are not imported
• List of documents that can be imported is limited.

It seems like Prolog and Proliance will both continue to be future Meridian products since they have different user bases. (They also have separate product teams.) This app is the bridge between the two. It sounds like this is "the start of something big". In the future, the limitations listed above could be tackled.

Applicability to WESTON

• None right now.
• If we do work for the GSA, we might be interested in a Proliance-Proliance connector
• If our subs are Prolog users, they/we might be interested in the Proliance-Prolog connector.

User Applications on the Proliance Platform

User Applications on the Proliance Platform (Mike Shelnutt, Meridian)

Discussion of four things that they have recently implemented/customized. (Speaker mentioned that title isn't quite appropriate)

1) Custom User Interfaces
2) Custom Limits of Authority
3) Custom Single Sign-On
4) Password Policies

1) Custom User Interfaces
Discussed two solutions provided if you want to limit/control the user experience based on user (security) role, document state, other data conditions were discussed.

A) Excel OBA (Office Business Application).
Meridian created an OBA where a Vendor gets a familiar Excel interface to enter an RFI. The Excel file highlights fields that they can enter/are required and grays out fields that they don't have rights to. When submitting, workflow is triggered. When the PM opens up the OBA on their machine, the highlighted and disabled fields are ones appropriate to the PM, not the Vendor. The system would notify the user when the system was in maintenance mode or if they did not have the latest version of the OBA. These are the particular requirements that one client wanted (Disney?). You can create/customize how you see fit…
- Can be written by Meridian, 3rd party consultant, yourself (Meridian/consultant needs to teach you their code interfaces)
- You create a form layout, mapping database fields to Excel cells.
- Any logic/code is written in VB (our development language at WESTON).
- User installs the OBA app on their machine.
- When they open the file, the are presented with a login screen so that rules/security can be applied, but they never see Proliance.
- Create an app for each document type where you have this need.

B) Entirely new UI
Meridian developed a customized UI for the GSA called ePM where it basically sounds like they wrote an entirely new/customized UI to work with the existing Proliance backend database. Excel OBAs were written as well. Someone from the GSA pointed out that one of the reasons that this was done was because the GSA isn't standardized on using Outlook?? (Thinking about this now that I’m writing this, I'm not sure how this makes sense.)

2) Custom Limits of Authority
One client had very precise authority/approval workflow they wanted to enforce that varied by company region, dollar value, and other information; the criteria/thresholds vary annually. In Proliance 4.0, user-defined work flow states can be created. They created one to be the engine that handled this logic. When the document was in this state, the "Message Bus Adapter" was triggered (not a standard part of Proliance) while applied the logic. They stored the criteria/threshold values as Catalog Card documents so that the client could change the values each year without having to go back to Proliance to change the code.

3) Custom Single Sign-On
They had a client that created a separate application to supplement Proliance. They didn't want to have the users enter their login information into the supporting application if they had logged in to Proliance already. (They considered Proliance to be the "source of truth" for logins). This has been integrated in to Proliance 4.0. This doesn't really apply to us.

4) New Password Policies
They talked about the new password policy features recently released. Nothing earth shattering (lock out users, password expiration, password requirements, etc.). It basically brings things up to speed with what you would expect. While we use Proliance as a hosted solution, this is helpful. Should we have Proliance running on our own servers in the future, if we choose to have Windows Integrated Security enabled, Proliance trusts whatever policies we setup for folks on our network today (as well as naturally providing single sign on).

Proliance Office Business Applications (OBAs)

OBAs (Office Business Applications) are basically excel templates used to import/export data from proliance. It simplifies work flow. Especially useful for external users. You can create a template with only the fields you require or need. Walt Disney heavily utilizes OBAs. Up to 26 different ones. Creates flexibility for users. 428 users of proliance.

Check out - http://www.obacentral.com/en/Pages/default.aspx

Vendors have site to download Disney OBAs.

Tip - create them with branding in mind. Also, One size does not fit all

Customer Profiles: Achieving Continual Process and Training Improvements

This session was done by two Proliance customers, North Texas Tollway Authority and the Simon Group on their implementation and training process.

NTTA

• Implementation team made up of business and IT
• Purchased in 12/10, Phase 2/10, plan to go live in 7/10. Our goal is purchased 1/10, Pilot 6/10 & go live 9/10
• Uses Sharepoint to for content management. Sharepoint appears to be very popular among proliance users.
• Use ISO 9001 process for continual improvement and user satisfaction. Plan -- Do -- Check -- Act -- http://www.iso.org
• Uses Cognos 8.3 for reporting. We have an issue with using a third party reporting tool in a hosted environment. We are in process of moving away from Cognos to SQL Reporting Services.
• Performance metrics are used - e.g. turnaround time on submittals, RFI's
• Design metrics to support objectives and be actionable to drive behavior
• Keep documentation simple - flow charts work well
• Uses ITIL Version 3 on implementation - http://itsm.fwtk.org/v3.htm
• Look to have a Proliance SME at each key location
• They did a timeline on their implementation - Weston should do same.

Simon

• Continual education is key
• Just in time learning
• Usually do it early in morning for 90 minutes max
• 180 projects use it
• Integrate with JD Edwards, their ERP
• Uses Excel for entry to support use
• Focus training on only what users need to know
• Real goal is YAC - Yards after Catch - basically how much users can do with training after receiving it
• Boot camp for new hires
• Views are powerful way to get users data
• Quick reference guides developed and popular

Opening Keynote

Mike, Janus and I are attending the Meridian User Conference. There are over 300 attendees. The opening keynote was lead by John Bodrozic, President and Founder of Meridian. A few clients spoke as well along with Kristine Fallon, President of Kristine Fallon Associates. Janus thought he heard this firm mentioned by Dave early on in our selection phase as someone we should consult on our decision. She sat with us at lunch and I hope to speak with her more later this week. Her topic was on BIM.

Key takeaways:

John stated there are 4 driving technologies:

1. Web Services
2. Integration
3. BIM
4. Collecting Data Easier & Quicker

Meridian's main sectors are AEC, Commercial & Public.

Proliance is used by large and enterprise customers. Prolog is used by small to medium firms. I get asked a lot why proliance and not Prolog. Prolog does not have workflow and only one document type can be used.

The goal of Meridian is to be the project and program management hub interfacing with financial systems, Microsoft apps, BIM, portals, supply chain, mapping apps, mobile apps, online plans & specs, estimating, scheduling and doc management. It seems like this fits our direction and the Proliance system is a platform to enable this to occur. I was energized by this and feel we made the right technology decision.