Archive for the ‘Advice & Reviews’ Category

Estimating and Takeoffs Take Wing to the Cloud

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September 13, 2011 · by Duane Craig · Advice & Reviews

Takeoffs and estimating are two construction processes that are getting easier and quicker by being cloud based. According to the folks at Cloud Takeoff you can now even use Google Earth to gather dimensions when doing exterior takeoffs. But the real power of cloud takeoffs comes from being able to get the wide view and to have as many blueprints as needed right in front of you.

Of course you are limited by the size of your computer monitor, but that really isn’t an issue since all the prints are presented as thumbnails until you select one to work on. As you do your takeoffs you can add notes, apply variables, dimensions, specs or labels to your takeoff items. Then, you can make your takeoffs available to anyone else who would benefit from them including subs, vendors, materials and equipment suppliers and architects. If you use CloudTakeoff you can copy and paste takeoff quantities directly into an Excel spreadsheet for the estimate, and the cost is ideal for any size contractor, just $69 a month.

In other cases you can get a bundled business solution that includes estimating, project management, job cost control, scheduling, and collaboration. One example is Corecon’s V7, a web based solution that costs anywhere from $42.50 to $60 a month per user. It has everything needed for tracking leads, creating estimates, managing subcontractors / suppliers’ bids, collaborating on documents, tracking schedules, and managing project budgets and changes.

It wasn’t that long ago I was writing about digitizers and tools that allowed people to work on plans right on the computer screen. But now, with this movement of these core processes to the cloud it is significant in how quickly the options are rolling out, and in how quickly construction is embracing them. It’s going to level the playing field so that technology will no longer be a factor in how successful you are at winning the bids — except for those who don’t embrace it.

Word Processing Review of Google Docs

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November 16, 2010 · by Duane Craig · Advice & Reviews

I took some time to experiment with Google Docs today so I could see if it might be a viable document solution for small construction businesses. In this post I’m only looking at the word processing offering and I am writing this post using Google Docs’ word processor application online.

This is really working in the cloud, and I just noticed there is an automatic save going on that seems to be triggered whenever I stop typing for about six seconds. That’s a good feature, since the document I’m creating is not on my own hard drive, and won’t be, unless I copy it to a document on my drive, or download it.

I can choose from among 17 fonts, and normal text, or six heading levels. Font sizes go from 8 points to 72 points, there is bold, italic and underline along with text and highlight color options. You can also add links and pictures, increase or decrease the indention and set the type left, center or right. There is no justification button but there is a line space option that also lets you set the space between end and beginning of paragraphs.

You do have to be careful to make sure the cursor is blinking before you start typing after you have chosen an option or set a function. I tend to look at my keyboard when I type (that’s how I achieve speeds exceeding 30 words a minute) and on two occasions I have looked up only to see what I had been feverishly typing never made it on the screen.

Other cool tools include word count, a Translate option that translates your document into the language of your choice and places the translation into a new document, and a Define option so you can highlight a word, choose Define from the Tools menu, and get a definition. There is also an option to insert a Table.

Screen Shot of Google Docs Menu Bar

The application has pretty good image control except for not being able to specify a space between it and adjacent text.

You can also undo, redo, print and cut, copy and paste. Basically this will do everything you might need to do for creating a basic document. I just took a screen shot of the top of the page and uploaded it to the document. You can see it to the right. There are controls where you can resize the picture using the standard handles and you can also select to have it “Inline” or “Fixed.” If you leave it as Inline, apparently the default, the text won’t wrap. Change it to Fixed and it wraps. Then you can drag it to the right or left side of the page and the text will automatically wrap to the opposite side. You can even set it in the middle and the text will wrap to both sides. What I couldn’t find was a way to add some space between the picture and the text. To me, it’s just too close and crammed-looking. I always like a space of from 5 to 10 pixels between text and pictures. (You won’t see that problem here because my WordPress theme gives me that functionality.)

When it comes to sharing, Google Docs gets a gold star. You can download your document as ODT, PDF, RTF, Text, Word and HTML. Nice. There are also some great controls for sharing the document with others for collaboration. Of course, you can also print, even though that seems to me to run counter to the idea of working in the cloud in the first place. But, hey, I know many people still like to smell the ink and actually hold their creations.

There are several other features that make Google’s word-processor-in-the-cloud a solid choice for any construction business that wants to quit maintaining this kind of software on its computers or servers. Heck, I don’t think you can go wrong, unless you have an unreliable or terribly slow Internet connection. Did I mention it’s free?

Sizing up the Free MS Word in the Cloud as a Small Business Solution

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November 4, 2010 · by Duane Craig · Advice & Reviews

Documents are arguably the lifeblood of any construction, architecture and engineering business. Most businesses use some kind of office suite of products that have word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs. They run either on individual machines or on the company’s server. Until recently, that was the only way these programs were available and they came with a price tag that was never ending – you had to upgrade at regular intervals and if you didn’t you’d be sacrificing security or interoperability.

Now, you can do your document creation in the cloud and there are several free word processing offerings. For this post I’m going to focus on the free cloud version of Microsoft Word, and then in subsequent posts I’ll share my views on the other free word processing offerings currently available in the cloud.  Keep in mind, I’m reviewing these from the perspective of very small businesses that might want to start moving their document creation and document sharing to the cloud. There are plenty of robust offerings for large enterprises and those are covered in other places on this blog.

Menu from Windows Live User Home Page

Picture management is very limited in the cloud version of Word.

I am writing this post on MS Word in the cloud. What you have to do is get a Windows Live ID and then sign in. At the top of the page you’ll see an “Office” link and where you can select the type of document you want to create.  Right away I have run into a frustrating limitation and that is the way pictures are handled, or rather, not handled. I took the screen shot you see here and uploaded it to the page. It was appropriately placed on the left side, bumping the text below it. There is no way that I’ve found where you can cause the text to wrap. The only thing you can do with the picture once it’s on the page is resize it and add “Alt” text.

Windows Live Word Menu Screenshot

All text functions are under the Home tab.

All of the controls for the text portion of your document are under the “Home” tab. You can cut, copy and paste and manipulate the text by bolding, underlining and italicizing. You can increase and decrease the indention, set it to justify left, center or right, and you can change the text direction between left to right and right to left. There are about 30 fonts to choose from and you can do sub and superscript and change the font colors. You can also highlight text and there are a number of buttons that allow you to change the heading sizes. There is also a spelling checker.  My connection to the Internet is not the fastest by any means (about 3Mb down and 586kb up), but working on the document was no different than if I was working within a program on my computer. There is one annoying little thing related to highlighting text when you want to type over it or insert a link. The highlighting doesn’t seem to turn off and you can easily highlight an entire page in a millisecond.

The reality is that for most documents a construction firm might have to create this would work just fine except for the options available to you once the document is complete. You can choose to “Share” the document but to do that you enter the person’s email address. The “sharee” gets an email and when they click on the link to view the document they end up at the Windows Live sign in page. So, as long as the person who you want to share the document with has a Windows Live account they can log in and see the document. This is kind of nice for internal reviews where you want a number of people to collaborate on the document’s creation, but it would be a real pain if you wanted to send the document to 10 subcontractors, or vendors. Of course, you can also “Print” the document but if you are working in the cloud that seems like kind of a silly thing to do, unless of course you are still using postal mail to send out your correspondence. If you’re still mailing things then you’re probably not reading this, and any discussion about clouds no doubt centers on the precipitation that’s falling from them, and not about moving business processes to them.

You can get the document on your local machine by choosing to “Open in Word.” But again, let’s face it, if you are moving to the cloud you probably want to stop buying and maintaining Word on your computer or server.  So the ability to use the document in meaningful and easy ways once it is created is very limited and for that reason I don’t think this is a serious cloud solution for even the smallest of construction businesses.

Guard Against These Cloud Adoption Mistakes

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October 14, 2010 · by Duane Craig · Advice & Reviews

Welcome to questions and answers about cloud computing for construction, architecture and engineering. Louis Rosas-Guyon, president of R-Squared Computing names the top mistakes when moving backups and operations to the cloud, puts order to adopting the cloud and reveals how companies that don’t move to the cloud will become increasing less competitive.

From the perspective of a small construction firm, what’s the biggest mistake it could make when making plans to put its backups in the cloud?

There are several. First, it is easy to overpay. There are so many new online backup services that prices are all over the place. Your cheapest bet is still Amazon’s S3 service but it can be tricky for a beginner. Rackspace has a good offering for $4 per month for 10 gigabytes of online storage which is marginally easier to use. In either case, a reliable business technology expert can advise and guide you through this process.

Next, you need to be aware of the limitations of your broadband data connection. I recently set up an online backup solution for a customer on Amazon’s S3. They needed to backup about 500GB of data which would have taken a week over their wimpy DSL connection. To speed the process, I just sent Amazon a disk with all their files which they copied onto the S3 servers. Now all we do is backup changes every 4 hours. If you have a sizable amount of data to backup, it is possible your broadband might not be very happy with you for it. Again, a good business technology expert will be able to guide you.

Another mistake is to treat your cloud backup solution as a dumping ground for everything. Because these services work with utility pricing models (you pay for what you consume) it is easy to overpay for storage — simply because you are storing too much. I recommend only storing business critical information to your cloud backups. That means no operating systems, entertainment, personal files, etc. It doesn’t pay to be a digital packrat. It also means aggressively reviewing the data being backed up and removing non-critical items from the backup queue. To backup everything else, just use a local backup solution like a few external hard drives.

And whatever you do — don’t agree to long term contracts! I expect significant consolidation in the online backup market over the next 2-3 years. The last thing you need is to be paying 2010 prices in 2012, especially considering that the prices will only drop further.

What are some mistakes companies could make in moving operational items such as estimating and project management to the cloud?

The biggest mistake with any operational tool is to rush into a decision. You need to take time and explore the options. That means using free trials (or paying for short-term usage) and identifying which solution works best for you. No two businesses work exactly alike. The key is to find the software that works closest to your procedures and then adapt.

Don’t rush into anything. It is critical that you understand the business critical functions that you require from any new tool. Be specific too. Don’t just say, “I need estimating software.” Say, “I need to generate and store multiple variations of the same estimate for the same client based on various criteria.” The more specific you are in stating your needs, the greater the likelihood of finding the tools that will work.

The dark side is that you may not find one tool that does everything. That’s when you need to prioritize your needs. Then you pick the cloud tool that gives you the most flexibility, the most features and the best set of tools. The rest you can either retool or work around.

Chances are you will need to change how you work. Workflow process has a habit of growing organically over time in any organization. What started as a simple three step process when you were just starting out in business has become a behemoth hydra with forty-nine steps and thirteen process forks depending on customers and circumstances.

While making the shift to cloud services, its a good time to re-examine how you work. It’s a great opportunity to identify bottlenecks and problem areas in the orderly flow of work in your business. That means getting down in the trenches and actually seeing how people perform their jobs every day. It means counting steps, documenting procedures and drawing flowcharts. It’s a pain in the neck but it is incredibly worthwhile. And whatever you do, don’t make the mistake of believing that nothing has changed since you first delegated the job. That is never the case.

Sadly, most business owners avoid this step — which I think is dangerous. Whenever you implement a new tool in your business you need to make sure that it is being used properly and that it fits within the greater scope of your business goals. Sure, you can use a screwdriver as a hammer, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best use of the tool. Make sure you are getting your workers the tools they need — not just the tools you like.

The other danger is unwillingness to change. Cloud tools will work differently than the old desktop version you are used to. That is inevitable. The question is whether the trade offs are worth the aggravation. Typically, workers will hate anything new for about two months — then they’ll wonder how you did business without it.

Suppose one of these firms wanted to move everything to the cloud, over time. What function/s would it move first, and then next? What would a recommended order be?

Email, calendars, documents, customer relationship management (CRM), estimating, project management (PM) and accounting/ERP. The idea is to migrate non-critical tools first so you can start getting used to working in the cloud. Email is a great example because most people already host their email in the cloud (to an extent) so this is the easiest shift. Considering how often email services are interrupted or down, this transition is the least painful to implement. But, it can also be the most immediately valuable. If you are hosting your own internal email server, the cost savings are near instantaneous, starting the moment you turn that monster off. Support costs on email servers are among the highest in the industry simply because of the overall demand placed on the device. Do yourself a favor and outsource your email to the cloud today.

Obviously, I left the accounting/ERP for last. This is a tough one and I am not recommending it for everyone. Too many businesses are still very paranoid about protecting their accounting information, and for good reason. There are significant legal concerns that must be addressed before you make this move. The biggest legal issue is the question of discovery. What is the likelihood that your cloud provider will fight a court order demanding the release of your information? The answer is zero. If you are in a particularly litigious market then this might not be a good idea. While there may not be anything damning or illegal in your activities, you also don’t want the world looking into your finances either. Of all the cloud offerings, this is the one I am most hesitant to use.

Any ideas on when a construction firm of this size will begin to see its competitiveness erode if it doesn’t move to the cloud? What business areas might show cracks first? Or, will it make little difference if a firm just keeps doing business the way it always has?

I was having this conversation last week with one of my construction customers. It is his opinion that it has already started. Since I moved his company onto cloud services he has noticed an enormous difference. First and foremost, his business is now truly mobile — he has access to his data from any Internet terminal in the world. He is able to respond faster to customers which has improved their satisfaction with his work. Because he can respond to a question on a bid or contract within minutes, he proves his dedication to customer satisfaction which earns him more work. His competition is reeling after he managed to win 15 of his last 18 bids, simply because he was better connected to his data.

The first places you will see the cracks is in your customer satisfaction. How long do your client’s typically wait for a reply? How long does it take to respond to a problem? How quickly can you write up a work order for a sub-contractor to address a grievance? How many steps do you need to take to adapt a project timeline? Customers are far less patient with delays than they were even five years ago. If you cannot address their concerns in their time frame, you lose. Unhappy customers don’t come back.

The next place you will feel the pinch is in your profits. Companies that adopt cloud computing are reporting enormous savings. The aforementioned construction company is saving almost $30,000 per year off IT costs by switching to the cloud! That’s $30k more in profits every year. He would have to sell more than $300,000 in new work to even approach that recovered profit.

As operating margins get tighter and tighter, old technology infrastructure starts to decay. Eventually, what started as a time-and-cost-saving tool becomes a drain on both time and money. Old servers have more failures and more downtime, which means your technicians are working more hours. You can either spend a fortune and upgrade those systems or move it to the cloud for a fraction of the price. The cloud gives you better outcomes at lower prices which makes it the logical choice.

Louis Rosas-Guyon is a business technology expert, author and speaker. He specializes in helping small business executives choose the right technologies to enable growth. An 18 year veteran of the tech industry, Louis has seen how the right technologies can make the difference between success and failure. Ten years ago he founded R-Squared Computing (r2computing.com) to help businesses make smarter tech decisions. He is the author of two business technology management books, Nearly Free IT (nearlyfreeit.com) and Firm Wisdom (firmwisdom.com). Lou was the kid that always found the best way to get the job done.