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Thai Nguyen has personal experience with workplace progress monitoring.
Nguyen, chief innovation officer at Diverge, the investment arm of Hensel Phelps, had to track a deluge of photos with different names and time stamps to monitor the progress of the job.
But in 2023, Hensel Phelps started a pilot with the Track3D progress tracking platform in a project in Denver. Since then, the contractor has leveraged the tool, which uses machine learning based on visual data to monitor construction progress, on a number of projects, including $300 million Courtyard 3 Connector Project at San Francisco International Airport.
For Greeley, Colo.-based Hensel Phelps, it paid dividends: The technology helped eliminate nearly 3,000 hours of manual coordination, avoided three major reworks and delivered $342,000 in verified labor savings, according to a news release. The contractor subsequently signed an enterprise agreement with the technology provider earlier this year.
Here, Nguyen talks to Construction Dive about the adoption path Hensel Phelps took, the problem Track3D tackled, and how the development team solicited user feedback.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Construction Immersion: You have been working with Track3D since 2023. How did Hensel Phelps begin his relationship with Track3D?
THAI NGUYEN: In those early days, it wasn’t the tool it is today. When I started with them, there were eight employees. Today there are more than 130.
Thai Nguyen
Courtesy of Hensel Phelps
It was a big help to expose Track3D to our regions and projects to convey what our people needed. We showed them what was working well and what wasn’t with a very field-centric and field-directed mindset.
This really allowed Track3D the natural progression of starting a couple of pilot projects in one region. Then we would put them in another pilot project in a different region.
Next thing I know, they’re in three or four different pilots in 10 different regions. That’s how it started and grew naturally.
What was the adoption schedule like?
The partnership and how they responded revolved around some key KPIs for us. At any time, I had the admin dashboard where I could see how many walks they were doing per project and per day. This definitely gave an understanding of the actual usage.
Then, as it grew between regions, it had to be consistent. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t just doing well in one region, and then for some reason not doing well in another.
What problems did Track3D help Hensel Phelps solve in the San Francisco Airport project?
What we did there is systemic for all the projects we have in the country today.
We all know there is a labor shortage. You have to do more with less. Therefore, in every process that we have to run, we have to be more efficient. What Track3D does really well is create efficiencies for us when it comes to capturing media, whether it’s photos or 360 video, but doing it in a way that’s already part of the workflow.
When I started at Hensel Phelps, I was in charge of progress photos. This meant creating folders on the file server. Everyone who went to the workplace had their picture taken and had to be in a certain naming convention. But it was rare that people actually followed him.
So you would go to these folders every day, millions of files with no common standardization. It was very difficult to access and manage this information in real time.
Today, Track3D has created those efficiencies where you can literally walk around a place with a 360 degree camera and track everything you need in minutes. In the past, it might take me an hour to walk around an apartment and capture those photos and try to organize it.
Now, walk around the site, capture that video, and then organize it behind the scenes. The key to everything with Track3D is how the information appears. You can look at it and make decisions in real time without having to go back to the office first.
What was it like adopting Track3D? Was there a backlash from the teams?
The key is ease of use. I think back to my previous statement, how Track3D was built in the field, in the field.
The Track3D team had meetings every Friday to discuss. They were like, “Hey, these are some of the things we’ve seen this week with the product, is this a user error or a software glitch?”
It was very effective. And not only did they engage with us and listen to some of these issues that we had, but they really isolated themselves beyond best practices and addressed the solutions that needed to be done.
As a result, it is the first field. It had to be a solution where you didn’t have to have a master’s degree in software, you didn’t have to have nine training modules to figure it out.
This is what we noticed right away. His ability, once he got on the field, didn’t need much input to get him going on a project. Obviously, there had to be some best practices instilled by the project leadership, and really within that, the discipline to go and act on that playbook.
But what we realized once we got it to our people, it was very easy to use and very intuitive.
