June 2, 2022 Frank Hopkins

Technology Enables Manufacturing Advances

Engineering, manufacturing and construction have changed dramatically in the last decade. The days of blueprints being spread out on a table or whiteboard are light years behind us. We now have the ability to collaborate digitally while an entire team works in the same live drawing. We can push and pull data from different Autodesk® and Microsoft® software programs to increase quality while exponentially being more efficient.

Through the full-solution approach enabled by FTI, our parent brand, we strive to understand how we can streamline processes for our clients. Often they come to us with problems, and we collaborate to develop ideas and plans to solve them. Our engineering teams develop and model solutions. Excellerate is then utilized to manufacture and validate products. Faith Technologies has 50 years of electrical contracting experience which we utilize to aid the overall process and deploy electricians on-site to integrate systems. Once we have completed installing and testing new products, we rely on our ICIAN™ specialists to maintain and optimize overall solutions. The ICIANs may maintain an on-site presence to look for ways to implement renewable energy through our EnTech Solutions energy division, upgrade software and technology as it is developed and aid in problem-solving. This is truly an end-to-end process.

The overall complexity of managing our processes begins with custom coding of multiple software programs, first creating the overall plan in Primavera P6. P6 is a multi-trade scheduling software to monitor the health of a project’s schedule. The P6 software houses all of the material deliveries, key milestones, durations and much more and brings visibility to potential timing clashes.

This raw project data is then exported to a more in-depth schedule that lives in Smartsheet®. Here is where some of the collaboration between platforms and custom coding comes in. Our Excellerate team is able to break down the large milestones from the P6 into individual lines that have estimated dates of completion, hours, phase codes (for labor), drawings, owners, etc. These data points are collected live and display metrics to track project performance, including hours used and hours remaining and how we are trending on the overall schedule performance index (SPI). Having the ability to plan work down to the hour and see how the team is doing has proven to help us understand the efficiency of the project and see where potential pain points are before the job is nearing completion.

As technology continues to advance, we are always looking for ways to implement process improvements to make our employees safer and more efficient, and to help our customers reach their goals. How can Excellerate support your project?