Construction and Cybersecurity

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to today's podcast on cyber security I have with me Vice President of Operations at Basi construction Kevin Morris Kevin has over 20 years of experience combining Financial science and business business equipment to deliver exceptional Financial results thank you for joining and how are you doing today thank you for having me I'm very good thank you so before we start tell us about your career journey and your role at bassi construction my job at Bassie construction is to deliver projects on time on budget and with an ecstatic client and for us that means that my job is to make sure that we have an exceptional team that understands what our client really needs how to deliver a product really on time with really high quality and being completely transparent throughout the process so the client knows exactly what's going on how come and what comes next and so what my 20 years before that coming here is I've been trained as a financial person so I understand how numbers and business activities and then the customer interaction happen and drives things forward so I find it's been a really good experience to bring together that experience and knowledge with what we're trying to do here as a company and we're already seeing really improvements in the way we serve our clients great so today's discussion is about construction and use of technology so as we know like most Industries are benefiting from intelligent solutions and we have seen Education Health Care high tech retail automobiles are the early adopters now when it comes to construction industry there was a traditional resistance to new technologies but now we have seen some are making significant progress with uh um Technologies like mobile drones building automation monitoring and even 3D printing so what are some of the trends you have seen in the in construction industry with respect to smart technology I've seen the construction industry to be quite slow honestly in in adapting smart technology the way they do things there was a study published I think about two years ago that compared labor productivity and Manufacturing versus construction and showed over the last two decades that manufacturing increased their productivity from labor over three times while manufacturing had stayed essentially flat and if you look at why manufacturing had changed their productivity versus construction is they adopted not only lean construction methods but also had the complimentary technology about it if you go walk most of my construction sites today you'll see paper you'll see paper drawings you'll see paper directions to staff paper directions to trades and again you go we all know what how efficient paper is versus technology so we've worked very hard to start saying okay we don't want to have paper we want to use technology like in other industries that can make things more efficient and we took a very small step last year in changing from paper time cards to GPS tagged time cards in everybody's smartphone and that really I think started our journey saying now I can tell not only where employees are and what jobs they're working on but now they can use that mobile device to start taking things like site pictures or start changing drawing exchanging drawings with other people electronically and so it's really taken a next step forward this year this year we've adopted a technology called PL grid which has fundamentally changed the way we do new construction for highrises before I'd have somebody walking around with a piece of paper looking at each floor or each suite and noting down on a piece of paper here's the problems with the drywall or the plumbing and having to go back downstairs to the ground floor enter that into an Excel workbook send an email and send it out and so I'd have two to three people walking around a 28 story highrise doing that work now by adopting PL grid I have somebody walking around with a tablet who can pull open the drawings from that floor tag specifically where on that floor that deficiency is which subtrate has the work tag in video notes comments and it gets sent electronically to the trade for them to do and they come back and clear their deficiency the same way so I've taken three people down to one by adopting this technology and what is not only impressive for our productivity we also make sure all our deficiencies are taken care of and most importantly we can send it to our client saying here's the work we've done we can show you now quantitatively how good our quality is with our sub trades is it a couple deficiencies per floor or hundreds before it was just stories now we can actually show the data of how good our value trades are in terms of Performing the work and so we're seeing that as sort of a really big game changer for us and we've got other things coming along in 2021 that'll be complimentary which we think again going back to leveraging those things that made manufacturing far more productive that we can apply on construction thank you for sharing those um real life examples because yes we have seen with technology not efficiency and then the chances of error are also less because you have everything on system so there there is a trail that is being maintained on the system which is also increasing the efficiency and is making the system easy to maintain so now when it comes to Innovation we always talk about best practices because when it comes to technology people also have to comply with the best practices so what are some of the best practices in the construction industry when it comes to Innovation and the use of technology I think constructions learning very rapidly that there's other Industries who have solved some of the big problems that construction has and so we can leverage those so as another example for us we have things that happen on construction sites we're doing work and I may need some additional supplies I may need some cocking or some paintbrush or hammer and all those while before the person who was a site supervisor would get in this pickup truck drive down to the local hardware store pick up those things and come back and again everybody does that every day in in construction well if you look at the time that takes that's probably an hour or two and I'm paying that person quite a bit and there's wear and tear on the vehicle and he's not he or she is not on site making sure production happens of high quality making sure safety is maintained and other things that the customer wants us to do while we we're doing a pilot project with a local AWA firm that we can go on our phone and saying I need these supplies sent to my site come look for me I'm on the fifth floor and it cost me $25 and it's done on the smartphone and not only does it get delivered and my site supervisor stays on site making sure production happens make sure I have a safe work environment then my supplier then sends me that invoice and it goes automatically into my job cost system so again I'm removing yet another step of somebody having to take a paper invoice and sign it and code it it's automatically done done again those things happen in lots of other Industries already but again constru say well why do I always do this there's other Industries who can make us better by just taking some of those simple best practices um another example for us we have a division that does a lot of concrete and masonry work which has lots of tools that go with that while before we used to have a paper sign in sign out sheet well we partnered with one of our providers now everything has a GPS tag on it so we know when it leaves the building we know what job sites it on and we know when it gets returned again not only reduces our loss of critical expensive tools but we can also be more clear with our client of here's the actual Pro Tools that are on your site we know when they went out we know when they came back and again it's a safeguarding of our own assets again Technologies has existed for a long time another way we can apply to our industry to make us more efficient reduce cost and again have a better prod quality product for our clients and and that that reminded me of a use case that came five or six years back in healthcare where using these GPS tags or we call it as as a Tracker the uh Hospital wanted to track the movement of a surgical kid from one place to another in a hospital so that it becomes easy for them to track because they used to um invest a lot of time in searching where the asset is so that reminded me um of that so yes and and we have seen the use of these GPS track and asset um trackers in logistic tracking the path of goods from Warehouse to retail so and it has worked well for them and the overall chain also became very efficient so glad like the use is now there in the construction industry as well and and our industry requires lots of documentation because we're dealing with large sums of money between various clients and we got lots of deliverables and again we got lots of documentation has to go on through the process well people don't like writing out forms well the nice part is other Industries have you can push on your smartphone and just dictate all the notes and it comes out about 95 to 100% correct again we've put that in our technician's hand or field staff hand so they don't have to type they don't have to say I'm not a computer guy I don't want to write stuff out there's no reason why it just can't be click the button it takes The annotation it puts into our project system again just those things that other Industries have done for years we're finally saying okay let's do those things here because know do includ improve the way we do business it makes us more efficient and we're not trying to reinvent something else somebody have already done it quite well we can just leverage it to make ourselves better yes and and now when it comes to Innovations we have always seen Innovation and security goes hand in hand and now with technology the construction industry now has to deal with threats in a relatively new area and which we call a cyers space um uh I was reading uh in Jan 2020 French company which is into construction business released a press statement that it became a victim of a maze ransomware Cyber attack and we have seen attacks like fishing and social engineering and malware are very common now in construction business as well so what necessary steps and due diligence you uh think is required to protect the construction assets and data from cyber thre um over the last two years we spent a lot of time thinking about this most of our work happens outside of the office so we on in a year we can have 300 to 600 active jobs throughout the year so we have a lot of times that sites need to be mobilized demobilized and for for them to be efficient they need to be able to get connected with their Network so we did a couple things we increased our bandwidth of our whole network and increased level of security so when somebody is on site and needs to connect into our system it happens securely and happens real time because if you're you're trying to push something up or down it's very inefficient or there's an opportunity for somebody to crack into the system um we've reduced our Reliance on thirdparty software so Dropbox is a famous example people put things in a Dropbox well allbody has to do is guess your password of your spouse's birth date and they've got access to everything that's including confidential client documents all that so again we've moved that back inside within Bassie with a very robust security level onto it to make sure we've got that access um we've also spent a lot of time training our employees about what does fishing look like what does malware look like why don't you just want to download things off the internet why if something looks good too good to be true you should probably ask because if you're a hacker and you want to get in those are very easy ways to get in we also have a responsibility teacher employees to how to be skeptical how to look for things and change things um we got a long way to go I think like the entire industry is learning to protect themselves but I think we're trying to be practice saying we know that's out there we have a responsibility both on the technology front as well as the people that use it that will reduce our risk of those kind of attacks yes and and and because people are the weakest link we always say that because they and they are also our first line of defense so which is a good thing because educating them because if they don't know what the risk is how will they report or how will they stop the risk from spreading so I think yeah the great way to start is to educate the employes that um if you get a link this is what it looks like don't click on it so yes this is a good start because this is how the the first level of Defense Works um and um what uh what is the kind of necessary steps when it comes comes to construction data uh like like how you protect and make sure the construction data and the financial recs and the client data is safe um internally we do have segregation and Security even internally so if you're a bassi employee doesn't mean you have access to everything yeah we have those roles defined if you are um either with within a division you're only able to see certain divisional information on construction you're not able to see all of them if you are part of your role you don't see Financial data you don't get access to the financial system nor the separate separate directory within our system where all that stuff's kept um other confidential data such as employee data we've actually moved to a uh a hosted secured cloud system because we go even if it's contained in our Erp it's very likely that someone could break into that and get that confidential information so we would taking that next step saying what information do we want to keep internally what's the risk around it versus where else can we keep it that further segregates the ability for somebody to go get it and the risk if somebody does get it what happens with it may things a access to all the data yes thank you Kevin thank you for sharing those insights it was pleasure talking to you thank you so much thank you so much it was a great pleas talking to you as well thank you [Music]