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Interview with Erez Dror: Pt. 5 - How does Genda support Superintendents?

 

Erez Dror:

Most of the superintendents are not coming from studying how to be a superintendent. It's usually a worker that turns into a foreman and then turns into a super, which is very good, because they have tons of experience in the field.

But the downside of it is that they're missing the outside perspective on, "How can we do things better?" They just do what they've been doing forever.

Erez Dror:

And that's why it's a bit challenging to ... Like one of the things we've seen today, and I was seeing as a researcher, is the first eureka moment of the users is when they understand how much time they've been wasting. Because everybody knows there is waste in construction, but nobody understands how much.

Erez Dror:

And I really remember the first ... It wasn't even a pilot. We deployed the POC of Genda on a small residential product here in Tel-Aviv. I was just telling a friend about it yesterday. And we showed that the superintendent was spending 40% of his time in the loading dock.

You know, the super should be on site, making sure work is done correctly and supervising it. And he was spending 40% of his time in the loading dock.

Erez Dror:

What we've figured out from the data is that he was unloading the trucks coming to the site because he had no assistance. There was a PM that worked part-time, and here was a super that's earning tons of money, was the highest earner in the project, spending 40% of his time unloading trucks; the task that you expect the lowest earner on site to do.

And by the way, I think I never told you this one; following that, he reached out to his manager and got an assistant, because he said, "That's not the best [crosstalk 00:01:49]."

Chere Lucett:

Right. That's great data to have, to say, "You're paying me a lot of money to do something that I shouldn't have to be doing. And my skillset should be over here, helping to manage the workers and the site and the jobs that need to be done, and here I am doing something that is not only," I'm sure, mentally, emotionally frustrating, but again, there has to be a level of dissatisfaction in the job when you're spending so much time doing that.

The biggest question I have is, I'm sure that the superintendent had a gut feeling of like, "I'm doing this all day and I shouldn't be doing it," but didn't have the data to back himself up.

Chere Lucett:

So if he had gone to whoever he reports to and said, "I'm spending too much time doing this," it might not have been believable, but when you have data to back you up, it's a completely different conversation.

Erez Dror:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). That was exactly the case. He was complaining all the time about the fact that he is all the time outside unloading trucks. You want to do what you're hired for.

Erez Dror:

And if you look at it financially, the biggest waste, like money waste, is not the time he's spending in the loading dock; it's the activities that are not happening in the right way, if you look at it from the flow perspective or the rework that will occur or the quality that is low, because he wasn't spending his time in the field.

Erez Dror:

That's what you might want to make sure, as an exec, let's say, or even as a PM; you want to make sure that the field managers are in the field as much as they can in the right place at the right times. Unfortunately, it's not always the case.

 

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