Recap, Reactions, and Insight From Procore Groundbreak
If you weren’t at Procore’s Groundbreak conference this year, you certainly missed out on some incredible insights. From incredible keynotes featuring AECO industry thought leaders to informative breakout sessions covering a range of construction management insight and hands-on instruction, there was something for everybody. As an exhibitor, we had a great vantage point into some of the exciting developments taking place in the AECO software space. So, on this special episode of the ProjectReady Podcast, we’re recapping, reacting to, and providing our own insight into the Procore Groundbreak conference.
AECO Software Solutions In Focus
Talking with attendees on the expo floor demonstrated, to us, a shift toward embracing efficiency and cloud-based solutions with emphasis on construction project information management’s role in delivering a holistic approach to construction technology and project management. A prevalent theme that ultimately emerged from our discussions was the concept of a modular approach to construction technology, recognizing the need to accommodate various systems not just within a company but across projects. Connecting data and integrating with Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) were also key talking points.
On a previous podcast, we discussed the ProjectReady Procore integration features that resonated most with attendees. Content synchronization, Procore/BIM 360 integration, automated setup and security of SharePoint, M365 Groups, and Procore projects, and other collaborative project information management solutions were top of mind. And, in conversations with Procore representatives, we heard about the excitement surrounding “The Ribbon” and Procore’s substantial investment in developing APIs, positioning them as leaders in connecting with other systems.
What’s Next For Cloud Based Construction Management Sofware Solutions
Looking to the future, as we explore upcoming plans and expansion of our own Procore integration and reflect on the continuous evolution of Procore’s cloud construction project management software solutions in response to industry demands, we are excited to strengthen our partnership while giving construction professionals access to even better tools.
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Check out these additional resources:
Making Microsoft 365 Work for the AEC
Art of the Possible – Solving the Challenge of Siloed Data in the AEC
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Transcript
Joe Giegerich:
Hi, everybody. Thank you, again, as always for joining us on The ProjectReady Podcast today.
Our previous podcast just came out right before this one, “It’s A Modular World,” it’s one that I kept promoting, I but really, really like it, and thought it came out great. Basically what it’s about is if modular is all the rage in the industry, why is the enterprise, as it relates to the systems it uses day-to-day, also looking at it from a modular fashion versus monolithic?
In other words, you’re going to have to integrate the things, you should be looking at them as modules within your work stream, but not as monolithic investments. Anyway, we have Sala Eckhart on that and Arne on that as well. Do stay. It’s a great webcast.
Upcoming webcasts are navigating the challenges of owners in the AEC. One of the things that in our practice, given that we bring together best of breed and apply some governance to this and some insight and all that other good stuff, different constituents use different platforms and systems and for different reasons.
There are unique challenges as it relates to owners, specifically around things like compliance. Needing to get access to the information that is theirs and how do they integrate their own systems with everybody else’s, much the same theme, but with specific emphasis on owner challenges. Another one continues around everything is schema, everything is taxonomy, so the opportunities around coherent structured metadata. We’ve spoken in the past about metadata, garbage in, garbage out, the importance of data fidelity and structure.
Well, there are some practical applications of metadata that we want to really call out in that webcast.
Today, however, is a special edition as it were. We just all got back from the Procore conference. We just wanted to do a quick roundup of some of the things that we found on the floor, speaking to customers and speaking to the folks at Procore. Especially if you’re a Procore user, this is germane, maybe not so much, but even then. Generally, the conference was really pretty great.
I mean, the attendance is up over last year when we attended. Just from our own mercantile perspective, it was good for us. We found a lot of good opportunities there.
What made the conference good though was understanding some of the challenges out there and how Procore users can address them and where Procore is going as a company in large measure around integration.
With that, Shaili, any specific things you want to call out first? Any takeaways from you?
Shaili Modi Oza:
Yeah, I think just generally, as you mentioned, Joe, it was a good conference. Of course, it’s always a great spot to network with all of the different Procore users. We were able to meet end users, as well as a lot of great interactions with the Procore team as well and how it just comes together every time. I think overall it was a great experience.
Joe:
No offense to the Procore folks out there, it’s really about the clients. That’s what we’re there for, because the history of the company and how we’ve gotten to our unique innovation at this point is listening to customers. Finding out what they need, what we do, how we can improve, and how that fits in with the larger community. One of the things that resonated pretty well on the floor as I spoke to folks was my constant reference to the modular approach to the enterprise.
Now, the podcast hadn’t launched or landed before then, but certainly we have recorded it and I had all the themes in my head and all the rest of it, but that seemed to resonate very well with the audience. Going back to what that means, you’re going to be using more than Procore. You’re going to be using different accounting systems. Different divisions will be using different CDEs in accounting. This notion that you take a step back and try to figure out what components, what modules, if you will, the enterprise needs for what specific functions seem to go pretty well.
One of the things that was a big takeaway that’s related to that was the need for a lot of Procore users and companies, users, companies that use Procore, to connect to ACC. Now, you would think, well, ACC, they have build now. They compete to Procore. But the connection to ACC underscores it’s a modular world. Even if you have your own enterprise down to a few systems, major systems, you still have to interact with everybody else’s. Shaili, why don’t you talk a little bit about what customers were looking to do as it related to connecting to ACC?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. We met a lot of potentials who were looking to… There are a lot of different workflows and such that we connect between the two systems, but as a whole, we met so many people at a project level, you are definitely using Procore, but you have teams who are in ACC, who are having the design team, for an example, is using ACC. We need to sync over these documents from one system to another. The users who live in Procore would like to continue doing everything there.
The users in ACC can stay in that system. But at the project level, all of these documents need to be in sync. The users who are managing the project can basically get that high level view of what’s going on across these systems for the project. The same thing with let’s say RFIs or submittals and a lot of different functionalities across these systems that make sense to end users who are looking at the project at that higher level view.
I think that was the one that resonated the most to bring all of these things together and work at a project level to not basically work on all of these different systems going back and forth.
Joe:
Not working as a platform but working in the context of a single project. This is what really started us there. There’s a good reason why all that resonated. It is brutal just going into, oh, let me go to ACC. I got a notification. Let me log in. I’m going to download, find out where it’s going to go. I have an RFI in Procore. It’s got to go over to the team in ACC, and I got to hear back from them. How much re-keying and downloading is someone supposed to do?
Shaili:
It’s a lot of manual effort. Of course, it leads to errors and people not doing it correctly. There are a lot of things that could go wrong with all of the manual intervention for sure.
Joe:
I was reading on LinkedIn. It was either one of Sala’s posts or Arne’s. You have a labor shortage out there. You’re going to take people who have been in the industry for a long time. You’re going to take engineers, architects and ask them to do that instead of the job that you’re paying them to do. And then a labor shortage, burning labor on these brute force efforts that resonate from the last century, because it is 2023, so the ’90s was the last century, was kind of eye opening. That was the other thing, the other takeaway I got. We’ve been doing these conferences for a few years.
When we would start to put forward these concepts of integrating systems, looking at them as modules, treating data and people as in the context of a project, not as an underlying system, there was a lot more that had to go into explaining back then. What I really enjoyed was seeing that the Procore community that we were talking to was really ready to embrace, at least a good size number of these folks, a better approach. It’s all in the cloud now. The pandemic did that, but that just seemed to resonate every time.
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. I think, as you mentioned, Joe, after the pandemic, there are so many companies have now moved to the cloud. Definitely in the last few years we’ve seen that shift because everybody had some sort of an on-prem solution before, which was making it even more complicated now that people are moving to the cloud. Just like ACC, we saw a lot of validation with everybody using M365 and SharePoint and not having a good way to set it up and integrate that with their Procore as well.
Joe:
Yeah, that’s a good point. I don’t know why I forgot about that. Where we really cut our teeth before there was a ProjectReady was building web parts for the industry inside SharePoint. Now, we do a lot more than that. We don’t have a dependency on M365 at all, except everybody already owns M365. And that was the other takeaway that we got was, yeah, we have it. I don’t know, some people set it up this way, but there was no…
Going back to this integrated data environment, integrating a data environment on top of these modules, there was no use of M365 in a coherent way, if you will, in the context of a single project. You talk to anybody out there, you’ll ask them and go, well, use Procore to do pretty much everything in documents. I go, well, when you’re trying to win an award, where does that happen? Oh, that happens in SharePoint and Teams, because you got to ingest requirements docs, you got to respond to them, issue contracts.
All that is going on in M365. And then for whatever reason, you get into the actual gig that’s paying you and now you switched out to another system and there’s no continuous bridge between the two systems. Because at the end, you’re going to have closeout documents that you will likely want some portion of into SharePoint.
That was another thing that was really, I think, folks found interesting in what we do is our ability to automate the setup of both M365 and Procore referring to external data in other systems so everything matches and stays just conjoined at the hip throughout the project. That was my take on the M365 piece. All right, moving along to, there were a number of announcements in the like that were made there, but some of these things drive home for us more than others. Shaili, what are some of the stuff that you found interesting that you learned from the Procore folks?
Shaili:
On the dev side, Procore already has great APIs, but they’re always making them better.
Joe:
If I may, that was a big take away from me was they’re really investing in APIs. I mean, continue and I’ll come back to it, but of all the manufacturers we work with, SANS, maybe Microsoft, they really seem to be very vested into that.
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. They’re promoting that we make all of these integrations and they make the effort to make it easy for us. I think that that’s great.
Joe:
And makes it easy for our customers. That’s the benefit.
Shaili:
Of course, of course. Definitely great announcements there. On the tech side of things, the new functionality that just released and is coming out with a new ribbon kind of a panel that shows up in Procore. That is something we are investing right now as well. But I find that it’s a really exciting next step on how ProjectReady users, as well as Procore users, they can all come together in the Procore environment itself with the new ribbon that’s being released by Procore.
Joe:
The ribbon, folks, is if you think about an Outlook, you have an add-in and it flies out. You’ll see it even at admin alerts or whatever. They’re now introducing the same concept into Procore. Pardon me, their investment into APIs and the ribbon means they’re addressing two things. The inherent need to interoperate with other systems. No one company will own all the marketplace and this is an inevitability. They seem to have embraced that more than other folks out there.
I mean, there are some companies that we’d love to integrate to. I’ll leave them nameless. Oh no, you can’t get a sandbox. You can’t get access to APIs. It’s a really closed system. I think Procore is betting correctly that those closed systems, as churn inevitably goes along, it’s going to be a problem for them, I believe. I think that investment in APIs is really smart in their move. The ribbon is more of the same, because webcast we just did, the user experience is the new middleware.
Great tools, how do people get to it? How many clicks do they got to go to? That is hugely impactful in the success of any solution. The ribbon, Shaili, its ultimate purpose is to keep people in the project doing other things, right?
Shaili:
Yeah, agreed. It validates what we say as well that the users who live in Procore, they don’t really need to keep popping and going to other systems. This gives them that additional interface of interacting and just staying where they need to stay while just making it easier for them to work on different integrations for the project, for sure.
Joe:
I mean, Procore wants users to stay in Procore. The ribbon ups the ante in keeping them inside Procore, those users.
Shaili:
Yep, yep, exactly.
Joe:
List of a couple of things we do because I’d like to pivot into… With all these advances in Procore, validating the need to continually expand email management, synchronization of workflows and content, all of which we do, automated setup of these systems, we always have a continuous roadmap.
Looking at the number of APIs coming out, the opportunity of the ribbon, give me some thoughts on where you think it’s unqualified. We haven’t met with some of their team members yet because it’s that new. But in terms of our roadmap, Shaili, what’s coming our way or what are we working on?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. I think the ribbon that we’ve mentioned a lot already is something we would definitely want to integrate to bring in ProjectReady right into Procore so that end users have that easy interface to interact with integration. That’s definitely something.
Joe:
But any thoughts about what we would stick inside ribbon?
Shaili:
One of the workflows that we mentioned already with the integration we have with ACC, so users are working on an RFI in Procore, they need to send it to ACC, we can provide that interface right within that ribbon so they can stay in Procore and send that RFI to ACC, bring back information from ACC. Those kind of interactions.
Joe:
Just starting the action of rather than, whatever, just right there click send to ACC, something to that effect.
Shaili:
Yeah, something to that effect. At the document level as well, we could show different integrations that we have with SharePoint, ACC, and show that KPI information as well, which would be relevant for issues, documents, submittals, and have that a view within their projects.
Joe:
And probably our chain links, right?
Shaili:
Mm-hmm, yeah, so that they can quickly get to the other systems, for sure.
Joe:
The chain links, for those of you who are not clients or haven’t seen the product, because we believe everything is in the context of one project, regardless of system or where people work. People go, oh, I can go to Autodesk and I can find my project. I can go to SharePoint and find my site. But how long is that going to take you? It’s all about efficiency. It’s all about getting rid of brute force and championing high value work. In our system, once we have the relations between the different platforms that we run process over, you just click and go exactly to that project’s information.
You’re not sifting through the gateway to these other applications. Another thing though, I know we’ve been talking about… I’m originally looking forward to solving, hopefully. We’re implementing a program management feature now where we can relay projects and the like inside ProjectReady as part of a larger program. It’s something we’ve talked about for a while and that architecture is underway. But with that, Shaili, talk about how that would impact Procore users potentially?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. This concept of bringing projects together, at a use case level, it would be that there is still a single project, but we have different vendors using different Procores in different companies, but they’re all still connected to one project.
The idea is that by bringing these distinct projects together, if there is a document in one company, one project in Procore, and we want to send it to another company within Procore, so basically syncing documents, RFIs, submittals, what we do right now between Procore and ACC, potentially we would be able to do that between two different Procore companies. That’s the end goal of this feature.
Joe:
The use case is that a program is… A portfolio, we were just going through the exact definitions this morning before we came on, a portfolio is a collection of projects that you have in your company. A program is essentially a whole bunch of related projects. You’re building out a large municipal piece of infrastructure, let’s say an airport. You’re going to have one major project, that’s the overarching, but you’re going to have six other projects as part of that one project, if that makes sense.
In that context, that means that you’re going to have one GC using Procore as part of that other project. You’re going to have yet another GC using Procore in, I don’t know, doing the work on the tarmac. Those Procore instances need to roll up someplace together in the context of a single program. Is that about right?
Shaili:
Yep, that’s correct.
Joe:
All right. Well, so that’s just a quick breakdown of some of our highlighted things. Again, a quick summary, everybody’s going to integrate to ACC. There’s a lot of desire for Procore to Procore, and just the advancements that Procore is making in making available a lot of APIs. What I say in the UX is the new middleware, the user experience. There are companies and there are departments that build all these connections, but how you work with all that together consistently is what we’re about.
I think the ribbon actually ties very nicely into the same paradigm that we’re trying to bring to the industry. The other thing I would like to say is, look, we’d love to get your feedback as it relates to the Procore Conference. Any of you who were there that are listening, please do email us, everything from you agree or disagree with what we’re saying, things that you would like to see around that Procore ecosystem of development, if you will. Otherwise, we’ll look forward to seeing you guys in Denver next year.
One final reminder about our upcoming podcast, they will be navigating the challenges of owners in the ACC and more opportunity, more granular, practical application of metadata, especially when it’s coherently orchestrated. Thank you as always. Shaili, thank you, and talk to you next time.