‘Change management is the real challenge’ – Arc Building Partners’ CEO on implementing AI progress tracking

Frank L. Ciminelli II is President and Founder of Arc Building Partners, a forward-thinking construction management firm based in Buffalo, New York. Frank is a keen advocate for construction technology, and he and his team have implemented Buildots on multiple residential construction projects in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

In this interview, Frank spoke with our team to share the lessons he learned while implementing Buildots and top tips for other companies looking to get started with AI progress tracking.

Every adventure starts with a good origin story. Tell us yours. When and why did you decide to invest in AI progress tracking?

I’ve always been naturally interested in technology, and I’m proud to say that we were pretty early adopters of VDC here at Arc. But our AI progress tracking journey really started during the pandemic. It’s fair to say that everything changed for us almost overnight. Many of our resources disappeared, and our productivity tanked – a seismic shift that affected everyone in this industry.

As we coped with the initial shock of the pandemic, it became clear that AI progress tracking would be an essential tool to complement our strategy and adoption of Lean processes. I initially worked with my son, who was going to school at Tufts for AI at the time, to compare different AI progress tracking tools and look into pilot projects. 

It wasn’t until we worked with Buildots that we found a platform whose value proposition was aligned with our mission. Buildots was actually the fourth platform we tried, so by that time, my team and I knew enough to be dangerous!

How did that first Buildots project go? What did you learn along the way?

Our first project with Buildots was 711 Front Street, a 265,000 sqft residential project in Philadelphia. 

As CEO, I saw enormous potential and value from Buildots on this project. It helped me understand what was happening on the job site and what was going wrong! It was great for me as someone who was based remotely in Buffalo.

But our site team just wasn’t on the same page. They used Buildots because I, the boss, was demanding it, not because they saw value in the platform. This project taught me that change management was the real challenge we needed to overcome. A top-down implementation wasn’t going to work. Instead, we had to engage our site teams actively. 

When we saw the top-down initiative wasn’t sticking, I realized we needed an internal advocate to help the team curate progress and issues data into something more digestible. Project teams are used to having a firefighting mentality, thinking, ‘I know a problem when I see it.’ So, we gave them a co-pilot to help them transition towards a more proactive approach, where they can spot potential issues before they become fires! 

Your site teams have now wholeheartedly embraced Buildots. So, why do you think they were reluctant to use the platform at first? 

Part of it was definitely an education piece. When we kicked off 711 Front Street – our first Buildots project – we went through a coordination process. But it wasn’t enough. Everyone from the design team to the subcontractors had limited experience with AI progress tracking, and many stakeholders also hadn’t worked much with 3D models. So, it was a steep learning curve. 

In particular, subcontractors not following the coordinated model caused many of our adoption challenges. On our first project, this created a ton of noise in the system (which, in retrospect, indicated many other quality issues with those subs). We’re now all over the deviation issues and are fixing them on the fly.

The other aspect to consider was fear of change. We had to ensure our teams understood that this tool would help them make projects more productive, for example, by giving them data to back up why a subcontractor needed to add more resources. This message took a while to filter through the organization. But I’m pleased to say that it has now happened, and I’m proud of how our teams have embraced it. 

Okay, let’s discuss other lessons learned. You’re currently using Buildots on another project, 700 Delaware, a 200,000 sqft residential building. What are you doing differently this time around?

Interestingly, our second Buildots project is just 70 feet from our first in Philadelphia and is at a similar scale. This has been a gift for implementing lessons learned. And there were a lot of lessons! 

The first was embracing the idea that we needed to coordinate the model and hold our subs accountable to it. We now understand this is a real joint effort between Arc, site teams and Buildots. Funnily enough, on our first project, we were reluctant to share updated schedules and sequences with the Buildots team – partly because we worried they’d change again. Now, we’re much better at this collaboration and understand that it’s crucial if we want the platform to reflect reality. 

Lesson number two relates to our VDC team’s involvement. This takes two forms. Firstly, this team does a great job of educating subcontractors and explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing. Secondly, they now go into Buildots each week and remove any ‘false positive’ error or deviation flags, so our site teams have nice, clean data to work from. Our VDC team also makes more site visits now, so they can see the project through our site team’s eyes. These relatively simple updates to our work processes have been worth their weight in gold.

A final lesson is to bring as many stakeholders into the platform as possible. On 700 Delaware, we have a sizable team that uses Buildots day-to-day, which helps us extract maximum value from the platform. With the help of Buildots’ customer success team, we’ve learned a lot about how to be good users. 

The result of all these lessons is that Buildots is now a major focus of field team meetings. We’re even seeing subcontractors who ‘get it’ gravitating toward the productivity data and taking it back to their own teams for course corrections.

Talk to us about the day-to-day benefits you’re seeing from AI progress tracking. 

Fundamentally, Buildots helps us answer one question each week – did we do what we said we would do? This alone is a game-changer. It helps us spot problems early – slow pace, loose ends, etc. – before they escalate into huge delays. Not only does Buildots stop problems from slipping under the radar, but it also eliminates the ‘he said, she said’ from meetings. We’re no longer listening to the loudest voices in the room. We’re looking at objective data.

We also see that the Buildots platform eliminates a lot of administrative work for us. Often, towards the end of a build, we go into ‘clipboard mode’ and start throwing bodies at the project to ensure everything has been done. Buildots’ system does 90% of this work, so we don’t have to scramble to find additional resources, which can be tough in today’s competitive construction talent market. 

What about the long term? How do you see your use of the tool developing over time? 

There’s so much more we can do with Buildots’ data going forward. Adopting Lean principles is a huge focus for us, and I can see Buildots’ insights helping us put the Lean philosophy into practice. 

Consider the Last Planner System. In the future, I see us using historical data from past projects to improve our master schedule, and then using simulation tools to animate the execution of each phase to ensure all parties are being realistic, not optimistic. Ultimately, even with the best intentions and all the sticky notes in the world, we still make mistakes. So, having data to support us can only be positive.

Thank you for your time, Frank! We hope to continue taking this collaboration from strength to strength. 

Want to learn more about how Buildots can help supercharge your adoption of Lean Principles? Check out this whitepaper, featuring voices from Skanska, Hensel Phelps and Layton Construction. Download the whitepaper.