Transcript: Blockchain with an Integrated Project Model Reduces Risk and Increases Transparency

If we get to a point in the future where people don't even know that what they're working on is blockchain, I think there's an opportunity to change the structure of the contracts within a construction project by helping clients manage more direct contracts. But I think if we can move away from the adversarial contracting model and move towards an integrated project model, it makes a lot more sense. If everyone can work together in that way, then you're increasing the opportunities for innovation as well. So if someone comes up with a bright idea today under the current structure and it doesn't work, then they'll get hammered for it.

The way forward is more transparency. And I think that transparency can totally be provided by the blockchain. Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is The Constructor Podcast, episode number 45. Hello and welcome to The Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects.

We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. First, I want to let you know about my talk last week with Paul Doherty. Paul and I discussed maturing technologies that are at the building blocks of smart cities. We talk about how these technologies are being implemented in cities around the world. I also want to say congratulations to Paul for getting the contract to design, build and operate the world's first virtual reality theme park.

So check it out if you missed the episode last week at Constructor.com slash EP44. So today is the second episode of a five-part series where I interview guests about the use of blockchain in construction. Paul was the first in this series and today's guest, Dave Hughes, is the second. He is a construction professional who is interested in unlocking the productivity issues in the AEC industry and sees blockchain as a major piece of the puzzle in doing that. He's interested in finding new ways to leverage technology within the industry.

We specifically talk about utilizing blockchain in an integrated project delivery model, blockchain integration with BIM and IoT, Internet of Things, and the potential use of blockchain with integrated insurance. So let's get into the interview. Hello, Dave. Welcome to the Constructor podcast. Hi there.

Thanks for having me. You are a construction professional who's interested in unlocking the productivity issues in the industry. And we know that we have plenty of those. But you see you see blockchain as a major piece of the puzzle. But before we get into that, could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your purpose to affect this world and how that connects to what you're doing now?

First, I'm primarily a construction consultant interested in the blockchain. That's sort of how I should phrase this. So as we get into it, there's any full on blockchain techies out there and I make mistakes, then let me know. I'm more than happy to learn more. But yes, I have 17 years experience.

I started off as a quantity surveyor, which in America is mostly called a cost manager, I think, and then sort of moved into into project management, probably with a specialism in higher education over the last six years or so. And then I got a bit interested in the potential for networks within the construction industry and how that might sort of lower the transaction costs that we have, because obviously the industry is so fragmented, I should say. And if everybody could somehow get on the same page, to me, that felt like a good thing to do.

And then it wasn't until November last year that I sort of discovered the blockchain. I'd heard of it, but I didn't know what it was. And it seemed as though it had real potential to get everybody onto the same page as far as how we could work together on a construction project, visualize that project as a factory whose one goal is to produce this building. But we're all working together in a team. So we're sort of a company together for this one project.

And that's when I started doing a lot more research about blockchain and understanding how it could potentially facilitate that. You've taken your experience with project management and all the steps along the way with wanting to improve the utilization of blockchain really got you fired up, it sounds like. So let's talk about smart contracts. What are they and how are they built on the blockchain? Let's just sort of go what the blockchain is.

And then that leads in pretty much what smart contracts is. The blockchain is a shared ledger of transactions. So that's just an exchange of value. So the most famous blockchain, if you like, is Bitcoin. So a smart contract on the Bitcoin blockchain is that exchange of Bitcoin.

So Sally agrees with John that she's going to purchase these goods at this price. And then the smart contract executes when they both agree that those goods can be transferred. That's a smart contract. So it's this if then scenario. And where I got quite interested in the idea of smart contracts and how they relate to construction is this concept of it's a record of a transfer of value.

So, for example, but what you can do on using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain is you can record, say, an approval. So using a construction example, you can record that if the painter has carried out this piece of work, then they can request that it is inspected. It would be one smart contract. And then the person who's tasked with inspecting it could come inspect it and say, this work is completed. It would just record that that happened, which is a bit of a step forward than some of the situations you find yourself in now, where no one can sort of say who approved what and how things were approved and on a construction project.

They can clean all of that up. But a smart contract in itself is just a computer program. If it's carried out on the blockchain, it means it's stored on the blockchain. So that's a shared ledger across thousands of computers across the world. No one can tamper with it because the only way you can change that transaction, the details around it would actually be to somehow change all of these records on all of these computers around the world.

It's extremely secure as well. I think that gives us a clearer understanding of what a smart contract is and how it can be validated once the transaction or once the work is actually done. And basically the validation of the work and then the payment and like how it's all documented very cleanly and that no one can tamper with it. So that's really helpful. Could you tell us a little bit about the process of establishing a smart contract?

What does that look like? If we get to a point in the future where people don't even know that what they're working on is blockchain. So there's just a platform that people are working on for a construction project because actually smart contracts are just computer programs. It's just that the decisions that get executed on them are stored on the blockchain. So say there's a request for information that comes from the main contractor to the design team.

And there's contractually in the real world contract, not a smart contract, like the building contract contractually in there. There's a period of time that a response is required. So that's two weeks. So you could start a series of smart contracts that say or that record that that RFI was was issued on this date. Now, you could argue that the common data environment or whatever the system is that you're using records that date or the email has that date on it or whatever.

But it's still ambiguous to some degree because someone owns that account with that centralized point. So if you were going to use a blockchain for that, you could call that date and then you could call the date of the response and then the date of the approval. And then if there was a dispute about any of that process later on, it would be really easy to look back on and check out and sort of understand who did what exactly when. It sounds like it's not just obviously for a monetary transaction for work that's being done.

I think when you understand that aspect of the blockchain where you can just transfer information and almost just do that correspondence of utilizing the blockchain to respond to an RFI request for information and validate that approval, make sure all the people have reviewed it that need to be involved in that process. I think that really opens up a new world of possibilities because it's not a simple sort of one to one, you know, back and forth like how a typical transaction might be looked upon. That being said, you talked about a combination of smart contracts and let's talk a little bit about what I understand you call it like the decentralized autonomous organization or DAO.

Let's talk about how information can be transferred and then all that integrates into that combined smart contract network. If you consider that a building project in itself is just a whole lot of decisions that are put together, if you think about the data that starts to be produced at the start of a building contract, it all starts with a question or a statement from a client that says I need a building. And then there's a question, what kind of building from there? It just kind of develops as I need a residential development.

You know, how many units? Thirty. It just grows, right? So if you thinking about how you could combine a whole lot of these questions together in a way that allowed you to store it, you can start to see how you should almost have a self-executing organization that is actually the building, which sounds pretty freaky, I suppose, in some respects. But if you use an example of, say, you got through the construction period and you actually built the thing, the building itself could actually manage itself.

If you had a building that had its own tokenized currency or it was able to execute sort of direct debits to your bank card and you had, say, 30 people that lived in this apartment block. And then there's usually just a standard maintenance cost, for example, for all the common areas. So if a light bulb went out, that light bulb might be on the Internet of Things and could actually say, I'm out and call someone to come and change the light bulb. When the light bulb says I'm out, it implements a smart contract or a series of smart contracts to say, I'm out, call someone out to change the light bulb.

And then that person can confirm that light bulb has been changed. Then the building supervisor can come and confirm that he agrees. And then the person that changed the light bulb gets paid. And then that payment can actually be distributed evenly across all of the tenants in the apartment block to pay their portion of that. So they're not paying a monthly fee, they're just paying the portion of that very specific piece of maintenance that was required.

But you could go further and you could say, well, actually, we'll just pay all of the rents through a decentralized autonomous organization. There's actually a company called Slokit who do locks that are connected to the Internet of Things, the lock itself, and they're connected to the block chain. And if you don't pay your rent, your key doesn't work. And there's a similar example that I've read about where if you rent a car and you have that car for too long, so you have you rented it for seven days and you still have it after eight and you go to unlock the car, the company has locked you out of it.

But you can go onto their app and pay for the extra day and then the car will open. This is sort of a side thing. People accept that much more from a computer. If it's the case of computer says no, that's OK. But if you ring up the car rental company and say you've locked me out of the car, that's more likely an argument will ensue.

Apparently, as human beings, we're much more comfortable that the computer has just executed the program. And you kind of understand that intuitively. Like, well, it's a machine. I can't argue with a machine. I'll have to just pay my rent or pay my extra day.

It takes the people aspects out of some of the transactions, whether they just be verbal. It really ties you to something that's very logical and truth focused. So you have 24 hours for let's use the car scenario, for instance. And your 24 hours ended at a time where you didn't anticipate for it to conclude. And now you have to pay a couple of hours additional for that car rental.

The question I have is, you know, a lot of times those things can be negotiated, right? Can be talked through or you could easily extend it like say you could easily extend it on the app. I feel like there would have to be that flexibility in the technology for you to at least have some sort of negotiation that you would typically have with a person. It would have to be some sort of happy medium. There could be extenuating circumstances in so much as maybe you are injured and you couldn't drive the car.

Like you had to go to the hospital and you were sick and you'd just been released from the hospital. There should always be some way of escalating it above the computer. If it's just a number to call and just say, I've just got this car for an extra day, that's an administrative cost that you've got instead of 100 people in a call center, you've got 10. Because they're only dealing with the extenuating circumstances, the by exceptions, right? Going back to the residential scenario, if you are talking with a management company and there is some sort of extenuating circumstance, similar to what you described, like say somebody is in the hospital for months on end and they haven't been able to communicate with their management organization or their landlord.

And there has to be some sort of backup of documentation that's associated with the agreement, right? There's an agreement in place on every step of the blockchain. And that's where the decentralized autonomous organization will take on that, I guess, legal documentation. Understanding where we could go at this point, the contractual obligations, could be mapped onto the blockchain. I think there's an opportunity to change the structure of the contracts within a construction project by helping clients manage more direct contracts.

If you consider how we do it now, there's a client who employs a design team and typically they will have a contract with each of those consultancies to work together to design the building. But when they go to on-site, they employ a general contractor, a main contractor, to manage all the subcontracts and actually manage all of the suppliers as well, of all of the material that the client requires to build the building that they want. So I think there's an opportunity to make all that transparent, to change the structure so that the site manager and the contracts manager are actually, they're a service provider in the same way that the design team are, so that's all direct contracts then with the client and the subcontractors.

But you could actually go further, I think, and this would help try and get clients closer to the suppliers. When you consider that a client is, effectively, a client is buying a piece of mechanical plant through at least two other agents, but in some cases three. So if you consider that they pay, whatever, $50,000 for a big piece of mechanical kit, for air conditioning, say, well the first person that actually buys that is the subcontractor, and they'll put a percentage markup on that, and then the main contractor will also put a percentage markup on that, and then the percentage markup on top of that for the construction costs as well.

So the client's picking up costs all the way through, when actually all he's paying for is the transfer of risk. So if the client could actually have a contract direct with the supplier, the manufacturer of the kit, he understands much more what he's paid for, and then you could use the blockchain to transfer the risk. There'd be a cost associated with that, it's almost like insurance, but initially the payment would go to the manufacturer, and they would hold all the risk on the piece of kit not being damaged, but once it was delivered to site and taken by the subcontractor, then they would take some allocation of that risk, and then once it was approved that it had been installed correctly, then the main contractor would take some allocation of that risk, and then at handover, the client would take the risk.

Take it a step further, and then now you can, if the model is good, and the designers have done a good job on the model, a cost manager can take that model and produce a bill of quantities. So the full list of materials, all listed out with precise figures next to them, right? So it used to be that the bill of quants, or the schedule of values, had ambiguity in it because a guy did it with a ruler, put his ruler across some drawings, and by the time you're finished, you could be out by whatever percentage, I don't know, it could be 10% say, which, or maybe it's only 5%, but that's still 5% on something that might cost a fair bit of money if it's a drywall plasterboard, in my speak, but once we've got a good BIM model, and the BIM model spits out that there's 552 square meters of plasterboard, well there's no

disputing that, that is just what it is. So then the client could actually quite confidently purchase that, plus an extra say 10% for wastage, and then again do the same process of passing on along the risk. And by doing all this it just becomes way more transparent about what we're really doing, which is the client is buying all of this material, all of this plant, and all of this labor to put it all together and build this building, this product that they want. Now I'm not suggesting either that someone needs to sit there and look through all these figures and stuff like that, but I would suggest that someone is tasked with spot checking or whatever and just intuitively knowing that it is there for me, I think that just helps to clean up the process.

Then again, like if you've got this contractor as a service type scenario where they're not working for a percentage markup on any changes that occur to the design, they're just working for a fee for their input on the design in the same way that an architect or an engineer does. I think they're much more incentivized then to work for the client. Everyone helps solve the problem if there is one that comes up on site to come up with the best solution for the client. And let's talk about that as it relates to BIM actually.

I'm just kind of thinking through having your contractor on board way early on the process within the design. I think that could focus on really achieving what the client wants to, you know, what their goals are, right? So I think that's where an integrated project contract comes into play because blockchain is not going to be the panacea that's going to answer all questions about how we kind of help increase productivity in construction. It needs to be a combination of things, but I think if we can move away from the adversarial contracting model and move towards an integrated project model, it makes a lot more sense.

So an integrated project model requires that there is a, or the one that I am familiar with anyway requires that there's like a project bank account. There's a group of organizations that are part of project alliance and they're effectively a company that is set up the sole purpose of building this building for this client. But with a project bank account, there's the transparency about how those payments are done. So you could replace the project bank account with a shared ledger on the blockchain and a much more robust procedure for payments and a much more simpler process.

So then when you're working on an issue on design, in the first instance, that issue should hopefully come up when you're doing it within the model. Everybody can come around the table without worrying about their organization's insurance policies because they're all covered within this integrated project environment and they can all unencumbered by that work on the problem together and not worry so much about who comes up with solution. And if it's a bit of an innovative solution, not worry that might not work. And if it doesn't quite work how it's planned, everybody understands that and as a group can accept the risk on that and move forward.

And then they'll be all be aware of it and all be incentivized to help make sure it does work when it comes to site. And if it does require some more tweaking or whatever on site, they can all work on that together because they're all working for the same pain gain share of the value of the construction project. So everyone's on the same page of trying to solve this problem the best they can because better for them financially if they do. So if everyone can work together in that way, then you're increasing the opportunities for innovation as well.

So if someone comes up with a broad idea today under the current structure and it doesn't work, then they'll get hammered for it. Absolutely. We had in mind to talk a little bit about insurance and I think that's a great example you shared about utilizing the integrated agreements. I'm pretty passionate about that. I've had a couple people on talking about the different integrated agreements and utilization of lean methodologies within that.

Pairing the two really helps just kind of build that culture that makes a lot of sense to achieve the goals of the project, whatever they may be. I think establishing them very early on is going to be key and then I think just this element of throwing blockchain in and making everything that much more transparent is going to be huge. But let's talk a little bit about integrated project insurance. We know that we're over insured for projects, at least most of the time, because every layer has basically they are responsible for a certain amount.

And how would integrated project insurance work? So integrated project insurance is a UK initiative. I met the guy that invented it and the director from insurance company called Griffin and Armour who provide it. It's an insurance policy. It basically wraps a bubble around the entire building project.

It is the insurance that I was sort of describing that if someone wants to innovate then and it goes wrong. So say the structural engineers like I'm pretty sure this will work and the mechanical engineer and the architect all kind of agree that because it impacts on some of the stuff that they're doing. Between the three of them think yeah this is going to be a way better result and yes it's a bit risky because of these reasons but we understand the risk and we still recommend to the team that we proceed on this basis.

In today's world if that occurred and if it didn't work so there was a you know whatever five percent chance of it not working and that came to be and the costs associated with that not working were a hundred thousand pounds dollars whatever. Then today or in a normal contract the client might sue the structural engineer and he might sue the architect as the lead designer and he might sue the mechanical engineer just because he might have a go he might have a better design liability insurance than the other guys and that would go into arbitration and whatever process would be required.

So if you're inside IPI inside the integrated project insurance that hundred thousand if it's a legitimate mistake and it is insurable it just gets paid by the project insurance. No one organization is sued the project insurance will cover that. IPI have representatives that come in as part of the project team that help to keep track of all these things and audit it and I've tried and I'll continue to try and talk to the guys at integrated project insurance about how I think blockchain can help them because as soon as you say audit I think there's an opportunity for blockchain to be implemented in some way to help lower the administrative costs of that audit.

And then I suppose as well it kind of bleeds in the block combining blockchain with BIM and there's a company here in Hull called BIMSense and they're looking at data provenance so who put the data into the BIM model. In the UK at the moment the country if you like is all supposed to be trying to work towards certainly for public sector we're supposed to be working towards something called BIM level 2 and broadly speaking BIM level 2 what that means is all of the design consultants work on their own model and every two weeks they bring their models together and just coordinate them basically and check to make sure that they all work and things like that but when we move to BIM level 3 the idea is that there'll be a hosted model and everybody will work on the same model so then it becomes really important to understand who did what to

that model and how you record that and how you record it securely will become much more important. It's going to be a long time before people realize that probably something like integrated project insurance is a better way of building their buildings so if we continue with the edge of serial approach the perspective of disputes about who did what if you're all working on my model having that real clear record of who did what will help clean up the dispute side of things if and when they occur.

I'm just kind of thinking through how BIM data is tracked within a model right now and I'm not a designer I haven't designed a whole lot since college but from what I understand about how it works BIM is pretty much a kit of parts at this point you can pull any material any fixture any whatever it might be you can pull it from a database. Now if you're able to tag whatever identifier of that person who's actually putting it into the model I can see how that would work.

I'm just kind of thinking out loud thinking through how that integrated approach would work when everybody's in the room and contributing verbally or on a call or things of that nature and how that would be looked upon how would that be viewed when it's everyone now that's responsible for the entire design. I guess it's a transition of culture right it's getting outside of the blame culture really is what it is it's taking that collective approach and saying okay even if I'm the one literally putting the design in place in the model and all the information associated with it is attached to my unique identifier solution for the owner's benefit it's really having that shift take place when right now it's very much a finger pointing approach to things.

Well in the integrated project insurance side of things yeah everyone's responsible because there'll be someone around the table that's the expert right so I should introduce you to the guys at integrated project insurance and you could see if they'd be keen to have a chat with you because they can talk through all that way better than I'll be able to but I do know that they did a trial recently and I think the trial is just completed they're doing their second project shortly but before the trial they actually ran like a day-long workshop with a whole lot of potential contractors and consultants and did all this role playing and things like that to see who would be best suited to a collaborative environment like a true collaborative environment and they were selected on that basis.

No yeah I'd love to speak with them always happy to take recommendations on on who to reach out to next. The last thing that we really didn't touch on is internet of things how does blockchain become even more powerful when that's tapped into? Yeah it all comes back to these smart contracts if this happens then that happens right so there's a few applications where blockchain's being used in conjunction with the internet of things and which would be easily sort of switched into a construction setting but the probably the easiest one is the retina scanning for security so if you had one of those at the entrance to a construction site yes so-and-so has arrived and retina scan on the way out so-and-so is left he's done his eight hours today and then they are paid for example so rather than having have someone sort of busily write up all these time sheets and then issue them for because

a lot of the time sheets are still handwritten from the subcontractors they get handed into the contractor to say yeah so-and-so was here from these times to that time and he did x y and z work well that administrative load would could be just gone because it just could be printed off and then they'd still have to describe what work they were doing but that's easier because it would need to be inspected to be verified that it had actually been completed anyway so so you could just say we had this many operatives on site for this amount of time and we've done this work and that lines up and then there's opportunities for i think it's the airline industry they have smart tools that check the the amount of torque on bolts to make sure that they're tightened to the correct degree and not over tightened or under tightened so

how important that is obviously from a health and safety perspective because it's the airline industry and how regulated they are that an immutable record of the fact that all of the bolts on this particular plane have been tightened to the correct or get into the construction industry if you like connected into a concrete strength testing that would be one that i could see being something that would be important enough that having it stored on blockchain the opportunity for for smart tools could be quite interesting as well if you could have a a smart paintbrush that knew how much it had been sort of moved up and down and you could start comparing the movement to how much paint's actually been applied to the wall you're kind of getting into the the realm of wearables but inside construction tools and then finally there's some of this mechanical electrical plant now actually can basically log on to the internet

to confirm that it has been installed correctly so all of this data is getting produced and where it's being recorded that's probably getting recorded in a centralized place by the manufacturer of say the boiler if that became a more decentralized data source opens up this sort of transparency about what the building is doing and how it's operating and i think that can only lead to a better result for clients if they have more information i mean obviously they've got to work out what's important information and crunch through it that's something simple that can be transferred over into the facilities management realm when you're looking to service any particular equipment having the information backed up it's so what the steps were that it went through where the natural resources were coming from how it actually got manufactured in the plant the transportation associated with it and we'll talk a little bit about this in another episode but

those little details can obviously be tracked but i do like your your thought process about pulling from some of the other industries that are not specific to construction right now like their lines with the torque on the bolts and then the retinal scanning i think those are a little bit even outside of what we're typically used to to managing or or tracking i mean even the paintbrush i think those are those are great there's great growth opportunity in this area when it comes to inventions of tracking certain things whether it be weight or viscosity of particular substance and concrete we do concrete testing whatever you install concrete there's got to be a way to ensure that that is structural integrity as it's being mixed and as it's being installed i think there has to be that opportunity that can be taken advantage of so i do want to make sure to

give you the opportunity to talk about keepsight the document management system you're getting involved with in november i'm joining a company called keepsight it's keepsight.com and it's it's site s i t e it's a portfolio management tool specifically for construction so what we discovered the construction is really good at concentrating wholly on the project and we bring this team together and everyone learns how to work with one another by the end of it and then we finish the project and we all go and we all go and we all go and work on another project but actually as an industry and i'm sure that there'll be a high percentage of construction professionals listening to this all we do is projects but we don't ever look at the whole portfolio of the projects that we've got on currently and what's coming up in any particularly meaningful way so the way keepsight works is everything starts at project level so you'll

have a project risk register for example or a project documents will be ticking over and that will translate into a an activity sort of digest if you like of things that are happening on that project and and actions that are required on that project and all that information can come in but within keepsight you can you can aggregate that data so it's a networked system so you can take all of your risk management for all of your separate projects and if you're a university for example with a capital plan they might have at any one time 10 projects of varying sizes on site and they can look at all the individual risk registers for all of those and sort of understand them but it's really difficult for them to pull it all together and look at the overall risk across their portfolio at a snapshot in time and keepsight will help them do that for risk and for

lessons learned because that's the other thing we're very bad at in the construction industry we carry out a project and we learn all this really good stuff and we learn some bad stuff too we learn things about different organizations that perhaps we would like to change for the next project but we don't capture any of it or we certainly don't capture it very well and it becomes like this sort of gut feel of oh yeah we don't want to do that again or we want to do this again and and actually even before we spoke like that example that you used about the municipalities they had this one issue and then their knee-jerk reaction is to make that a requirement on more projects going forward well that's just intuitive right that's not a strategic decision that they're making necessarily so keepsight would help capture those lessons learned if that same thing kept

coming up then they might think actually do you know what five times out of ten this is a problem but if one time out of a hundred it's a problem that probably doesn't warrant changing it for everything moving forward so it'll help you capture that stuff yeah we're actively partnering with the un at the moment and we're trying to get in with some some universities in the uk as well at the moment so yeah it's exciting times and that first nut is the productivity really if we can increase the productivity for the construction industry is this supported by the blockchain then we will be implementing blockchain technology behind some aspects of the tool so say for example the contract administration tool we'll be looking at that quite closely and we think there's a really good application there to store on the blockchain decisions made around instructions that are being made for change management in

the first instance there's also a pretty good use case quite a difficult one to implement but blockchain is really good for verification of data and identity so for a regulated industry like construction where someone might have to self-certify their work for example so an electrician might say it might have a qualification to do a self-certification you need to know that electrician in fact does have that qualification to be able to do that it requires them to provide proof of that but to do it on the blockchain it requires connecting in with the authoritative body that provided that authority to them to self-certify so it requires connecting into their systems there's also a scheme here called the csis card whichever all site operatives are required to have so at the moment keepsight allows people their own individual profiles and they can upload scans of these documents but obviously that's only as good as is the trusting that what you're

looking at isn't a forgery so one area we'd be sort of trying to plug into as well is seeing if we can interest some of these organizations to connect into their databases and store on the blockchain that the people that clients are employing are in fact who they say they are that would be a great application of the blockchain to what's already being tracked through keepsight so what do you think the the top things are for owners to do in order to start adopting the right mindset to adapt blockchain the way forward is more transparency it's not going to be any more sort of work for them it'll just help them a more in-depth understanding of what's going on on their projects and i think again that that relates to them and educating clients on the benefits of them and if you just use that example of precision of the materials and plant that's going to be required

on their projects i think that's a big step forward and i think that transparency can totally provided by the blockchain what do you recommend the listener do right now are there any people i mean i know you mentioned a couple already throughout their interview but is there any particular resource that you think the listener should be paying attention to so a ted talk by betina wallberg from a company called animal ventures and that's the first thing that i watched that really made me understand that blockchain was more than cryptocurrency that it could record these transactions this this transfer of value and then they also do a udemy course which costs 10 bucks like nothing pretty good introduction to the blockchain that's sort of how you found me i guess with that medium article i wrote that because at the end of their course they basically say

okay your only assignment from this course is i write a thought leadership piece on how you think blockchain might impact your industry and since doing that and writing that that article that's generated a fair bit of interest from people and it's led to a lot of pretty exciting opportunities for me that's where i would start if i were any of your listeners that were interested in learning more yeah that's a great recommendation thank you for that what's the best way for people to contact you or reach out to you if they want to talk with you more so my email is dave at hanger dot co h a n g a dot co contact me if you've got any questions i'll see what i can do to answer them yeah and then obviously linkedin and twitter all right awesome this was an awesome chat uh i really

appreciate you taking the time out and just the interest level as well really appreciate you doing this no problem i really enjoyed it i hope you enjoyed my conversation with dave it was definitely a pleasure to speak with let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me at twitter and britney underscore ct or find me on linkedin or you can just email me too at britney constructor dot com again email is brittanie at construct double r dot com i mentioned last week that i would be at the lean construction institute congress this week and i'm here right now in anaheim california if you're here connect with me on linkedin twitter the conference app whatever so we will continue our series about blockchain and construction next week jordan williams the chief technology officer at intelliwave technologies will be speaking with us about sight sense

sight sense is a platform that uses blockchain and internet of things to simplify construction material traceability and produce quality documentation one of the most memorable points i resonated with personally is that the amount of phone calls to track down status location any information regarding materials was significantly reduced and it was reduced simply because all the information was stored on the blockchain and readily available cool stuff and less headaches really for everyone so listen out for our talk next episode in the blockchain and construction series don't forget to subscribe at constructor.com to get email updates from me if you haven't already subscribed to the podcast you can do so at itunes and stitcher and now also google play so i'm working also to to get on to other platforms for your listening convenience so listen out for those updates please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast

i look forward to talking with you guys next week