Transcript: Blockchain with IoT Creates Verifiable and Immutable Record Tracking for Materials

Just site organization is huge, getting the metrics, but also utilizing some more better organization and lean construction principles. With the right data, you can get those real-time metrics and actually see that effect and see the productivity gains. When you get in the situations with lack of standardization, that's really when it gets complicated and it starts to break down. Setting that up at the outset would be huge for these projects. The number one for owners is it's a really good way to reduce overall cost of a project by increasing that visibility over your resources.

Just wanted to give you an update. As I just got back from the LCI Congress last week, I had an amazing time connecting with wonderful people and actually doing a couple of amazing interviews as well. I wanted to let you know that those interviews of course will be shared and you will be able to hear the 19th annual LCI Congress recap. So as you may know, integrated project delivery is a hot topic within the lean construction community and I went to a number of presentations about that.

But I wanted to make sure you didn't miss last week's episode with Dave Hughes. Dave and I particularly dig into utilizing blockchain specifically for integrated project delivery. If you want to hear more about integrated project delivery or IPD, check out my episode with Rinne Cheng. It's called How to Create High Performance Projects and the Benefits of IPD Lean Projects and it's part two. So you can find that at constructor.com slash ep29.

Today is the third episode of the five part series where I interview guests about the use of blockchain in construction. Today's guest, Jordan Williams, is the Chief Technology Officer at IntelliWave Technologies and we talk about using SightSense. SightSense is a platform that uses blockchain and Internet of Things to simplify construction material traceability and produce quality documentation. One of the biggest challenges I encounter on my projects is trying to get ahead of the long lead item concern. At the beginning of the project, we always try to identify what are the items that have the longest lead times and order them as early as possible, whether it's ordering them directly from the supplier or whatever the case might be.

Even though we do that, in the past year, I've encountered concerns about fire-rated doors, sinks from China, tile from Italy arriving on time in my projects. With SightSense, long lead time concerns are relieved. Obviously leads to a reduction of phone calls, emails, follow-ups on where materials are and that they will arrive with the level of quality expected. Here Jordan and I talk about it and it's all because of the use of the blockchain. Let's get into the interview.

Jordan, welcome to the Constructor Podcast. Thanks for having me. We appreciate it. So you are the CTO and co-founder at IntelliWave Technologies. IntelliWave provides web and mobile-based software solutions for identification and tracking of construction materials.

Our main topic is going to be SightSense sensors and software. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. But I really want to get to know a little bit more about you. Could you tell us about who you are, how your purpose to affect the world and how that connects to IntelliWave? Sure.

Yeah. My background is primarily in technology. Ever since a young age, I've always been interested in computers and computer programming. It all really started when I was very young, around 13 or 14 years old, where my parents got us an older computer that you couldn't really do anything on. So I started tinkering around with the programming languages and building my own programs for it.

Ever since then, really interested in technology and tinkering. I went into college and studied information technologies and came out of college right around the time of the dot-com boom. So I was able to get right into it and work for some early adopters of technology on the internet. And from there, I did a lot of consulting for various companies, which gave me a pretty good breadth of experience working with a lot of different large enterprises and corporations and also some smaller companies. And then after that, I started getting into my own personal consulting and then entrepreneurship a bit.

I started a company where we made dental software that worked on tablet devices. This was a pre-iPhone days, so there wasn't a lot of options for mobile hardware or really good tablet type devices. But we made do with what was available in the market and made a pretty good offering for dentists and dental specialists. And then from there, I went back and did some more consulting in the casino space where we were tinkering around with some RFID technologies and radio frequency tracking technologies where we would basically go into casinos.

This was back in around 2002 where Macau, which is an island in Southeast Asia, it's really close to China, but gambling is legal there. And as the growth of the middle class in China was really starting to take off, Macau started to boom pretty significantly. And a lot of the companies in Las Vegas were investing pretty heavily in development of in Macau, but counterfeiting was a big problem there. So they consulted with us because we were pretty much domain experts in RFID technology, which was at a different state back then.

It wasn't as standardized, wasn't as popular and well used. So we worked with them to put some tracking devices in the casino chips so that they could identify if there were counterfeits at the cages and at the tables, which really got us more into some analytic purposes, such as just counting money in real time on the floor and also just understanding the flow of money across the casino for analytic purposes. And it was about that time that a friend of mine, Dale, who's my partner and co-founder at IntelliWave, met with me and heard about what I was doing.

And his dad was actually a project manager at Amec, which is a large EPC company in the construction space. And they said, wow, you could apply this tracking to materials on construction sites and really help solve a problem. So that was really interesting to me. My family has background in construction as well. My dad and my brothers worked in civil construction for a long time.

And I helped out with my uncle who had his own construction company as well. It was really appealing to me personally to work in that space. And then also, after taking a deeper look in it, we just realized that such an opportunity for innovation in construction. Oh, yes. So it's just one of those things that felt like a really natural fit with my past and interest in tinkering on the hardware and software side and industry that's really ripe for disruption on the technology front.

We felt like it was a good fit. So we decided to form IntelliWave Technologies and build our product, which is called SightSense. What SightSense is about is bringing in sensors and web and mobile technologies to give owners, construction contractors more visibility over their project sites. I mean, that gives us the broad history and casinos. Oh my goodness, that's really cool that you utilize the RFID technology to count money.

Sometimes you just don't think about the many opportunities there are with a simple tracking mechanism like that and counting any real time. I'm sure that was hugely valuable. Yeah, it's an interesting industry for sure. So let's talk a little bit about productivity and how you achieve that through SightSense. From a productivity standpoint, I'm sure everybody's familiar with the McKinsey study on construction productivity or the lack thereof in the construction industry.

But there's been other studies that we've looked at. For example, in 2008, CII did a study, RT240, where they did a detailed look about really the problems on construction sites. And they came to the conclusion that overruns and delays stem from the lack of control and visibility over construction resources, which are materials, personnel, and equipment. So that was really what we looked at originally when we started. And we started with materials, primarily because those are the things that can be tracked and provide the most value from tracking or so we thought.

There's also a follow-up study on that where they actually did a pie chart breakdown of time that the workers spend on the project site. And really what they were trying to find out was how much actual direct work was being performed on some of these projects. And they were looking specifically at large capital, heavy industry construction projects or large heavy industry projects. But they'd found that really the amount of direct work or tool time spent was about 27%. And then the rest of that was spent on prep work, personal time.

But the three main areas that we felt that there was a lot of excess time was the travel time. So the time just traveling around the site, waiting. It's waiting for something to happen, which is about 13% of their time. Travel was around 17%. And then material handling, which is around 8% of their time.

So a big chunk of their time, around 40%, is spent on those three areas. Another area is dealing with tools and equipment, whether it's just waiting in the tool crib or getting your tools and equipment available and ready for use was another 19%. So basically over half their time was spent relatively unproductively in areas where we felt that if we just improved visibility over certain things like knowing where their tools were and equipment were and how many were available and obviously the same side with we could improve their lives, but also reduce those times and that would lead to more tool time.

What we set out to do really was first of all, use sensor technologies to help automate a lot of the manual data entry processes around the location and the traceability of materials and correspondingly doing the same thing with tools and equipment. So really adding in lots of different types of sensors, creating really easy to use web and mobile software for material management, material handling, and then just adding a lot of visibility tools that users are used to seeing on the consumer side, things like Google Maps and Google search and Facebook, but not so much available on the instruction software side where they're used to using either Excel spreadsheets or really old systems for recording material locations.

So we developed these tools for them and then set out to improve the concept on certain project sites. So doing that and doing the analysis, we found that we were able to achieve about a 10% improvement in tool time just by using the visibility tools that SightSense provides, both the sensor side and also the web and mobile software for improving that visibility on site. If you would like to hear more about Construction Industry Institute or CII, listen to my episode with CII Director, Steven Mulva, on how to increase performance and productivity of your capital projects at Constructor.com slash EP42.

I think those stats that you mentioned are really quite jaw-dropping. The amount of time, 70% spent on traveling, walking around the site and then waiting, that's 30% right there of time wasted. And then improving it by 10%, I think if you're to add in a couple of things like utilizing lane construction or organizing your site more cleanly. It's just simple, really good management skills. Just kind of layering a lot of those things would be really awesome.

But SightSense, I think it's doing a great job then if you're able to do that improvement of 10%. And I'm sure it can be definitely improved that much more with just some smart activities as well. Yeah, and I totally agree. To your point really, just site organization is huge. One example of that is we were working on a site.

We just implemented a worker tracking system. It was just simply an in-out system where we were using RFID to monitor workers as they went into a work area. This happened to be on a shipyard. But what they had found, they used the data to provide these M-curves, which is just a curve that shows the ramp-up time of workers when they start on site and then when they leave on site for break and then they ramp up on site. And then they played around with these metrics and they actually just reorganized their tool bins.

They would move them around to various locations, put some on the boat, and then they're able to visibly see the effect of that on the ramp-up times of crews. So they found that they were able to just simply move the tool cribs around and achieve better and faster ramp-up times for their workers, whether it was workers not waiting in line or workers not having to travel too far to those tool cribs. So to your point, I totally agree that just combining some of these concepts in terms of getting the metrics, but also utilizing some more better organization and lean construction principles with the right data, you can get those real-time metrics and actually see that effect and see the productivity gains.

And within 24 hours of implementing something, you can actually see results on that. Because if you just do some simple review of the data itself. Well, yeah, I could see the gains being 30% improvement really easily. So let's talk a little bit about SightSense, the technology itself. What is it?

Tell us how it works. So really, the core of SightSense is web and mobile software. We pretty much host everything in the cloud. So it's more of a modern approach to software. We host everything on Amazon and Amazon Web Services, use their infrastructure on a global scale so we're able to host multiple data centers in different geographic areas.

So for example, in Europe or Australia, South America and North America and multiple locations. So that gives users access to the software in a reliable manner, but it also makes their access pretty speedy no matter where they are. And then we also have mobile software that runs just the typical apps you would download either for your Android or iOS devices. Our web-based software is also pure HTML5, so it works on a variety of devices, whether it's tablets or smartphones, either iOS or Android. And users just access the system by logging on.

When users log in, they're assigned to projects, construction projects. At somewhere in the hierarchy, it could be a job or it could be a work package on a project. And they can only see their resources based on the project they're assigned to. And then they also have roles on those projects, and those roles further dictate which actions they could take. So for example, a safety user would only be able to see workforce safety information, and a material manager would have much more capability in terms of seeing materials and equipment, locations and purchase orders and material receipts and things like that.

So there's a permission system built in that just filters the information directly to the users that are designed to see that information. That's the core of the system. And then we also have just a plug-and-play interface for a lot of these automation technologies. So for example, our apps work with a lot of both passive and active RFID technologies. Also Bluetooth low energy tags, which are these newer Bluetooth type beacons that you're seeing more and more of.

Integrated barcode as well. We use the device camera for scanning barcodes, either 2D or 1D barcodes. And also we interface with a lot of integrated barcode scanners as well. So we interface with this sensor layer, and that helps automate the processes. But really it's all about having your software designed to work with the sensors as much as possible to make their lives easier by automating manual processes.

So for example, when workers go to receive a load on a truck, depending on which sort of identifier it has, if it's a barcode for example, all they'll need to do is wave their camera over the barcodes and it'll automatically add those lines to their MRR, including the quantities of those items. And then they can do their kicking counts, their OS and D reporting, just check the items to make sure that the counts match, that there's no visible damage, and that everything looks good. And then they can just post that MRR directly from the mobile device.

Or if you were using two stage administration, they could complete the MRR and an administrator can review it before posting it. So that's sort of one example, the software working with the sensors and just making it easier to receive materials on site. But in addition to that, we also use the sensors on the device. So for example, we'll record the geolocation that this activity occurred in and who used it to get extra information and help validate what's happening on the project site. So you actually have like the physical location of where it's located, whether it's a room or is it coordinates?

How is it direct there? Exactly. So we use both mechanisms. So we use both the geo coordinates. So we'll give you a 2D geolocation, which gives you the latitude and longitude of the materials.

And then in addition to that, we have the traditional warehouse location system. So on a map, you can go ahead and grid out your project site, then creating your MRR will default to your current location and say, okay, so you're putting this stuff in warehouse one. Looks like you're in section three, and then you'll just need to select a bin from there. We also have barcode labels you can put on the bin. So you could just scan the bin to enter in its bin location.

So that's another option as well. So for the most part, we can automate a lot of these manual data entry processes, but we do keep both locations available to the user. So they'll see, okay, here's its map based location. They could use the map to find it later. But in addition to that, we'll say it's in warehouse one, section three, bin five, or lay down one and bunk number three, for example.

So we keep the best of both worlds. But the key is we just try and automate as much manual entry as possible. So I'm just thinking of all the opportunities here, just what you're talking about. I think of how, rather I should say, I think of how many times I've spoken to a contractor and said, hey, please just take a picture of where it's located. So we know where it is, and we know that you've received it, and we know that you received the full entire quantity.

It's just one of those things you are concerned about having the right shipment of the right materials on your site. It's essential to the productivity of the project. And what you've done is you've automated and streamlined that process by having the software and sensors, pretty much all those pieces of data in one place and one location by either going on your web application or your mobile apps. Yeah. And to your point, pictures are really a big part of what we do as well.

And just having these devices and having the apps on these types of devices that everything has a camera nowadays, there's so many spots in our software. We'll give you the opportunity to take a picture, whether it's of a truck that has come on the project site with materials on it or a piece of equipment like a welder, a generator, a light stand, or materials themselves. And what we find is users actually enjoy that aspect of using the software. And even in areas where it's not specifically outlined in their process to take pictures, we find they normally take them.

And it's really, from my perspective, it's really exciting to see the users actually doing that because we know we did something right when users are using the system for its intended purpose, but not something they've been specifically told to do. But we'll find that when receipts come in, almost all of the items on that receipt have a picture, whether it's of the box, they'll open the box and take another picture of it. That helps for a lot of reasons. One reason is it helps for identification when it comes time to find that material later.

So they'll have a thumbnail of that picture. They'll know exactly what they're looking for. So if you're talking about ducting or prefabricated lumber pieces or prefabricated steel piping or even HDPE piping, when it comes time to find that, they know what it looks like. So instead of bending down and looking at a bunch of paint sticked on markings, they can go and look at maybe five or six items and find the right one within a matter of minutes. So the guys that are looking for those materials really appreciate that in terms of being able to get out of the field quicker, just get in, find their materials and get out quicker.

So pictures are a huge opportunity for improving productivity on sites. It's pretty cool. Let's talk a little bit about smart contracts and how the transaction of the materials are documented. Sure. Yeah.

This sort of harkens back to Amazon and being in a multi-dentist center environment. And one of the problems we were looking to solve was if we had a global contractor or a global construction unit that was using our software and we wanted to make sure that they had access to one of the data centers that was located anywhere they were working, so they had the fastest response time to that data center. So we were looking at ways to make sure that the data was replicated securely and quickly across the multiple data centers at a time.

And blockchain was a really good natural fit for that. Construction being first of all the way that we store transactions in a sequenced manner where each transaction was in sequence and related to the previous transaction and also securing that information so it was encrypted while in transit and then being able to replicate that or have that distributed across our different data centers around the world. We turned to blockchain to help store those transactions. So really it's a great natural fit for I feel like for construction because of the nature of the transactions that are performed during construction.

So you have your purchasing transactions. So you have your purchase order transactions. Once the purchase order is approved, that order goes out and then you have your delivery information that comes in. So delivery transactions as far as it's been loaded out, the tracking information for the shipments. Then you have the formal material receipts that are performed on site and then that actually triggers an activity, the materials received on a purchase order, that triggers an activity of actually paying that off.

So talking about smart contracts really is putting in the logic actually into the blockchain to say is this purchase order now fully received and all the materials have been accepted by the site and if that's the case, let's trigger this payment to happen. So using smart contracts in a blockchain and using blockchain in general to store these transactions gives you a lot of benefits. The main benefit is being able to distribute this information to the multiple parties involved and also then being able to automate some of these manual processes in terms of identifying purchase orders that need to be paid or automating receipt of goods and the acceptance of those received goods against the purchase order line items.

So smart contracts can accomplish all these things in the blockchain and tied to the transaction and also the linking of the transactions help enable this as well in terms of the sequence activities that occur for the material receipts from the orders to the material receipt really paints the full picture of what's happened for these ordered goods and helps enable the automation of the completion of a lot of these activities that right now it takes a lot of legwork just to gather the information required to for example close out a PO and pay it out.

So those are a few examples of really how smart contracts can come in and help automate some of the manual transactions that occur in procurement along the supply chain. Hey I wanted to give just a really quick explanation of what blockchain is and so I'm just going to do a little quick run through of a definition. Blockchain is a shared digital record book of transactions called blocks that are linked together in a sequence or chain. Everyone who shares this record book has the ability to validate the transaction and add records but not modify any existing records.

This will create transparency and the smart contract guarantees the execution of the action. So this should sound very familiar to the construction industry because as you deal with any requisition purchase order request work order inspection form any other documentation that has similar characteristics where it has a record or a sequence in place and it needs to be linked or tied to a transaction then this is a really good place to utilize blockchain. This is a question I'm not sure if you have the traditional way of doing things like from a time savings perspective to now doing this automated process on the blockchain because essentially what's happening is the smart contract is in place and the process of paperwork is happening as a byproduct ultimately the payments themselves because everything is happening as it should as agreed to in the contract right and every time it makes a step in the process then that's being

verified on the encrypted blockchain and then things are getting sequentially paid out as the things are actually taking place right. I guess the question is twofold do you know how much time is saved from it and then am I correct in my thinking as to like exactly what's happening that it's a byproduct. Yeah yeah so to answer your first question not necessarily we don't necessarily know how much time is saved honestly so for one on a lot of the projects we work on every construction project is different which you well know I'm sure you know and two it's just hard to benchmark a lot of this stuff really versus because there's not a lot of benchmarks on how long how long things take right now I mean as far as like with the old manual processes especially with procurement organizations who are very secretive about their operations it's one of

those things where we don't really have a good sense about the back office time savings we have a lot more sense of the field time savings because we've done formal studies on that and we can actually sit in the field and watch people you know do their stuff and we can work with them and do that stuff in the field but as far as the back office stuff we don't have a really good idea of how much time is saved just by automating some of the manual paper type processes or data collection processes and that's a fair response I'm just kind of thinking through how much time I would save is all you know just really if you think about project expediting and all of the phone calls you know one of the metrics we do track is on the material management side the reduction

in phone calls that they get when they're using Sitesense so for example if someone wants to know where their materials are or if you know someone up from procurement calls them and wants to know if a materials receipt has been accepted before they can pay off a purchase order in cases we've recorded an over 80 reduction in the number of calls that the material management office receives on construction projects so that drop is is very significant so we suspect that just with a few of the tools in place and mostly on the collaboration side and information sharing side where they can just go to a website or they can pull a transaction automatically off the blockchain into their procurement system if they have that integration set up then they won't need to make that call because they'll have that visibility into that transaction near real time so you know our

suspicion is on the back office side that a lot of time is saved but we do see significant time savings in the field for sure so that's that part of it and then yeah you're correct in your assumption that the smart contracts can be established to help automate a lot of these payment processes of course that has to be set up as well so you need to do integration on the purchasing side in terms of setting up the erp so it pulled a transaction off the blockchain and then analyze that transaction to say okay what does this mean in terms of the overall purchase order status and then trigger that payment i still suspect that even in fully integrated systems there's going to be checks and balances in place where someone looks at it and does the final posting of payments which totally makes sense but really just cutting down that manual collaboration and

legwork of getting this information is a huge help to to these people on the sites yeah so could you tell us a little bit about how the a project might be set up and getting all the the contracts in place and all the associated vendors follow the necessary protocol how does that play out in the beginning so really from both the sensor side in terms of which vendors are going to apply what type of tracking technology whether it's a barcode or an rfid tag that's normally done in the early procurement phases when they're approaching vendors for bidding on the project they'll include a section in the the rfp's about making sure that they are put on whatever type of tracking tag is required by the project and include the associated costs with that in the initial bid so that's an important part of making sure that the vendors have clear instructions on how to put any type

of tracking information on the materials or equipment that they're sending to sites so that's actually normally done on projects right now they'll specify their standard markings or some sort of identifying mechanism for the materials and requirements on that but i think really one of the things that we see when we initially engage projects we just end up putting a lot more detail on those sections to say for example what specific type of barcode and the symbology and how many bar codes you know based on the size of materials and where they're placed so just adding a lot more detail in those sections on specifically to the detail what types of tracking devices are put on materials or equipment and one of the kind of key examples of that is rfid is a very diverse technology there's lots of different types of rfid tags and some vendors claim to have you know rfid

tags or they do rfid tagging but it might not be the right type of rfid tag that they have readers for at the project site it might be a different standard or a different classification of tag so if that's the case then really i mean there's no value in putting the rfid tag on there if you can't read it at any point on the slip-align chain you don't have the hardware or the system set up to do that so really there's no value in doing it so that's really why it's clear you know to put that in your initial language and really it's the same thing on the is side in terms of putting language in the contract how information is going to be shared along the the project and throughout the life cycle of the project so whether that's the specification is is paper handover of materials

and i think projects need to start once all the tools are available and they've selected the right system to put this in place they should specify that transfer of information should be electronic and if they just simply did that and just make sure that there was an electronic handover of information then whether it's you know manuals or p&m information on the mechanical equipment pieces or really a lot of types of information if that's specified as electronic and then also again putting a lot more detail into exactly how that's going to be transferred i mean blockchain it's an emerging technology but if projects aren't ready for that even just setting up some sort of a more electronic database type system whether it's an edi file transfer or you know even a drop box type folder where information is aggregated just getting to the point where electronic handover is happening would be huge for a lot of these contracts so

really i think the bottom line is it's just best to take baby steps start with where you are and if you're at paper work towards structuring it so that in your rfps the vendors are required specifically to use electronic transfer of information and then also getting into pretty good detail on how that's going to look so for example if vendors are giving you advanced shipment notifications or detailed builds of materials then the exact format of that is specified and the exact transit mechanisms over the network are specified so that it's all standardized across a project when you get in the situations with lack of standardization that's really when it gets complicated and it starts to break down so setting that up at the outset would be huge for these projects okay that makes a lot of sense being committed to upfront standardization early on in the project is key to implementing the use of a smart contract

definitely yeah it's uh it's critical i think really just to identify in terms of starting to utilize blockchain or starting to utilize really any type of newer technology that's specified in detail how that will occur and that making sure that all the vendors are aware of it when they're doing the bidding on the process so that they're buying into the overall solution for the project for data transfer it's good to see that intelliwaive is utilizing the blockchain and smart contracts particularly because at this point there's the early adopter who's interested in trying to adopt you know a more efficient more trustworthy way of of doing contracts and i think this is really interesting and can be mapped on to a number of processes here in construction could you talk a little bit about the advantages to property owner or the the parties themselves how does it explain

to them what the benefits are of utilizing a smart contract so i guess some of the benefits of of using blockchain specifically in smart contracts from the owner's perspective really come down to visibility so the owner really gets unprecedented visibility into all of these transactions being you know at the top of the project hierarchy so we talked a little bit about that project hierarchy permission system well the owner is really at the top of that and if they can see you know all of these transactions and they can sync all these transactions into their system then they really know exactly where the project is at so one of the primary benefits to the owner is having access to timely and accurate information about the project status so they can make educated decisions about what's going on with the project from a cost perspective or resource perspective using

blockchain technology and smart contracts and especially tying that in with the sensor play and getting source of information that's automated in terms of you know when materials are detected at a specific location or certain actions happen you know having these these transactions completely transparent and visible to all parties really gives that owner that visibility into what's happening they can have the full picture a lot of the times on construction projects if you call a vendor they'll say yeah it's been shipped um of course it's been shipped that's what the po says so we shipped it out so they'll just look at the po and say the contract delivery date was yesterday so it was shipped out yesterday because that's what they're supposed to say whereas if you're not calling the vendor and you're just looking at the transaction history for that particular project in that particular resource or material then you're actually seeing exactly what happened

exactly when it arrived on site when the material receipt was processed the status of that material if it's been issued or not so you have access to all this information without having to drudge through what people are saying or that may or may not be accurate and try and find that you have that complete picture of what's happening and then just aggregating all this information up into whether it's the owner using an erp system or working with an ebc or a primary contractor on these projects to figure out what's going on then you know they have that visibility without having to put in a huge amount of work to get it so i think that's the primary benefit other benefits in terms of reducing overall cost and then also improving overall quality of delivery in terms of just having better track and trace histories on materials and information just gives you overall

better quality picture of your construction so for example you know one issue in construction is counterfeit materials as well so if you're using better track and trace systems you'll be able to identify that easier and determine that the right grade of material was put in the right location for their building or plant or whatever construction project they're working on so those are the few advantages but i guess the number one for owners is it's a really good way to reduce overall cost of a project by increasing that visibility over your construction resources i really like that so taking a step back just want to know what your opinion is on the use of blockchain and how it will affect the industry the construction industry on a whole what do you think the future holds for blockchain specifically it's it's a really early in the construction

world i know they they've started to talk about it at some of the industry consortiums there hasn't been a lot of movement around committee formation in terms of committees in either fiat tech or cii or some of these industry-wide consortiums from what we've seen so far we haven't seen a lot of committee formation or standardization around the use of blockchain so i would say it's still really early in the life cycle for for blockchain but i think just in general what we're seeing from a broad perspective is a lot of industries and a lot of organizations are looking at blockchain as a solution to a lot of problems and they're starting to implement blockchain mechanisms within their systems so some examples are oracle and sap or ibm for example who are all investing in rnd and investing in implementing blockchain technologies into their core products

and i think along with smaller technology vendors like like us and others are also doing the same thing that's really just going to lead to better collaboration at the software level and enabling these systems to communicate much better than they have in the past you know with this technology so from what we see happening you know in the industry even though it is early we feel like there is a lot of momentum around it it will be a pretty widely used solution you know maybe not in the next year or so but maybe in a few years there will be solutions that you know allow fully integrated project systems using a blockchain and also allow this this level of visibility where contractors or subcontractors have access to to blocks and transactions and to the blockchains that's based on their permission level on the project and and really giving that visibility

throughout the whole project life cycle so we don't see it as something happening overnight certainly not you know in the next year or so but just based on the momentum in the industry we feel like it's something that's really going to get legs and in the future we'll definitely be contributing to more efficient projects and more efficient collaboration on these projects hopefully it's within the next few years but construction tends to move a little bit slower than some industries so you know maybe maybe five years or so it's good to get a sense from you i'll be asking a number of other people that same question in the near future as well so well i guess i want to ask what what do you recommend the listener do right now if they want to learn more about blockchain or about intelowave just material management systems on a whole what people should

they be following obviously you guys and tell away but are there any other resources you'd recommend number one we recommend the constructor podcast so that's a that's a good resource but the best way to learn more about intelowave specifically is through our website we've been putting out a a lot of effort into putting content on our article section on our website and we write a lot of articles about safety and and the implications of technology and construction safety including the use of drones and other technologies mobile devices so we actually do have quite a bit of on the article section of our website it's not just all marketing fluff it's actually we get our field people to write pretty useful content some of the articles we've been really trying to improve that content and push it out so that's the number one way to learn more about us there's also a

contact us section if you want to get in touch with us you can see a demo of our software and systems and we can talk through specific use cases so definitely hit our website and check out the articles and the information we have there and if you are interested in our solutions just give us give us a call or just use the contact form on the website yeah and i can absolutely put that in the show notes for people to find you more easily those articles are quite good hence how i actually reached out to jordan a plethora of information there that you get to learn about technology in general i just want to thank you jordan this has been an awesome time thanks for talking with us on the constructor podcast yeah thank you so much appreciate it my pleasure i hope you enjoyed my

conversation with jordan he's definitely a pleasure to speak with so let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on twitter at britney underscore ct or find me on linkedin or you can just email me too at britney at constructor.com again the email is brittanie at construct double r.com we will continue our series about blockchain and construction next week we'll be speaking with jeremy barnett he is one of the founders and a director of the construction blockchain consortium and he's a practicing lawyer so he will be talking with us about the legal perspective of blockchain implications including smart contracts safety and ai he also talks with us about the goals of the construction blockchain consortium and how you can get involved pretty cool episode so look out for our talk next week 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 google play and i'm working on getting onto some more platforms please leave a review to show you support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast i look forward to talking with you guys next week