Transcript: How Safety Can Improve Productivity- with Pete Schermerhorn - Spot R, Triax Tech

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number 16. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. I'm Brittany Campbell Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. I want to help property owners foster trusting relationships with your project team, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule in your construction projects and exceed your end user's desires. Hello everyone.

Thank you for joining me today. I'd like to thank you for listening to Constructor, the best way to build it. Thank you to those who have subscribed already on iTunes. You can find the podcast also at Constructor.com, that's C-O-N-S-T-R-U-C-T-R-R.com and subscribe to get email updates directly from your inbox. Today's interview is with Peter Skirmerhorn.

Peter Skirmerhorn is TRIAC's Chief Operating Officer. Peter Skirmerhorn was a corporate lawyer specializing in private equity, venture capital and mergers and acquisitions. Peter Skirmerhorn holds a Bachelor's of Arts from Brown University and a JD from Stanford Law School. We have an awesome interview discussing where the industry is going and how productivity and efficiency are increasingly more and more important in the construction management industry. Without further ado, here is my interview with Pete Skirmerhorn.

Thanks Pete for joining me in this interview. Welcome. Welcome to Constructor. Thank you very much. Nice to be speaking with you.

Yeah, same here. So just to get a better sense about you, you're the C-O-O of TRIACS, is that correct? TRIACS Technologies? Yeah, that's correct. So I'm responsible for a lot of the operational side of the business.

Awesome. So tell me a little bit more about yourself. What's your background? How did you get involved with TRIACS? Tell me a little bit more about you.

Sure. So I'm a lawyer by training and by background. I spent a number of years in the private equity and venture capital space practicing. And I've known Chad and Dale Hollingsworth, the two founders, for quite some time and had followed the company for a long time. And it was just great timing.

They needed someone to come in and take over the C-O-O role. And I loved the product and loved what they were doing and jumped on board about a year and a half ago. That's awesome. What helps you gravitate towards the product? What about the product did you like?

Well, I think their approach, their fundamental approach of bringing safety through the use of wearable technology to different industries and to different areas was really attractive. I grew up playing contact sports, playing hockey, and some lacrosse, and doing a lot of skiing. And so the first product that the company came out with, the head impact monitors, really spoke to me in terms of being able to keep kids safer doing those activities that I grew up loving to do. So that's actually pretty awesome. So did you grow up nearby Chad at all?

Did you guys happen to play sports together? How far back does the history go? We've known each other for about 10 years. I grew up out in Colorado. Chad grew up in Connecticut.

We met through a mutual friend, skiing actually, and got to know each other over the course of a bunch of ski trips. Awesome. So did you yourself, did you get any injuries while you played contact sports? Did you experience anything where you felt like this particular wearable tech would have been beneficial to you if you had used it? Yeah, you know, I'm pretty sure I had an undiagnosed concussion playing hockey growing up.

I think just back in the 80s, 90s, playing these sports, there wasn't the same level of awareness amongst the coaches and the parents. And so I definitely think I had a concussion while I was playing, and I think that something like the technology that Trax has developed and deployed would have made it a lot clearer what had actually happened and perhaps allowed better treatment at the time. Oh yeah, that's actually really interesting that you say that. I know for sure that my brother, he's definitely had a few concussions.

You know, it's one of those things that we just didn't pay attention to or recognize back in the day. And it's one of those things that there's definitely a lot more attention on that subject just in general. So that's really great. Tell me a little bit about who the market was for the wearable tech, specifically for contact sports. Was it just kids?

Was it college athletes? Who was the market for this? Sure. So the goal long term with this type of technology is to have athletes across the spectrum using it from small kids just learning to professional athletes who make their living off of the sport. What we found was the younger athletes up through probably high school were more open to adopting and using this technology.

And part of that is it's amateur sport. You've got the parents involved who are really actively interested in this. And then we also have a fair number of research universities and institutions, upwards of 40 at this point in time, using the product in a research capacity. They love the data that comes off of the device and it's helping them to define standards and thresholds that can be deployed across sports. If you're familiar with in little league baseball, there's a pitch count.

So a pitcher of different age level can only throw the ball a certain number of times in the game before they have to sit. The way the science is going is similar in that there'll be something akin to a hit count where a kid of a certain age and perhaps a certain weight should only take this number of subconcussive hits below this G-force threshold over the course of a week, the course of a season, et cetera. So we've had a lot of interest in the product from research institutions trying to further that science.

No, that's actually really interesting, especially as it relates to your newer product, the SpotR. I'm really interested in the research around how you've developed that particular product. Is there that much interest from the research side, in particular to construction? Yeah, and maybe it makes sense to take a minute to talk about the overlapping technology between the two products. So the big innovation that Tri-X made in the sports world was the two things, really, the accuracy of the sensor, so the accuracy of the data that was coming in, and then the communication protocol between the sensors that were worn on the athlete's head and the coach on the sideline.

Most of our competitors in the sports market rely on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or other more off-the-shelf type of technologies to communicate, and those have some severe limitations in terms of the number of athletes that can connect at one time, range, and battery life. So what we did was build our own communication protocol off of the 900 megahertz frequency that allows up to 100 kids at a time on a sports field bigger than a football field to all be monitored in less than a second in real time with good battery life.

And that's the technology that we've really brought forward into the construction world, and we can get into that in more detail. But from the research side, there is active interest in reconstruction of injuries on a work site and using these sensors to really figure out what's happening to the human body when someone falls off a ladder, when someone slips, when someone trips. And we're working closely with some lab groups across the country to really further that science and that research. So have you guys had the opportunity to work with any construction crews just to test the spotter?

I mean, I know that obviously there's lots of research, but just curious as to, you know, was there a prototype being used to just kind of monitor a lot of what, you know, the features are monitoring at this point? Yeah. So we've had a really good working relationship with Turner Construction for probably a year now. And we put a very early prototype on one of their sites. I believe it was March of 2016.

And we've been running successful beta tests with them since then. We've also worked with a number of regional Connecticut firms, EP Construction, and some others to test the product on their sites. We've now actually flipped over and started commercially selling the product as of about a month ago. And a lot of those early beta test clients are now looking to put this on jobs and become paying customers. So obviously safety is huge at construction.

You know, and that's one of the markets that it appears that you guys are hoping to continue to service with the spotter. But just curious as to what other industries, I know we talked a little bit about sports, but curious as to what other industries you're looking to tap into. Sure. So the spotter system, it really does, as you said, tackle safety and it tackles productivity and efficiency. So by allowing you to have interior geolocation, so the location of workers within a building where GPS won't work, there's some really unique abilities to know what workers you have on a job site, where they are, and how much time they've spent in those areas.

And that's both real time and historical. So you can imagine that type of efficiency data is very interesting to not only construction firms, but warehouse and distribution centers, heavy industry, mining, oil and gas. And we've also had some active interest from the healthcare space in terms of tracking human assets within the hospital environment, but also looking at the use of this type of technology in things like nursing homes and for visiting nurses. And that really ties in both to the productivity side, but then the safety side.

And it may be worth me just running through some of those features right now, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, sure. Go ahead. That's certainly fine. So on the safety side, we like to think of it as really there being some reactive and proactive safety devices or safety features.

So on the reactive side, there's an automatic slip, trip and fall notification that's triggered anytime someone has one of those incidents occur to them. So if someone were to fall off a ladder, say the safety supervisor and the foreman on the site, immediately get a notification with that person's name, the location on the site, and the fact that they had this type of incident. We can tell how high they fell and how hard they fell, which gives important information both to the contractor, but also for the worker themselves.

It also makes sure that someone knows an incident has occurred, particularly if it's on a remote part of a job site, and that someone gets to that individual quickly. On the more proactive side, we have an alert button on the device that allows the worker, if they're injured in a way that wouldn't trigger that slip, trip and fall notification, to send an alert, same type of alert, to their safety supervisor, letting them know that they need assistance immediately. And the same thing gives the worker's name and where they are on site and the fact that something has happened to them.

It's not an emergency situation, but there's an unsafe work condition or something that needs to be addressed. The worker can push the button multiple times, and that again goes to the safety supervisor and their foreman and lets them know that there's something on that site. It gives the geolocation of that that needs to be addressed. That worker then obviously gets credit for having reported the safety incident because it gets logged on our system. And then the final thing I'll say about that is because we know where workers are on site, if there is something like a building collapse, you know who you have on site and you know where they are.

There's an auditory signal in the device similar to a smoke detector alarm that you can set off to help with recovery of workers. And then if there's something like a fire or other emergency on the site, using the dashboard, you can set off that alarm on everyone's sensor at the same time, which means evacuate and go to your muster point. Yeah, those are great. First of all, it does quite a bit of things. I'm actually very impressed by what it's capable of doing.

And then also just because of the amount that I've looked at about the sports features, I'm actually really glad you've definitely added some of the capabilities on the spotter. It seems like it's definitely quite a bit enhanced from the previous product, especially with the alarm and just the productivity level. I think it's really great. Yeah, and it's similar technology. And again, it's that wireless communication protocol that was developed here at Trax that lets us communicate with a very large number of sensors over a large area.

We can cover a full construction site. And with really low battery draw, that's really important. The device itself gets a year of battery life. There's no on-off switch. There's no charging.

So all the worker has to do is clip it to their belt and wear it. There's no active maintenance of the system. And when you think about wearable technology more generally, people only use this type of technology in these systems if they're easy to use and they're not a hassle. So you think about something like a Fitbit. A lot of people get it and they wear it for a month or two.

And then after a while, it gets to be a hassle to charge it periodically. And it gets put in a drawer and it collects dust and it doesn't get used anymore. So one of the guiding principles we had, and this is based off of what we learned in sports, was as we built the spotter system, how do we make it as absolutely user-friendly and local maintenance as possible? And that's where the year of battery life comes from and the fact that the worker really doesn't need to actively think about the fact that they've got it on or maintain it, they always have it and it's always ready for them to use.

And just part of their PPE that they put on, they put their steel, so they put their safety glasses and they go ahead and put their spotter on their belt and that's just part of it. Exactly. And that's the way our current customers have been explaining it to the workers. And that's really what we found on site is the guys love all the safety features that are inherent in the device and because it doesn't take anything more out of their day or any real active training other than some basics of if the alarm goes off, go to your muster point.

If you're hurt, push and hold the button. If you see an unsafe condition, hit it three times. Beyond that, it doesn't really impact their day. So you mentioned that they really like the product. Which I guess I'm curious as to which tier really loves the product.

Has there been any pushback from the day-to-day laborer saying, I don't want somebody tracking when I walk off site and when I walk back on to, you know, like has there been anything like that? If I left my tools over there and I have to go over there, why does somebody have to know which location I'm in? Has there been anything like that? Sure. So in terms of who really values from this, what's nice about the system is there's real value all the way up and down the chain.

So you start with the worker and the worker, all those safety features I just mentioned, they're not alone on the site anymore, no matter what part of the site they're on. If something happens to them, they push that button. It doesn't matter if it's their first day on the job or they've been there for a hundred days. They don't need to have the safety supervisor's cell phone. There's help available to them right away.

The workers also like the fact that they get credit for being an active part of the safety culture. Almost every single construction firm that I've ever interacted with has value statements about a safety culture and making sure that everyone buys into that. This really gives them a tool to effectively change the safety culture and to enhance it and to get credit for it when they do the right thing. Because again, everything gets logged on the system. You go up a level to the subcontractor and the subcontractor loves having the data on what their workers are doing and where they are.

That helps them with estimating. It helps them with future job bids. You go up another step to the CM or the GC. They have now much greater site visibility as to the human resources that are on the job and how long they've been there. From an insurance standpoint, and obviously different jobs are set up differently in terms of who holds the risk.

It may be an OSIP, it may be a CSIP, but someone in that chain is also going to hold a lot of the risk in terms of workers' comp and umbrella coverage. Having this type of system in place helps to mitigate that risk as well. You see the value there. Then you go up even further to the insurance industry. The insurance industry really loves having this type of data.

You can draw an analogy to the safe driver discount that Progressive and other companies are using when you plug a little dongle into your car's computer that allows them to monitor your speed and that type of thing. That's a long answer to really the value proposition. The worker themselves, there can be some initial reaction of, hey, this feels like big brother. You guys are tracking me. I'm not comfortable with that.

We recognize that from the very earliest stage of developing this and built the product in such a way as to minimize that concern. First and foremost, there's no GPS in the system. When you're off the site, it can't track you. Most people understand that. Pretty quickly, when you see the size of the device and you explain that there's a year of battery life, we all use GPS on our phone and know how quickly that drains the battery.

Everyone gets it pretty quickly that there's no GPS in the system. The device is only active when you're actually on the job site where you're being paid to do the work you're being paid to do. That's the first thing. Second thing, while we have very good accuracy in terms of height, can tell you with a high degree of accuracy what floor someone is on, on the horizontal access, the accuracy is more like 20 feet. I can tell generally what room someone is in, but not what chair they're sitting in or not whether they're in the porta potty that's in that room or the electrical closet that's in that room doing their work.

While it gives general visibility, it's not as if you have a supervisor standing over your shoulder at all times watching your every move on a minute level. That's really important to get the guys who are wearing these comfortable because no one wants that high degree of tracking. The third thing is we built the system with state of the art privacy, data security, systems and standards in place to make sure that everyone's covered and everyone's comfortable on that angle. No, that makes a lot of sense. Likely working with Turner and the other GCs, you were able to get a lot of that feedback and clarify what's really required for them to see on a day-to-day basis or what's even beneficial.

Yeah, and this was never intended to be a system, to build a system to just give contractors the ability to big brother watch their employees. The company was started with the mission of keeping kids safe on the sports field and we've expanded that mission to keeping workers safe on the job site. That's really the guiding principle. There's some great benefits in terms of the productivity and the efficiency features that come out of this system. Those shouldn't be diminished, but at core, we're building this to keep guys safe on the job and to make sure you got more going home healthy at the end of every shift, end of every weekend, end of every month, end of every year and that there's continual improvement there.

No, I really enjoy how you guys took everything into account and definitely had the right approach of, you know, again what we all focus on when we're working construction, making sure everybody goes home healthy every night for long term, as you mentioned. So, how did you guys pick construction? I mean, you went from sports to construction as it seems like your main target market here and yes, you mentioned healthcare, you mentioned oil and gas, you mentioned another couple industries, but just curious as to the shift to construction and why that was chosen over maybe other markets.

Well, you know, in talking with insurance companies about premium discounts for schools and really starting to dive deep into the insurance world, we became aware of just the level of injury and the expense of workers' comp coverage in the construction world and started looking more deeply into the technology that's been deployed to combat the injury rates and the soaring workers' comp costs for construction companies and realized that there was certainly room for improvement there, to put it mildly, from a technological standpoint. And there are more solutions that have been rolled out in warehouse and distribution center type contacts, more fixed building, controlled environments.

We liked the challenge of the construction environment, the open air, the constantly changing sites. We liked that challenge and we thought it squared pretty closely with the challenges we found out on athletic fields and teams going to different sites all the time to play games in different fields. And we just thought that what we had built in sports could really work well in this more chaotic construction world, and clearly there was a need. And then as we built out the product and we started to see these efficiency and productivity benefits that came out of it, we also became aware of, and I'm sure you've seen the graph like everybody, about the decreasing productivity in construction over the last 40 years on a man hour basis and the efforts to improve that.

Oh yeah, I mean, there's always this, okay so there's reduction in productivity, right, but there's also the increased awareness about safety. So there's always that question of, okay, well you want to make sure that we're operating safely, you want to make sure that we're doing things well, and with safety in mind. But that will definitely slow things down. Safety alone, just to focus on that. Just to focus on that, right, which again also has been increasing over the past 40 years, which is truly relevant.

So I think that with the technology that's available in construction now that it's certainly growing, right, we have BIM with Revit or so many other other softwares that are out there that help you see in a 3D manner, integrating schedule, integrating cost. You know, there are lots of other things that you can have as tangible technology that will help you do your work, but there's also this relevancy of you just have to understand the process and you have to be strategic about your approach. And if you have things that you can easily just kind of let you do your job, yes think about it, plan it out well, but if you just have things that kind of just let you do your job and you can kind of just track the data and check for improvements as you are going along, if it's a checkpoint every week, doing a plan,

do check, act or something like that. That's something we do often in lean construction. I think it makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense to have that type of tracking mechanism through the wearable tech to say, well this is what we learned, this is the information we have on hand, we can learn from it and improve moving forward week by week. Yeah, and you know in terms of lean construction, we have a lot of customers that are very active in employing those principles.

And the three of the really key principles in lean are continuous improvement, work smarter not harder, and empower your workforce, which is your greatest asset. And we think this system can really help with that because you need to identify waste before you can attack it and remedy it. On an assembly line or in a manufacturing facility, that's much easier to do. You have a supply closet that's not organized. You apply the 5S principles, you get in there, you clean it up, you have one assembly line or two assembly lines, you can re jigger those or realign those and see if you have improvements.

On a construction site, it's such a different and ever-changing environment that it's much harder to uncover these sources of waste if you don't have data. And so what this system does is it gives you that data on the workers and the flow of work and the man hours. We've started integrations with Procore and Autodesk and some other project management software vendors to allow this type of data to be automatically overlaid into those programs that CMs and others use, which also really helps drive benefit from those systems because you don't have to have somebody at the end of the job, I'm sorry, at the end of every day sitting in the trailer typing in this type of information, it automatically goes in.

So do you have some API integrations that go into those products? We do and the way the system was designed was to have a very open infrastructure and to work well with all these systems. So we expect to roll out an integration with Autodesk and Procore in early 2017. It had great early relationships with both those companies. I think we're both excited about the enhancements to each other's products and excited to see how this can continue to help the customers with that mission of continuous improvement.

One area, a pretty simple example is estimating. If you have used this system on a number of sites and you now have a new project that you're bidding on that has similar characteristics, with a couple clicks of a button, you can go back and pull reports for exactly how many man hours were spent by the different trades and the different areas on the site. That gives you a much better idea when you're looking at the new bids and the new estimates of are these right, are these wrong, how are our own estimators doing.

It just allows for that continuous improvement because you have the data. Absolutely. Yeah, you can definitely come up with more realistic numbers and quite honestly come up with, build that trust with your client a whole lot more because it's definitely something that's more accurate or it's a better estimate of what's realistic and more accurate in the field. I think that word you use, trust, is a really important one across the whole site. There needs to be trust between the client and the CM, but there also needs to be a high degree of trust between the CM and the GC and the subcontractors and the actual workers.

I think part of what will drive that is transparency and part of what will drive that is, again, empowerment of the workers themselves and giving workers a tool like this and giving them a voice in safety and giving them meaningful ability to communicate those concerns. We really think will help to drive the safety culture that all of these contractors and and GCs really look to build and in doing so, that only makes the site more efficient over time. It only improves outcomes for everybody. Not only just the outcomes from a productivity and safety standpoint, but just the morale in general.

When you're transparent on all levels, it really does boost the morale and again, get everybody to trust each other on another level. They know that they can anticipate the people that they're working with. They're going to execute the way that they say they are. Exactly. Exactly.

I think if you can really start to drive that and really build that type of culture on these sites, you're not only going to see the safety numbers improve and by extension, the insurance costs go down, but you'll see that productivity metric start to track back up. No, this is very cool. Really enjoying the topic of how just tracking data in general really can help improve any project team. I think that's just where the industry is going. We're definitely, like I said before, adapting to utilizing more technology.

It really is about data documentation. We're getting to the idea of internet of things. It's data. How can we use it to improve everything that we know about? As long as it's usable data.

That's where wearable tech can really help us. We know it's usable because we know it's tracking the right things. It's not somebody entering something in on a computer. That's right. It's got to improve.

Again, to go back to the core principle on wearable tech, people are only going to use it if it has a good outcome for them and it's easy to use. As we start to employ this type of technology on construction sites, it needs to improve outcomes for everybody involved and particularly for the person that's attaching it to their body. Again, that's one of our driving focuses and then something we've brought over from the sports world is got to improve the outcome first and foremost to the person wearing it.

If you do that, the benefits flow up naturally and are much more powerful. Well, just kind of wrapping up, first of all, thank you so much for having this discussion with me. It's great to learn about Tri-X technology and Spotter and where you guys are going with tracking the safety, the productivity, the efficiency on the job site. Even some of the partnerships that you're having with project management software companies, I think that's going to be a game changer. We're really excited to continue to work with those partners and to really see where this technology can go.

I was asked this question and quite honestly with the product, it's really interesting. Normally we talk about say conditions of satisfaction or a process that can maybe even be implemented into the way you either plan construction or how do you utilize this specific approach versus a tangible product. I guess is there something that you would recommend to either anyone who's listening to this podcast in the audience will either be working in construction potentially a property owner who may be thinking about well how can I improve my projects or GCs, what have you, what would you recommend to them to learn about in order to improve the process, improve executing a construction project?

Well, I think there's great potential for technology in this space, but as with anything, you need to be careful in terms of what products you adopt and how you use them. Particularly if you again are going to go down the wearables path and you're going to ask people to clip something onto them, you need to make sure that it's been designed in the right way. You need to make sure that the data and privacy aspects of the product are rock solid and you need to make sure that the company that's building it and providing it has a solid history is going to be around and is going to support the product in the right way.

I think that's, there's a lot when you look at technology, there's a lot of, I guess to use the term, spoken mirrors out there. A lot of people can produce a really pretty video. They can code a nice website. When you're starting to look at these products, ask for references, ask others who have used it, ask to actually demo the product, touch and feel it, make sure it works and do your diligence before you commit to something like this. Because anytime you bring a new product onto a site, there's going to be change.

There's going to be some resistance from some folks, some excitement from other folks and you just want to make sure that if you're going to do it, you do it once and you get the right solution first. Oh yeah, that's great advice. Thank you for that. Well, just to give people a sense of how to get in touch with you or learn more about Tri-X Tech and SpotR, do you have contact information or how someone can get in touch with you? Yeah, our website is tri-xtech.com.

That's T-R-I-A-X-T-E-C.com. You'll see full information about the product on there and then there's an area at the bottom of the first page to input your information if you'd like someone to get back to you and to learn more about the product. Awesome. Thank you so much, Pete. Pete Thank you.

It's been a pleasure and hope to speak again soon. I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did with Pete. He was a pleasure to interview. I'm definitely going to be following Tri-X because they're following the trends of the industry just as I am and I'll give you the Constructor audience a sense of new technologies to help us drive safety and productivity. Find the show notes at Constructor.com and don't forget to subscribe.