What To Build: Travis Voss (Leader of Innovative Technology, Mechanical Inc)

Conversation with Travis Voss, Leader of Innovative Technology at Mechanical Inc. We chat about Mechanical Inc’s two biggest priorities challenges in their industry, and how that impacts the types of startups that Mechanical Inc. would be interested to partner with.

1. Tell us about yourself, where you currently work, and your path on getting there.

I’m the Leader of Innovative Technology at Mechanical Incorporated, one of the top mechanical contractors in the United States, offering a full range of mechanical design and construction services. I’ve been with them for almost four years.

Before Mechanical Inc, I spent time in software development, startups and also the Army National Guard. My varied background has been helpful to me in my current role as there’s a lot of moving pieces to pushing innovation in this field.

2. Tell us about your role and what your mandate is and how this specifically relates to working with startups?

I keep tabs on technology trends that could have an impact on our business — I see which technologies we should bring in and test out, and I help drive adoption within our organization for the relevant ones.

Our firm wants to live on what we call “the bleeding edge”; we want to be out there and take chances on new technologies that could benefit us.

We don’t care about the startup’s stage or status; we focus only on what problem they’re trying to solve and see if it makes sense to partner with them on that. We don’t mind partnering early to help shape the product but we also recognize that later stage startups have more fully baked solutions. In all cases though, we like to come in as partners versus just as customers.

3. What are some of the interesting types of projects that you’re currently doing with startups?

We partner with several startups.

Two of the interesting projects that I can share include:

a) We’re working with an early stage that is using generative AI to help draw, estimate and build systems faster using historical data collected over the years. It’s still very early on and we’re hoping to launch a pilot with them soon. Currently, when we bid for a project, our team of estimators will take 2D engineering drawings and manually trace over them to build out a quantity take-off and estimate what it would cost for us to build out the structure.

Using this new platform, we can hopefully speed up our estimation process and do coordination and clash detection; even though each project is a one-off prototype, many internal spaces are similar so we should be able to use past project data along with industry knowledge to begin automating some parts of this estimation process. Ideally, we’d be able to take the 3D model created for estimation and use it downstream if we win the project.

b) We’re partnering with another new startup to attack some of our supply chain challenges. This startup would help us to manage our procurement processes via tracking individual pieces and also being interoperable with existing systems we use. We have increasingly adopted a lean manufacturing mindset, especially as we see our industry moving more and more towards pre-fabrication; we want to work with our suppliers so they have insight into what we will be ordering in the future. We care about just-in-time processes so that we understand and manage consumption and throughput in our shop, and then hopefully will extend this system out into the field as well.

4. What number of these projects move into production? By what criteria? One of the challenges we see startups facing is how to move a customer from pilot to production.

Thus far, we’ve only worked with 6–8 startups and half or more of the projects we’ve engaged in with them have made it into production in some form, even if not enterprise wide yet.

We always start with testing new technologies on smaller projects and then expand to other projects and continue to grow it as the startup’s product / service gets more robust and our understanding and usage of it gets better.

If a project doesn’t make it into production it’s usually due to these reasons:

a) We don’t have enough of an internal user base for the product/service, even if it works well; the technology has to be fulfilling a critical need.

b) The startup pivoted from their original idea or perhaps weren’t able to support the pilot as well as we would have liked. If we don’t trust in the on-going relationship we won’t engage.

c) There’s feature creep, potentially due to other customers’ demands but for us it detracts from the core of our needs.

5. What are the major challenges in your industry these days, and specifically ones that you think can be addressed by the right type of AI and or robotics application? Can you give some detailed examples?

There are a number of challenges that come to mind, including:

a) Procurement processes that will allow us to track exactly where everything is in real-time and order items just when we need them.

b) Easily going from 2D drawings to 3D visuals, especially helpful for more inexperienced team members as we are facing a labor shortage.

c) The move towards pre-fabrication and all of the implications surrounding this move.

d) Robotics: due to a shrinking labor force, I think we’ll see exoskeletons and other such technologies that will augment workers’ capabilities.

e) Better data collection and analyses, allowing us to be more proactive vs. reactive. This is especially the case for keeping on schedule and within budget. We’d like to be informed as to what we should be aware of; for example, if something critical has changed in the schedule, what the dependencies are, and how then to get back on track.

By far though, the two biggest priorities we have in our industry are 1) labor shrinkage, which is driving us to pre-fabrication so that we can put more work into our shops and utilize less people; and 2) how to not get delays in our work schedule, which is driving us to data analysis solutions that allow us to be more proactive in preventing delays. The majority of tools we look for are centered around these two priorities.

6. What type of startup would you be most excited to see?

I would say supply chain management only because I’m looking into this problem right now. As we push to be more manufacturing focused, it’s clear that this is a problem that manufacturing has solved that we haven’t.

Here’s what I think a good solution for us would look like:

a) Integrate with us in order to provide relevant information to our suppliers for just-in-time procurement purposes.

b) Track items / materials from our suppliers’ warehouses to our shops.

c) Track items / materials from our shops to our job sites to installation and potentially beyond installation.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of different solutions that have potential but nothing that solves everything end-to-end. Perhaps ultimately it’s unlikely going to be one solution and we’ll need to have different integrations and interoperability with software we already use; currently, we have systems handling ERP, design, fabrication tracking, etc.

7. What should startups know about your industry before going in? What nuances or details about the industry are not so apparent from someone looking in?

Startups need to run through potential solutions with boots on the ground people in the field before building. Building solutions in a black box and releasing it on industry is not going to work.

Since every building built is a one-off prototype, it’s important to understand the complexities of such projects and also break them down into repeatable processes. To do this, startups need to spend time with the foreman in the field, with project managers, etc.

Startups should understand the process so well that they can see how to improve upon it versus only building technology around it in order to automate it. Building out technology to support a bad process only makes you fail faster.

Also, the opinion that the construction industry is technology shy isn’t true anymore — we want to engage with innovative startups.

8. Lastly, any recommended resources / reading (ex. Industry conferences, publications, experts to follow, etc.) for startups looking to build in your space?

Here’s a list of worthwhile conferences:

- ENR Future Tech

- Bluebeam Extreme Conference

- BILT Conference

- Advancing Construction Technology Conference organized by Hanson Wade

- AGC (Association of General Contractors) has a series of events that are pretty good

- Mechanical Contractors Association’s annual conference

Almost every major construction software provider such as Autodesk or Procore has its own conference.

Some other folks in the construction industry and I are also trying to put together an event for construction technologists in the near future. You can follow our progress using this hashtag on LinkedIn and Twitter: #ConstructionDorks or go to constructiondorks.com