What To Build: Eric Law (Senior Director, Technology & Innovation, Swinerton)

Conversation with Eric Law, Senior Director of Technology & Innovation at Swinerton. We chat about the startups Swinerton is partnering with, why only 10% of pilots make it into production, and what specific projects Swinerton is currently searching for a startup to partner with and why.

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

I joined Swinerton almost two years ago to lead their Innovation and Technology teams. The Innovation team is responsible for transforming our business for exponential growth or increased profitability, the Technology team is responsible for incremental improvements and investments into existing solutions such as our ERP provider.

Swinerton is a 131-year old construction company with 3,500 employees that provides services in the United States for Aviation, Education, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Interiors, Multifamily Residential, Office, Parking Structures, and Renewable energy.

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

Our Innovation team meets with our various divisions to identify opportunities for substantial improvement. We look to see what’s preventing these divisions from such improvements: is it people, workflow, technology, etc. and we do pilot projects to help them resolve their issues and prove out that it can be a more profitable business model. Once a solution is proved out, we provide a roadmap for the business to scale it.

We look for opportunities to partner with startups and prefer earlier stage companies; in fact, we like being one of their first three customers if what they’re working on is core to our focus areas.

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

There are two projects that we’re currently engaged in with startups on and one project for which we’re narrowing down a potential startup partner.

We’re working in pre-construction with Join and on layout with Dusty Robotics.

We’re also reviewing two options, one of which is a startup, for a new project that we’re calling “fee erosion.” This is to help us identify the leading indicators of a project going bad. If a project doesn’t perform well, we don’t earn the fee so this is really important for us.

Currently, we track schedule and budget but we think they’re lagging indicators. There’s communications and other activities that occur earlier and we want to mine those activities to see what we can extract out of it. For example, we suspect that a lack of communications going on within the project is a true leading indicator that things are not going well. We would like a way to be able to compare communications and other indicators across projects, correlate that with the success of the projects, and therefore be able to come up with a monitoring tool that will allow us to take action as soon as possible.

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.

We move projects into production after the startups have proven themselves on the pilot. Only about 10% of the projects we start move to production. Can they get to at least a 90% solution? Sometimes we might do multiple pilots to flush out the whole solution. Do they have the right team in place? Once a pilot is completed, what does it cost to scale the solution?

Depending on the solution type, it might be only for one of our divisions and that’s easier than applying a solution that impacts everyone in the company. Does the solution require changes in contracts, people, processes, etc.? The more areas it impacts the more likely you’ll get push back from users or run into other adoption challenges.

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 two key areas for us:

a) Field labor because we have a hard time finding enough qualified affordable labor, especially in metropolitan areas. For example, movement of large materials into the right locations. We don’t see a lot of startups targeting this space because hardware is hard and has a longer build cycle.

b) How to automate data collection on job-sites because we need accurate data in order to analyze what’s going on in job-sites. Right now, it’s very expensive and time consuming to continuously capture the entirety of a large job-site and we want to find effective ways of doing this. We’ve seen a number of companies who offer targeted niche solutions here but nothing that’s holistic and at the price point and quality we need.

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

Automated data collection across the entire job site. We have multiple use cases for the data and the challenge we run into is the cost and time to collect the data.

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?

You want to add someone to your team who has industry knowledge or otherwise you will try to lean on your customers too much and your customers will feel that very quickly. Having an industry veteran will allow you to iterate product a lot faster and make less expensive mistakes. You don’t want to run the risk of wearing out your pilot partners too quickly.

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

Our industry is massive! Focus on the specific conferences that are relevant for your focus area. Lastly, have fun! It’s a challenging industry but it’s great people.