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Thai Nguyen has personal experience with tracking jobsite progress.

Nguyen, director of innovation for Diverge, the investment arm of Hensel Phelps, once had to track a deluge of photos with different names and timestamps to monitor jobsite progress.

But in 2023, Hensel Phelps started a pilot with progress-tracking platform Track3D on a project in Denver. Since then, the contractor has leveraged the tool, which uses machine learning based on visual data to monitor construction progress, on several projects, including the $300 million Courtyard 3 Connector project at San Francisco International Airport. 

For Greeley, Colorado-based Hensel Phelps, it paid dividends: The tech helped eliminate nearly 3,000 hours of manual coordination, prevented three major reworks and delivered $342,000 in verified labor savings, according to a news release. The contractor subsequently signed an enterprise agreement with the tech provider earlier this year. 

Here, Nguyen talks with Construction Dive about the adoption path Hensel Phelps took, the problem Track3D addresses and how the development team solicited feedback from users.

CONSTRUCTION DIVE: You’ve been working with Track3D since 2023. How did Hensel Phelps begin its relationship with Track3D?

THAI NGUYEN: In those early days, it was not the tool that it is today. When I first started with them, there were eight employees. Today there are over 130. 

A big help was exposing Track3D to our regions and projects to convey what our people needed. We showed them what worked well and what didn’t with a very field-first, field-driven mentality. 

That really allowed Track3D the natural progression of starting on a couple pilot projects in one region. Then, we would put them on another pilot project in a different region. 

Next thing I know, they’re on three to four different pilots in 10 different regions. That’s how it naturally started and naturally grew.

What was the adoption timeline like?

The partnership and how they responded revolved around some key KPIs for us. At any time, I had the administrative dashboard where I could see how many walks they were doing per project per day. That certainly gave an understanding of actual usage. 

Then as it was growing across the regions, it had to be consistent. We wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just doing well in one region, and then, for some reason, not doing well in another.

What problems did Track3D help Hensel Phelps solve on the San Francisco airport project?

What we did there is systemic to every project that we have in the country today.

We all know there’s labor shortages. You’ve got to do more with less. And so in every process that we have to execute on, we have to get more efficient. What Track3D does really well is create efficiencies for us in terms of capturing media, whether it’s photos or 360-degree videos, but doing it in a way that is already part of the workflow.

When I first started at Hensel Phelps, I was in charge of progress photos. That meant creating folders on the file server. Everyone that went out to the jobsite took a photo, and they had to be in a certain naming convention. But it was rare that people actually followed it.  

So you would go into those folders every day, millions of files with really no common standardization. It was really hard to access that information in real time and manage it.

Today, Track3D has created those efficiencies where you can literally walk a site with a 360-degree camera and track everything you need in minutes. In the past, it would take you maybe an hour to walk a floor and to capture those photos and try to organize it. 

Now, you walk the site, it captures that video, and then organizes it behind the scenes. The key to everything with Track3D is how it then surfaces the information. You can look at it and make decisions in real time without having to go back to the office first. 

What was adopting Track3D like? Was there pushback from teams?

The key is ease of use. I think back to my earlier statement, how Track3D was built in the field, by the field. 

The Track3D team had meetings every Friday to discuss. They’d say, “Hey, these are some of the things that we saw this week with the product, is this a user error or a software glitch?” 

It was very effective. And not only them engaging with us and listening to some of these pain points that we had, but then really isolating beyond best practice and addressing any fixes that needed to be made.

As a result, it’s field first. It had to be a solution where you did not have to have a master’s degree in software, you didn’t have to have nine modules of training to figure it out.

That’s the thing we noticed right away. Its ability, once it got into the field, it didn’t take much onboarding to get it going on a project. Obviously, there had to be some best practices instilled by the project leadership, and really within that, the discipline to go and act on that playbook. 

But what we realized once we got it to our people, it was very easy to use and very intuitive.