Hilti’s work on productivity and processes can reap dividends for companies who own tools, its GB Vice President Thibaud Lefebvre tells Andrew Gaved in the third of our series of articles.
Hilti believes that significant productivity gains can be made by the construction industry by cutting waste – but in this case, the waste isn’t just the material waste we often hear about, but the waste of time and money that comes through inefficient processes.
The company realised some years ago that while large construction equipment and vehicles are routinely subjected to asset management to optimise their availability, efficiency and often performance, to maximise return on an often considerable investment, the same rigour has not been applied to the tools sector. Whilst this is a natural consequence of an individual tool not being as valuable as, say an excavator, it soon became clear that with companies still having large amounts invested across total tool fleets, the cumulative benefits of improving tool management could stack up significantly.
Hilti has undertaken a significant amount of research into the daily onsite reality of tool operations and is now able to articulate the various stages where optimising operations can save costs and increase productivity for contractors and other tool users.
Its research into what it calls the ‘pain points’ for contractors found that a massive 95% of respondents had inefficient communication between the office and workers in the field, with a reliance on paper-based ordering and use of the phone, rather than a proper system.
This reliance on paper processes in turn means that equipment is often underutilised, or not in the right place at the right time, to the extent that Hilti estimates tools are idle for as much as 35% of their working life. In hard cash terms this could be worth two hours per employee per week, the company calculates – amounting to a potentially huge sum for a large company.
But by applying a suite of integrated digital services, including tracking technology, enterprise management and the onboard diagnostics of the Hilti tools themselves, the company believes it can address this idle time, thereby improving the productivity and thus the profit base.
Improving tool ‘visibility’ with better processes has a number of further benefits that might not be immediately apparent, the company adds, ranging from avoiding site downtime due to having to locate the right tool from an application, to exposure to insurance liability for not having maintenance documents available.
In financial terms, Hilti estimates a minimum saving of 20% on the cost of running a tool fleet by optimising and tracking.
Improving processes
GB Vice President Thibaud Lefebvre, who has been spearheading the digital campaign in the UK notes that with current shortages of skilled labour, improving processes is a natural step: “We have had a number of customers who almost lost money in the last fiscal year. And one of the main reasons is because they are not enough efficient in terms of processes – they have manual processes which are just too time-consuming and cost-consuming.”
And, Thibaud adds, this is a problem that is surprisingly pervasive in the construction industry: “I’m still really surprised to visit customers with 2000- 5,000 employees in the UK who are managing assets in a manual way with Excel based whiteboards.”
In practice, Thibaud says, the process begins with ‘productivity meetings’ with the management of the company, so that Hilti can present initial ideas for savings – and here the firm is confident it can identify savings for 2-3% of turnover.
“Then we visit the job sites and warehouse plans and observe a bit, so we can map out the workflows and processes,” says Thibaud, “At that point we might demonstrate some of the solutions that could be implemented. Then we have a validation meeting with the decision makers just to be sure the numbers we gathered are accurate. After the meeting, we work on the full optimised solution and we have the decision meeting.”
One of the enlightening things about these meetings, he adds, is that they often reveal long-held assumptions to be untrue:
“I’m often surprised to see so many customers using tools which are four or five years old and yet they still believe they are working as if they were new, which is not true at all. Those tools will have lost 60-70% of their initial performance.”
This inefficiency adds up with every hole drilled, he stresses, which has a huge cumulative effect. “I just don’t understand why customers are still using those old tools on job sites. If every hole drilled takes 10 seconds instead of five, that has an impact on how much you are using your labour. A decision maker might say, ‘Does five seconds matter?’, but labour is the first cost of a company.”
Reducing the cost of ownership
And where it really counts of course is in the potential savings to the bottom line that these innovations promise. Thibaud gives some compelling estimates for a typical tool customer: “If you are a company spending on average £20,000 every year on tools spent, your total cost of ownership is five times that amount per year – that includes processes, internal repairs and downtime and also operating costs and indirect costs, such as theft, et cetera. And what we observe, is we are always almost able to reduce that total cost of ownership by between 30% and 70%. So from the £100,000 annual cost of ownership, it might cost £70,000, but the company is saving £30,000 per year.”
This is before the optimisation stage kicks in – and here there is a fundamental saving, he adds. “If you are driving a full process, you will soon realise that customers have way too much equipment – because they don’t know how to track them, and then they have different battery platforms with different voltages and different brands…Can you imagine how many chargers and batteries that might mean, when you could optimise it with Nuron, which is one single platform? On top of that, the optimisation process will reduce by a further 20% the total of assets a company needs to have. So when you are calculating all the savings of everything I told you, it’s quite a substantial sum of money you can save.”
He estimates that around 70% of customers choose to go for the full suite of solution, since that is the way to leverage the best value: “If you’re not using project management software to track, to forecast and to track progress, you are losing a bit of the full power. It’s not such a big investment on top upfront.”
Thibaud notes that change management is a particularly difficult issue for companies who have grown used to time-honoured ways: “It’s not always easy for customers to change the way they work the welding for instance, or they’re using other systems.”
Savings beyond the tools
But optimising the tool fleet is not in itself enough for Hilti. Given that it manufactures a range of hardware designed to speed up installation – from fasteners to pipe support systems – the company believes that by integrating it with design software and its optimisation calculator, it can achieve as much as 50% the total cost of installation.
It is a bold claim, but one that Thibaud thinks should be eminently achievable, provided the customer fully embraces the concept: “I think it is one plus one equals three. You can have a customer who is just using the hardware side and is using our installation calculator just to optimise. Then you have the services you can use from Hilti or not and we’ll support you with design and engineering. But the last piece, when it applies, is how you connect the hardware with the services to the software?”
The software available is in itself a broad offering – ranging from BIM applications to digital twins and the like. But, stresses Thibaud, the key is to ensure that this all communicates properly with each other – and that often comes back to culture again: “Big companies often have structures that are super complex. It is something that I have I observed here in the UK: people tend to work in silos with a lot of individual KPIs and they’re not talking together across departments. So if you want to bring together the hardware services and software, it is breaking silos and I’m not sure everybody is ready for that yet…but the fact is, when the economy is not so vibrant that is when people become more open to optimising.”
The Hilti approach
Hilti’s solution consists of three distinct stages:
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Digitise
The first stage is the application of digital equipment management, using software such as Hilti ON!Track, which, the firm says, makes it easy to create a record of inventory and offers a clear structure to capture the relevant attributes for all equipment, independent of type or brand: “Many contractors have thousands of pieces of equipment – using a software solution make it easy to find, filter and sort equipment. Software solutions for equipment management also typically offer intuitive workflows to assign equipment to locations and individuals, to manage services and inspections from scheduling to documentation, and to conduct inventory checks. Solutions designed for construction also include hardware, such as robust barcodes to allow easy and reliable identification of the equipment using a smartphone.”
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Automate
The next step, Hilti says is to ‘drastically reduce the need for human process discipline’ in managing the location and activity of the tool fleets, which it achieves with a range of hardware, from active BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) tags to telematics to van gateways, which not only track the vehicle but all the tools onboard too.
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Optimise
The third stage is to leverage and analyse the data onboard the tools themselves. Hilti tools have a range of onboard sensors which allow location and use monitoring and deep dives into performance, but its latest innovation are Runtime Tags which can be fitted to anyone’s tool to provide real-time running data. By utilising this data capture with reporting programmes and using Hilti’s other services, tool owners can start to optimise their fleets, the firm notes.
See the previous articles in the series:
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