Product Update Q2 2024

The following article is a summary of the key notes spoken about in Built Intelligence's most recent Quarterly Product Roadmap Webinar.

This article contains the following topics:

• A Busy Start to 2024...
• Feedback
• Academy Recap
• Focus on eLearning
• What's Under Construction
• FastDraft Recap
• FastDraft Last Quarter Notes - All Users
• FastDraft Roadmap
• Video Recording

A Busy Start to 2024...

Built Connections Conference 2024

We recently hosted our annual Built Connections Conference in Bristol with our headline sponsor, Foot Anstey. It was a really great day with some really great speakers!

If you were unable to attend we are looking to add this content to our YouTube channel, and also our Academy, so you'll be able to go back and watch some of the fantastic presentations!

We heard from speakers such as Bob Cummins, who gave a really interesting presentation about how behavioural science can be our ally in shaping the actions we want to see, particularly in NEC contracts and collaborations. We also heard from our own Managing Director, Chris Corr, who gave us some tips and tricks on how to implement X29 Climate Change into your contracts. 

Please do take the time to see these talks as they bcome available, which will be very shortly!

Feedback

We absolutely value your feedback, and we're really passionate about ensuring our products deliver you the best user experience. You may well recieve one of these:

...or perhaps one of these:

They go out for both FastDraft and Academy. We really want to make sure you're confident in giving us a 10! If you do receive one of these questionnaires, please do take the time to rate us - if you don't feel you can give us a 10, please give us a feedback. We're listening!

Academy Recap

This section will look at what we have been working on in Academy recently. We release updates on Academy on a 4 week cycle which you can find here. 

Some new Academy features that have taken place recently include:

eLearning Content

We have recently launced new eLearning:

• JCT D&B Fundamentals (we'll talk more about this here)
• How AI is Regulated in UK Financial Services
• Tips to Maximise Social Value Outcomes Through Procurement

Webinars

We recently aired the following webinars:

• An overview of Risk Management (Part 1 & Part 2) - hosted by William Brown, of Fortfield & Brown.
• FastDraft Masterclass - Compensation Events

If you have a licence with us and are one of our premium users, you can access all of the above on-demand. 

Academy Features

You will have noticed when you get your email notifications, and when you log into the Platform, that your overdue items, or items tht need attention, have moved into a new section. We've created this section, 'Needs Your Attention' to highlight any outstanding eLearning you may have.

Focus on eLearning

JCT Design & Build 2016 Fundamentals

The JCT Design & Build contract is one of the most popularly used contracts. Our new Academy eLearning has been designed to explain the key aspects of the JCT Design & Build contract, and how the contracts are set up and implemented. 

If you have a premium account with us, you can enrol yourself onto the course. 

The course consists of 21 steps, and takes about 11 hours (depending on your reading speed). 

As with all of our eLearning, once you get started on a module you will be able to see the title, completion rate, and granular breakdown of each chapter on the left-hand side of the page. You will be shown the Learning Objectives for each module, and as you proceed through the course you will be presented with short quizzes and flashcards to enhance your learning.

Here at Built Intelligence we work and collaborate with industry experts to deliver our content. In this case, this course was produced with Steven Evans, who is a construction professional with lots of experience, and Chris Corr, Built Intelligence's Managing Director. 

If you haven't got a licence with us, there is a trial version of this course so you can try it out and see how it works for you. See here for more details. 

What's Under Construction

New eLearning courses

• NEC4 Facilities Management Contract
• FIDIC Red Book Fundamental
• FIDIC Silver Book Fundamentals

New webinars

• NEC4 Writing Good Scope
• NEC4 ECC Disallowed Costs
• Putting together an NEC4 contract

FastDraft Recap

This section will look at what we have been working on in FastDraft recently. We release updates on FastDraft on a 2-4 week Sprint Cycle which you can find here. 

PowerBI Analytics

PowerBI is a prebuilt set of reports emedded into FastDraft, with comprehensive filtering capabilities. It is there to enhance and provide a more comprehensive reporting tool, as well as our already embedded Aggregated Reports.

We are slowly rolling PowerBI out to our customers - those with a dedicated instance can get early access, but we are looking to roll out on our Managed Services in the near future.

PowerBI dynamically adjusts so that users can only see the data they are entitled to see; for example, users will only be able to see reports about contracts that they are a user of.

FastDraft NEC In-App Coaching

Unlock your project team's potential with FastDraft In-App Contract Coaching, coming soon!

In-App Contract Coaching will provide contract type and role-based notifications for the first 30 days, first 90 days, and last 90 days of your contract. It aims to coach users with regards to NEC, for those less familiar with or new to NEC contracts. It's designed to help remind you of the things you might need to do, notifications you may need to raise, actions you may need to take within the previously mentioned timeframes of your contract.

Users will be able to enable/disable this feature based on their preference. 

FastDraft Last Quarter Notes - All Users

Master Templates

• FIDIC (if you deal with FIDIC contracts, reach out to us to discuss your requirements!)
• Version 2.5 of all templates

FIDIC

We've added some new workflows into the FIDIC Configuration:

• Green Book new Claims with Quote - to allow event awareness dates to be captured and used to calculate the quote required date
• Yellow Book Contract Price for Claims with Notice - we've added support for subsequent claims against the same claim notice, so any acceptance or assessments against the claim notice will need to be deducted from the previously agreed or determined impacts on the current cost, completion, or any secondary dates, and replace these with a new cumulative impact from the latest accepted quote, or latest assessment.
• Client Claims with Notice workflow - most of the FIDIC contracts include a workflow that is not present in NEC or any other forms of contract: Client Claims, known as Employer Claims in FIDIC has been created for the FIDIC frameworks.

Additional items for PM and Supplier Defects

As a Supervisor or Project Manager you may like to report on the split between defects that have been closed because they were accepted, versus those that were corrected. There's a new configurable placeholder which has been added so the user is able to report on this split. Closure reason has een added, which is also available as a colum in the register, which will allow you to filter those out in the register and also the aggregated reports.

Early Warnings

New Risk Assessment tab for PMs and Suppliers

We have created a new placeholder to provide more information on the Early Warning - whether mitigated or unmitigated. This will enable reporting, as a PM or PM's line manager, on the more granular status of early warnings beyond simply whether they are open or closed. This will help prevent inappropriate behaviours (i.e. avoid people closing Early Warnings too soon). This is also required for PowerBI reporting purposes as mitigation status is currently reported as Mitigated based purely on whether or not there has been an action/owner assigned).

A new Risk Assessment tab has been added where the existing Likelihood, Severity and Priority fields will reside alongside (where specifically configured) with the new Risk Status.

A new configurable placeholder RiskStatusoptions has been added with default values Mitigated and Not Mitigated but with the option to add more statuses where considered appropriate for more granular reporting (e.g. Identified, Assessed, Transferred, Avoided, Accepted, Triggered, which could all be included in the default but marked as inactive by default).

• Where the RiskStatusoptions placeholder exists in the contract template a new dropdown will appear on the 'Risk Assessment' tab and completion will be mandatory.
• Where the RiskStatusoptions placeholder does not exist in the contract template the dropdown will not appear and the 'Risk Assessment' tab and updating of the Risk Assessment fields will be allowed without any Risk Status (i.e. even if the Risk Status is blank or null)
• 'Risk Status' has been added as an available column in all three Early Warning registers
• 'Risk Status' has been added as a column in the Early Warning aggregate report

Client Early Warnings

Under the NEC4 ALC contract, multiple companies/parties can create an Early Warning (Alliance Manager [PM], multipl partner companies [Supplier] or Client). It is now possible for the 3 parties to independently raise Early Warnings (Supplier, Project Manager and Client). In order to take advantage of the new workflow, it will first need to be added to Master Workflows and then added to a Contract template.

Client Early Warnings will appear in their own separate register and in the Master Early Warnings Register.

New PM Assessments workflow

Sometimes a clause in the contract requires a PM Assessment of something that doesn't relate to a CE and that may or may not affect the contract price. The PM should be able to issue a Project Manager's Assessment without being obligated to select a related Compensation Event and instead be able to select the relevant clause to indicate the reason for the assessment and be allowed to choose whether the assessment affects the price. This is an optional workflow that can be switched on.

Support for Multiple Currencies on a single contract

We have created a new workflow to cater for contracts that may have prices in multiple currencies We are still adding additional features to this workflow. Plesae have a look at our support article for further detail. https://support.builtintelligence.com/hc/en-gb/articles/17542561352093-How-to-manage-Secondary-Prices-Multiple-Currencies

Enhancement to contract dashboard breakdown

After the introduction of the PM Assessment workflow, the new assessment values will now be shown on the dashboard and updated accordingly.

FastDraft Roadmap

Exporting Contracts (expanded to Site Admins)

A new feature that is currently only available to Built Intelligence will go live soon; the ability to 'Export' a contract. In the Contract Overview, there will be an 'Export' button next to the Contract State. This schedules a zip file to be exported overnight, and will provide a spreadsheet register of workflows, a pdf of notifications, plus any attachments added to notifications. This will save you having to do it manually, and you will be able to find the export in the Downloads page under Analytics in the left-hand navigation panel.

If you'd like to know more about Exporting a contract or are interested in exporting your contracts, please contact support@builtintelligence.com 

Enhanced action reminders

All workflows where it is relevant to have a reply will have a reply timescale, but there are several additional scenarios where you've got scheduled tasks which we are looking to support better so that they will also appear in your action reminders. This includes:

• Schedule Tasks - Paymet Applications/Certificates/Programme Submissions, etc.
• Actions arising from instructions
• Manually assigned actions
• Support mutual agreement to extend deadlines (currently only supported for CEs)

Support for X1 - Inflation

Quite often we get requests for the capability to uplift the price on a contract based on inflation, for those who use the option X1 in their contracts. The PM Assessments workflow, as mentioned previously, will include this capability. We're currently looking into updating all of our Master Templates to update all relevant clauses for the PM Assessments workflow, which will include X1, but if this is something you require now, please get in touch by emailing support@builtintelligence.com 

Setting E-Mail preferences at Contract level

Some users have mentioned they would like the flexibility to set their email preferences at a Contract level - at the moment you can set your preferences to either not receive any emails from FastDraft, or to not receive emails where you were the sender of the notification, and these preferences apply to all of your contracts. We will be looking to extend this functionality so you can set these preferences at a Contract level. 

New Templates - NEC4 TSS and NEC4 FMS

We've received some recent demand to cater for the NEC4 TSS (Term Service Subcontract) and NEC4 FMS (Facilities Management Subcontract). We will be creating new templates for these contracts soon. 

PowerBI Reports

We're introducing the capability to be able to export PowerBI Reports. When it goes live it will enable you to export all pages of the report, which will be filtered to your specific view. The length of time it takes to download will depend on the extent of the data in the report. You will have an Exports Download menu where you can download a copy of the report as a PDF file or a PowerPoint so you can share it with others in your organisation where appropriate. 

Once this capability is live we will look to extend it so that you can download selected pages of a report, and the ability to customise a report before it is exported. 

Integration Hub

With our new Integration Hub, users will be able to connect multiple platforms together. You can send project data to third-party software and apps, such as:

• Productivity software like Outlook, SharePoint, Teams
• Common data environments like ViewPoint, Aconex, and Asite
• Financial systems like COINS, QuickBooks, SAGE, or SAP
• Scheduling tools like Project Online and Primavera Cloud

You can use software like Power Automation or Zapier to receive a trigger from FastDraft that will prompt another software to perform an action, or vice versa.

The Integration Hub opens up a massive potential for lots of use cases - if it sounds like something you might be interested in, please get in touch and speak to our Support Team by emailing support@builtintelligence.com 

Video Recording