Interview with Erez Dror: Why was Genda Developed?
Chere Lucett:
Hi, I'm Virginia Lucett, VP of Marketing for Genda, and I have with me Erez, our CEO and co-founder of Genda as well. And we're going to talk a little bit about why Genda, why now, and what kind of waste we're really focused on for construction. And so, Erez, introduce yourself.
Erez Dror:
Thank you, Chere. So, hi, I'm Erez Dror. I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Genda. We will talk about Genda later on, but I'll start with the introduction of myself. I've been in the construction industry for the last 13 years. I started my way as a labeler. I was building single family homes, fell in love with the industry and that's what I decided to do for the rest of my professional career. Since then I got the privilege of working in several positions in the industry. I was an assistant super, I got to be a structural engineer, be manager, a project manager and at the same time, I went to the academic side of things and I've done a Bachelor's and Masters in Civil Engineering. And my Master topic was about lean construction and how can we improve flow in the construction industry, so we can improve productivity at the end of the day. It correlated quite well with my experience in the field.
Erez Dror:
So as an assistant super, it was quite a challenging task. One of my first responsibilities was to walk around the site and just write on a piece of paper what's happening on site and then report to my super, because he needed to make the decisions on what test are we going to do tomorrow. So practically all day I was walking with a residential project and I was looking for the crews. It was hard to find them because there were quite a few location and I was writing down, we have seven concrete guys on the sixth floor doing that, we have one dozer in the basement, they had taken out dirt because we were building an underground parking lot. And putting aside the fact that it was not a very interesting job, by the time I got back to my super, the data was already not relevant, most of it.
Chere Lucett:
What if somebody stepped out or like you said, the time had already passed.
Erez Dror:
Exactly that. I had no idea, it wasn't like a confined site with access control or anything like that. Definitely we didn't have technology. It was all done in Excel sheets and the MS project, the big Gantt chart, which nobody understands and reads. And that was the challenge because I was responsible of gathering the data. So my boss can make the decisions. I knew I'm not bringing the correct data in the right time and a hundred percent covered. And then he made decisions, which weren't very relevant and obviously test floor delayed, things that we thought are happening didn't happen, putting aside the quality side of things. It was chaotic, every construction site I've been working since then, and then it hit me.
Chere Lucett:
I was just going to say, I guess you were actually going right to it. How did that feel as somebody who's having to walk the site all day, was that the best use of your time and your skillset? Number one. And then number two, when you kind of had to give data that actually wasn't as usable as you were hoping, that had to have felt a little pointless and frustrating?
Erez Dror:
I felt stupid, to be honest. You feel like you're working hard. I was a soldier before, like every Israeli before, starting my career in the construction industry and in the army, you do what you were told to do. So I was doing what I was told to do, but then it feels pointless because the data you bring is, in many cases, useless. And it's very, very frustrating because you work hard, but then you don't get the results and you get blamed for not getting the results and the product is not performing well. If I knew that I would work hard, but it'll affect that, the bottom line, I would've done that happily, but you know that you're missing and you're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but you have no idea what's happening, you don't know what you don't know, but you know you don't know a lot of things and that's very frustrating.
