Building It Right: Training, Torque, and Quality in Hyperscale Data Center Delivery | Work Done Right with Dale Jennings

Wes 

Today’s guest is Dale Jennings, Executive Vice President at Fulcrum Reliability Systems. Dale has an extensive experience ranging from nuclear operations, mission critical training programs, and some of the most complex infrastructure projects in North America. 

Now at Fulcrum, Dale brings a true mission critical level of precision and discipline to hyperscale data center commissioning, refinery safety programs, and industrial controls. At Fulcrum, he’s helped build a culture centered on operational excellence technical rigor, and most importantly, people-first leadership. Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale

Thanks Wes, I appreciate being on.

Wes 

Yeah, great to talk with you! We’ve talked a couple of times in the past and you have a very interesting background to say the least. So I’d like to dive into that a little bit to begin with about how it is that you started in the industry and how you made your way into really what you’re doing now with Fulcrum working primarily in that mission critical space.

Dale

I think it’s a very similar probably background to a lot of the folks in the industry at the beginning of my career in that there are a lot of Navy Nukes and I started out as a Navy Nuke. But then I took a path that was that was a little bit different. I spent most of my adult life in the commercial nuclear industry and started our own, with some other principals, started our own nuclear training company to train across the country. And we exited that via an acquisition from a publicly held company in 2014. And I actually went on a non-compete for five years with nothing to do.

And so in 2019, I got a phone call for some folks in the industry asking if I could put together a small team and come up and provide some electrical quality inspections on some gear. And that’s how we got started in the industry.

Wes 

Oh wow! So you started, you were re-emerging into, effectively into the workforce after having a few years and…

Dale

Right, right, was actually planning until – I got the phone call – I was planning on going back to what I know, and never re-entered that workforce. Just blossomed as we came into this industry because it was such a target-rich environment.

Wes 

Well, yeah, especially right place, right time by the sounds of it. Also right on that kind of front end of this AI boom and data center boom that we’re all experiencing at the moment. So you really, so you started off nuclear submarines, right? With the Navy, you got out of the Navy, you worked around nukes for a while longer, right?

Dale

I did, I got my license at a nuclear plant in North Carolina. To have to operate a nuclear reactor, you have to be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And I got my license back in the early 90s at a nuclear plant in North Carolina. And, you know, I’d already spent so much, it’s called sitting in the box, just sitting there staring at things that aren’t supposed to move. What a pretty boring existence for me. You know, I couldn’t do it for a lifetime. 

But so then I transferred to the training environment and I got certified by the Institute for nuclear power operations to train. That just makes you kind of mobile within the industry because there’s requirements for training all over the place. Internal staffing generally doesn’t handle it many, many times. So there’s consulting and contract teaching is certainly a need in that industry. So I entered it and eventually started my own company to support that need. And then once again, exited it 10 years later. Yeah.

Wes 

Got it, that all makes sense. that brings us to now what you’re doing with Fulcrum. For those folks who might not be as familiar with Fulcrum, could you describe a little bit about what it is that y’all do, the markets that you serve, and kind of the approach that you’re taking there?

Dale

Sure, we provide quality and commissioning services. We generally are attached to the GC, but we work very often directly with the client. We work with the client generally at the integrator facilities, providing direct eyeballs on fasteners, essentially quality inspections.

And we perform that same task at the sites, the construction sites as well. And we like to take it all the way through the L3 process. And we like to get it energized and tested. And then we will assist the folks coming in, the client, generally will come in for L4, L5, and we assist them all the way. These milestones almost become targets for us and we want to hit them. Because they’re going to ask you back. The more times you hit their milestones, they’re going to ask you back. And so whatever we can, the answer is always yes. We find a way to say yes.

Wes 

Right. So we have a lot of listeners who are in the energy space, oil and gas. Can you describe just a little bit better about maybe what is L2, L3, L4 in data center commission?

Dale

Just construction phases, generally broken down into five phases. First one, L1, would be your factory acceptance and witnessing of an asset. And then it gets on a truck or a train or a barge and then it arrives on site and you do your receipt inspections and your construction related activities. That’s all L2. That’s where the meat of the quality inspection would occur.

L3 would be pre-functional asset style testing, make sure it run it through its paces, make sure that it as an asset works. L4 then would be testing the asset within its system so that it works as intended as a system and not just an asset. And then L5 is really generally just loss of all-site power scenarios, either temporary losses of individual divisions of power or extended loss of both divisions where all of the diesels have to fire back to fire up and repower all of the existing load.

Wes 

Yeah, that all makes sense and thanks for going through that explanation there. I guess curious in my mind, so you’re really focusing obviously like you were saying all in the quality and commissioning space and that there there’s almost two competing interests that are going on right now in the data center market and they should be going hand in hand but it doesn’t always kind of work like that in everybody’s mind because we have different folks with different vested interests. 

And what I’m saying is there’s the demand to get these things built right now. And there’s the demand to get them built right. So how is it that, know, whenever you’re going into these facilities, how are you keeping, I guess, this balance between the eye on getting work done now and getting work done in the best way possible? How do you balance that demand for speed and precision?

Dale

Yeah, it’s not difficult in many respects and in others it’s impossible. So we can only control the things that we have control of. And one of the things is like the specs, the specs between the site specifications and say the integrator project specifications, they don’t line up. So we can expect the gear to be a problem when it arrives, in that, just joint pack installations on busway. If they use, if the integrator uses all the margin, there’s no margin left when it gets to the site. And then you’re just breaking the connection they made at the integrator facility. So there’s that communication thing there. 

And then there’s other things that we can control. We can control the knowledge of our own inspectors. We provide training and then we can, and that is really kind of cool because our clients have seen the effectiveness of our training, both on a weekly basis, a monthly basis. Bringing them all here. I’m sitting in one of our training facilities in Omaha now. 

And so now they’ve asked us to provide torque training, BIM training to the entire workforce on the site. And I think it’s imperative if we want to get that velocity, we’ve to take these young folks and train them and they’re yearning for it. And we have that skill set, obviously. So I think that really, you can have a modular design, but you want a modular workforce too, and you have to train it. And it doesn’t need to be beyond the tasks that you’re going to perform. So it’s a very targeted training.

Wes

So that makes sense. And I guess just to dig down a little bit deeper into that in the spirit of, why would we then provide the training? Because something that I’ve heard from contractors in the past, even if it’s working across different industries, is, well, I’m hiring a journeyman. I expect them to be a journeyman. I shouldn’t have to tell them how to do X, or Z. 

It’s all well and good, but it’s the reality where we’re living, I suppose, right? Is it really looking at emphasizing something like the on tool training to prevent issues later? Is that really what it’s largely around is just kind of issue mitigation, issue prevention to prevent the rework? I guess, is that where your logic is?

Dale

Well, a journeyman has minimum proficiencies possibly. A journeyman with 15 years of experience should have beyond minimum proficiencies. But we’re getting a lot of new journeymen. So to say they should know, I think that’s kind of a stretch. You don’t know everything once you get certified. A pilot doesn’t have experience once he gets a pilot license. He has a pilot license. And that experience is just as valuable as the license itself.

So right now I would say there’s a large majority of our workforce that doesn’t have a lot of experience, doesn’t know how to respond probably in less damaging ways. And I don’t mean equipment damaging, maybe damaging to the process. Then they would if they had experience. They’ll take action. That’s what most people want to do. When the best thing we could do is stop, because we’re going to end up doing rework. They don’t have the experience. We practice human performance tools with our folks.

STAR is directly stolen from the nuclear industry. We STAR, that means Stop, Think, Act, Review during your human interactions every time. Just take a moment and perform these four things please. And then don’t proceed in the face of uncertainty. Just come see somebody who has experience. That’s helped us stay out of trouble because it is, that’s ubiquitous throughout our entire organization. We try not to go backwards.

Wes 

That makes sense. And you know, you said it in there also that like people really are well intended whenever they’re bias toward action, right? Hey, they messed something up. The immediate thought or desire is, well, I’m going to go fix it. That’s a good thing. Like that, to have that motivation and that drive, we shouldn’t, I guess, punish that, but we should understand maybe that’s not always the right solution. We should take a step back first, assess maybe ask a question or two, and then move forward in a more methodical approach. So love that you touched on that and then you also said that you do similar trainings for your quality and commissioning personnel as well. Is that right?

Dale

We do. Torque is a big one for us because these modular designs, I think the ultimate goal is really just to, they show up on site and you connect them together. So the connection itself ends up being the most important thing on site. Whatever kind of fastening action that is to connect two things together. They could be welded, they could be bolted, whatever.

That’s where we really provide a lot of emphasis to our inspectors. Torque and torque review of the paperwork. Because at the end of the day, our work product as quality inspectors, is paperwork. You don’t get to go home and say, boy, look what I built today. You really just look at what I laid my eyes on today. It’s in my daily logs, my narrative report, and my quality checklist. And it really can be disheartening if you think that you really, where’s my work product? What did I get done today? So that’s something they have to get over.

Wes 

Yeah, it’s just kind of part of the job a lot of the times. You know, I ask the question because I’m thinking about what I’ve seen out of some inspectors that again I think are well intended oftentimes. That maybe they don’t know what they don’t know and then they’ll start writing up punch list items against what they think, not necessarily what they know.

And just because you’re certified as an inspector in some regard doesn’t mean that you actually do know everything. And I don’t think we should expect people to. So we should really train them to the standards that we have to avoid unnecessary rework. Because that’s, I guess, another angle where it could happen. 

So it’s great that you guys are taking that proactive approach there as well to just ensure that everybody’s competent to the standards, right? That’s ultimately the goal is each project is a little bit different. And we should take the time to train people to do the things that are specific for this project.

Dale

Well, each campus, each building on a campus is different because they’re having lessons learned. They’re modifying the second building and the process within that building. By the time we get to the sixth building on a campus, it may not look anything like what we were doing on the first building because there’s been an evolution. And we see that all the time. So I think the folks showing up, or I could agree, they want to do a good job. And they’re not trying, no one’s trying to make a mistake. I don’t think they’re sabotaging the builds or anything like that. 

I think we just, we go too fast without knowing and we don’t provide enough oversight. And if you want to shift left and speed the thing up, I think the workforce has to be modular and the expectations themselves then become standardized. And because we don’t create a standard, we only enforce it. 

So we’re going to read the project’s specifications and that spec becomes our minimum acceptable standard. We don’t if you go above it, we could care less. It just has to meet this thing and if it says bolt one of every you know, ensure one of every six bolts on a flange is torqued. Well, all right, give us one bolt. That’s all the client wants. We’ll do it. We will suggest and recommend otherwise, but in the end of the day, we work for the client.

Wes

Yeah, that’s funny. You had brought up earlier kind of the deliverable item for a lot of these QC and commissioning agents is really just the documentation that work was inspected or done appropriately. I guess I wonder, here’s like how much documentation through relating it back to what we talking about earlier, like kind of L1 through L5. 

What’s the typical like load that we have for documentation just out of my own curiosity for each of those phases?

Dale

Well, I think that every commissioned asset at a minimum is going to have a receipt seat inspection. And a lot of times that is verified boat wrap in place because we’re not going to get up on a truck.

And a lot of times the clients don’t reject anything regardless of what it looks like. They just accept it because assets are valuable and they’re not sending them back so someone else can get them regardless of whether or not all the breakers and relays are missing in it. And just got pelted, you know, by gravel from Texas to Omaha for the last 800 miles. They still take it. 

And then so the receipt inspection, you start your paperwork then. And if you’re doing it inside an environment, online type deal using application, that’s not that bad, right? It’s when the paper starts coming out. Torque was a perfect example. It creates a very large burden on our quality assurance team to gather all these torque logs, verify they’re accurate, that the torque that’s recorded is within the allowable that’s on the torque sheet itself, on the checklist as well. 

That ends up being a huge burden for quality assurance team. And then, it’s really crazy, it starts out electronic, they’ll print it in paper. They’ll fill it out. Then we have to review so then guess what we’re gonna scan it and put it up and upload I mean, it’s so 1990 all over again drives me insane. So looking for those things that can provide velocity now, they’re not hard. They’re out there.

Wes

Yeah, right. I guess, know, obviously, to disclose to the audience, we have a relationship. Fulcrum is utilizing the Cumulus platform in certain areas. But I guess with that, without having it just being necessarily a shameless plug, you know, what all solutions are you seeing out there to help aid in this space? Because it is an annoying space, right? Like it’s senseless. Like you said, it’s doing things like it’s 1990 to just print things out, fill it out on paper, then scan it back in. It’s a lot of administrative burden.

It’s a lot of just changing hands for no apparent reason. So I guess just, you know, what all out there are there for options that y’all are saying again, in the spirit of how are we balancing the application of the standards as a floor, not a ceiling, and then delivering the highest quality product faster. If that’s, if that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do.

Dale

I think that the big products out there, starting with how you’re going to manage the project, how you’re going to identify issues, how you’re going to put your submittals, right? The big three, I guess, that we see are Autodesk’s BIM, CX Alloy, and Procore.

And but downstream from there is where we can get a lot of project velocity as well. And, you know, I didn’t mean to plug y’all, but we are excited.

Wes

I definitely appreciate it. I do.

Dale

We’re excited that we’re saving so much time. I’m not lying. But obviously, Cumulus provides torque. They do have a Bluetooth wrench and stuff. But for us, just the electronic torque sheets themselves are a time savings. Then autoLOTO, we’ve been reviewing autoLOTO and we think there’s some savings there as well to get some project velocity. Beyond that…

Those so far are kind of the major ones we’re seeing. Can you think of any Wes beyond those that we use?

Procore, CX, Alloy, BIM, you know, Cumulus product right now and autoLOTO. And I think it’s a space where a lot of folks, there’s opportunity for nerds to create a solution.

Wes 
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And trust me, we’re working more and more in that space. We have the nerds. We’re definitely driving there.

Dale
Yeah, I wish we had a nerd.

Wes

Hahaha, no kidding! It’s actually encouraging for me to hear over and over how much it is that torque is a big problem that you’ll have to be honest, because it is an area, as you know, that we have a solution that’s out there. 

So it’s great to hear that we’re helping you all to solve a problem that is providing value back to the projects. Honestly, I say that as somebody who’s deployed this on projects and also as somebody who’s had a product for everybody who knows and listens. So that’s great. It’s really great to hear that we’re helping to solve a big problem for y’all.

I guess drilling back into the issues here, I’d be curious if you have any real world examples of instances where maybe rework a topic that we’ve talked about quite a bit already, where that has caused delays in the project or could have obviously just been avoided out of taking just a little bit more time, maybe taking the STAR approach as you were talking about earlier.

Dale

I can think of several, but offhand, I would share this with you. Our very, very first building and our very, very first asset, I won’t tell you the vendor, but it’s a very, very large piece of switchgear supporting 30 megawatts, right? And there were two divisions of power, so there’s two of these supporting the power coming into the buildings at 30 megawatts a pop.

And we had a small team of three people performing a point to point on the very first piece of switch gear. And at the end, as we’re doing the control sections, the entire DC section had reverse polarity. And there was a placard in it that said, reverse polarity will cause MOSFET damage to relays.

And the entire thing was wired wrong. It was huge. And we couldn’t believe what we were seeing, but there was two of them. So we’d go to the other one and go, well, one of these has to be wrong. So we just started documenting. We documented 81 issues the first day on miswires. And this is why we were called, because the person that asked us to come up, he was afraid that these things were probably going to be wired for it. They were wired very poorly.

And the vendor themselves didn’t believe us. And this causes delays. And then we just solved it very simply. Let’s go look at the other one. And then you’d select which one you want to be right and make the drawings match that. And then we’ll write the issues on the other one. Yeah. So, lots of things like that. Not, to that extent, cause that was probably that made a name for us. That was a very, very expensive piece of gear with swipes or relays all over it.

And they’re not necessarily inexpensive. And the lead time alone, I don’t think it’s the cost of the components of the assets any longer that matter. It really is the time to get them.

Wes

Yeah, to go back and remediate the issue, right? You there were 81 of them with reverse polarity. That’s probably not 100 % of them. There was some that I’m sure you had to go back, put hands on again and…

Dale

Well, that would represent about 5%.

Right, so exactly. So to go back and to do the inspection of all of these, open up the aperture to inspect more and more and more, because you get what you inspect, not what you expect, right?

Wes

And then to remediate the issues. What did it take? How much time did that delay the project overall if you had to estimate?

Dale

If I had to estimate, the vendor’s tech probably took a week to fix those. And we didn’t know at the time that we could offer our assistance in find and fix type assistance, which makes it go a lot faster. So we do offer that now. It wasn’t in our contract. We were just supposed to identify the issues, turn them over to the vendor.

And obviously our first asset at our first building, they’re pretty immature in the process actually. But now we know when in suggesting early on during pre-con activities, hey, if we find these conditions, do you want us just to document and fix them to keep the thing going? So I don’t have to come back after a vendor comes and fixes it. And then I have to do a re-inspect so that I can close out the identified issue, take a photograph possibly and upload all that. If we just take care of it all at once while we’re there.

So we make that offering now, but we didn’t used to. Cause we didn’t know we had the option. We thought we had to be a third-party vendor that didn’t touch anything. So now they’re realizing we have a skill. mean, most of us have either been electronics technicians in the Navy or electricians, commercial or nuclear. So yeah, it’s worked out I reckon we’re starting to learn more and more every day and our capabilities are broad. So we just constantly doing a needs analysis, see where we can help.

Wes

That’s interesting. That’s something that I usually like. I think just like you probably had seen before, I’ve never really seen the inspection group, whether it’s internal within the organization or a third party or what have you, never seen them also be the ones to go forward and fix. 

It’s good that you are, like you’re saying, it’s just wasted cycles. We could be so much further ahead if we say, hey, all right, we know this is wrong. It’s not conformed to the spec.

How do I know? You we’ve gone through the trainings, we’ve reviewed the specifications and standards, we know, let’s just fix this right now, rather than having a big debate about it and who’s gonna do it and trying to schedule it all in. That’s excellent, glad to hear it.

Dale

Yeah, if it’s agreed upon early on, a good example is cutbacks. 

Integrator cutbacks can sometimes get fairly sloppy. And so if we disagree upon wire cutbacks, they can’t exceed a quarter inch. Makes it very simple and if it does exceed a quarter inch, we’ll go ahead, recut, retrim, re-land, perform a quality inspection, a third party quality inspection, meaning a second inspector has to watch that and sign off on it, even if we do it. So that there’s always, there are always four eyeballs looking at things.

Wes 
Yeah, excellent.

Dale
Trust but verify.

Wes

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so a lot of the work that Fulcrum is doing focuses on, again, quality commissioning for hyperscale down centers. 

So can you share just a bit more about how it is that your team is ensuring that the contractors are installing the original kit properly the first time? What tools are you using? What have you found to be most useful in ensuring that we’re getting that work done right the first time?

Dale

I think the one thing is training. For instance, we just worked with 3M, such that we now have five 3M termination trainers in Omaha. So we can train people on the proper methodology of terminating a medium voltage cable using 3M kits. 

And we’re always looking for those opportunities because I really think most of the frustrations the client sees rework, it really is just lack of training. And that training, you can take a 15 year journeyman electrician. Each site expectations are different. And if they default towards what they know, it could be the exact opposite of what this client’s requested. Not in the NEC code, but maybe in terms of practicing how torque verification is going to occur or how the torque marks are going to be striped onto the actual bolt or nut or whatever they’re doing. 

So a lot of variance in each building, each campus. And just because you have 15 years of experience, are they being trained to go into project specifications and have it, hey, here’s what we expect each site. And usually it doesn’t happen to the level that we would like to see, but we’re not in control. Once again, we’re just the quality inspectors working for the same client they are.

And we love to get them involved in our training too. We like to invite them as well because we will go over construction expectations from the client. They’re not ours. They’re what we know the client wants. And they don’t get to hear that. You don’t bring your 80 electricians or your mechanics in a room and go, all right, everyone, this is exactly what we need to do. And then give them a test on it. And if they don’t pass the test, we get to do it. Well, that’s how we do it. You have to pass the test.

But you can see why. I mean, everyone’s struggling for folks. You fail the test, they’re not getting rid of you if you know how to terminate. But…

Wes 

No, that totally makes sense. Cause it’s one of those things you hear all the time on project. It’s, well, this is how we did it on the last job. Well, we’re not on the last job anymore. And I don’t blame you for saying it because you probably you’re exposing that you don’t know how we’re supposed to do it on this job. 

So like you’re saying really just reinforcing, at least putting it in their hands, the right information for how it is that this project needs to be executed on. think that totally makes sense. 

I’m curious what sort of.. you know, what does the labor force look like right now? The folks that you’re getting in training. Do we have the level of 15 year journeymen on these projects or are we seeing a younger workforce entering it?

Dale

If there’s a 15 year journeyman, he’s at least a superintendent. He’s not turning wrenches because it is a very young and inexperienced workforce. But that doesn’t, I’m not saying that they’re dumb. They’re young and inexperienced. Now let’s train them up. There’s a lot of good folks out there. We just want, I want to get my hands on them and show them, you know, certain things that I think they’re not seeing. They just run them through some basic industrial behaviors. Communications being the biggest one, you know.

That can be frustrating because folks don’t know the importance of possibly just great communications when they’re writing things up so that everyone at that afternoon meeting in the commissioning trailer can understand exactly what the issue is. They’ve already gone home for the day, their phone is up and not picking it up and they wrote a non-conforming condition on an asset or something, not our guys, someone else. Because our guys know, you know, we review our issues every day and if there’s any, you know…

Any question as to what the problem is that well, first of all, they should have provided a photograph of the problem, but then a write up and we encourage our folks to use AI because if they’re not, you know, not everyone’s the greatest writer in the world. So we’re like, Hey, put your ideas into Chat GPT tell them what the problem is and then spit it out. It’s our reports are wonderful when they do that.

Wes

So at Fulcrum, you really have obviously a heavy, heavy emphasis on training. And in that, you you’re effectively giving all of your personnel the tools that they need in order to succeed, right? You’re really empowering the team and providing that kind of continuous improvement effort there. 

So I guess I’m curious, like, how do you train? How do you motivate the contractors, pardon me, to prioritize quality in their installations and what role does this play in building data centers as fast as possible? Without sacrificing those standards, maintaining that floor of the base set of standards and requirements.

Dale

I think that’s the problem. I don’t think the workforce understands or knows the standards. So that’s why training is so important to these folks and they’re yearning for it. Like I said, we have a procedure on how to use procedures.

Wes

Right.

Dale

Because it’s, and then we have 21 core procedures which starts with project overview, set up and execution and ends on organizational effectiveness. And then there’s 20 admin procedures. Then we have everything mechanical and electrical. 

Which, you know, I don’t want to downgrade anything or seem like we’re cool, but I mean, there’s in reality, electricity meets cold fluid at a computer in a data hall. So essentially I see three systems, the computer system, the electrical system, and the cooling system.

Hey, a nuclear plant is 90 systems highly integrated with the most extreme logic and interlocks you can imagine. So this isn’t hard for us. It really isn’t. We can get our arms around pretty quick. What we can’t get our arms around is the unknown, you know, there’s a lot of that. So we’re figuring out what we don’t know as we go to because it wasn’t presented to us. We didn’t see it anywhere. No one’s mentioned it. And all of a sudden, poof, here’s something we don’t know.

Wes

Right, like you’re saying, know, lot of the folks, just don’t necessarily know that there is a spec or if there is a spec, what it is for this individual project. You know, a lot of these folks, haven’t really worked a whole lot of projects in the past. 

So what I’ve seen has helped is where you can put as much information kind of in their hands through training or just kind of by breaking the bits down and putting that in their hand as they go kind of step by step through the process of completing whatever the procedure says.

Do you see that as well, just making sure that they do have access to the right information? Does everybody have that access? What sort of issue are you seeing there?

Dale

As good as you can get on a very fast moving site, seems like there’s lags. Certain vendor drawings sometimes lag behind the asset themselves. RFIs can take a minute, things like that. But kind of if…

Here’s what I see with most of the folks out there. They don’t have training departments within their companies in the manner that I would expect. And it’s because they don’t know like basic structure of a training organization. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. 

Really, we follow what’s known as a SAT-ADDIE model. It’s a militaristic model that adopted by airlines and nuclear plants. But, and it does get kind of cumbersome. So we just stripped all of what we call SLR, Silly Little Rules. We stripped all of that out and took the good. 

So, you know, it’s the SAT-ADDIE model stands for systematic approach to training using five steps, essentially. The A in ADDIE is analyze. So and that’s what we’re doing constantly. We’re doing the first part of analysis is doing needs analysis on the site. Walk around and what do we need?

And then after you see the need, now we have to solve that need through training. So we’ll do a job and task analysis on that need. Right. And the output of a job analysis is a list of tasks to perform the actual get the outcome you want.

And then we’ll go through those each individual tasks and we’ll get elements of the tasks so that we can create training on it. 

Then the D is we’ll design the training and develop it. The D isn’t necessarily what folks think. It’s a lot of times we create mockups for joint pack and busway training. It ends up being way better than a two hour training session in a classroom. This way we have 30 minutes in the classroom talking about a joint pack just being nothing more than a kind of a fancy splicing device to connect conductors together. 

And then we go into a lab and we have all the different joint packs there. We can insert them and they can see the difficulty, how they position their body in a scissor lift, how it’s heavy, right? Some of them are heavy. you know how you’re going to have to position your body to get leverage and get the joint pack inserted, establishing critical dimensions. 

So you follow this process of analyze, design and develop. Then you get to how you implement it. And then the last one is evaluate. You’re constantly trying to make it better, constantly providing feedback. They don’t know it’s that easy and they’re not supposed to. I did it for 30 years. It seems easy to me. But I mean, that’s why we end up doing most of the training on the site for the general contractors.

Wes 

I think it makes sense. Like you’re saying, they’re just not set up for it oftentimes. So it’s great having that.

Dale

They’re not. They construct big buildings. They’re not trainers.

Wes 

Right, yeah, exactly. It’s great that there’s a resource out there like Fulcrum in order to kind of help streamline that process and take those lessons that have already been learned and just apply them in these different areas.

The last question that’s in my mind, Dale, is exactly on that topic. In your mind, what more can be done? there’s one solution that you would try to, I guess, push through across the entirety of the industry, what more do you think can be done industry-wide to improve the outcomes of these projects in the space of both quality and velocity?

Dale

Gosh, that’s a catch-all question. I think pre-con activities are the key. And that’s where everyone can get on board. Because so often, we’re three months into a build, we haven’t even energized the first piece of gear. But no one’s really on the same page yet three months in. 

Pre-construction activities are where we can all get alignment. And we can all work towards the same common goals. And we see that our pre-construction activities are stolen virtually every time with many of our clients. The contracts don’t get signed to the last minute. We’re deploying and we’re having to figure it out. And we’re drinking from the fire hose like everyone else. 

If we could get those pre-construction activities to create our work packages, to figure out our assets, to scope it out and figure out, okay, we’re gonna have to create scoping groups because this cable is gonna go underground. No one’s going to be able to do anything so we’ll have to analyze that to see how we’re going to energize and test the gear. We’re fortunate that we’re using standard design that doesn’t change that much. 

But now when we go to a new client and it’s all brand new, we’re on our way to Atlanta here first week in July for some 60 megawatt builds that are never seen before. But we’re getting good pre-con activity. So there’s all the drawings. We’re going to take a look at things. We’re involved. But that doesn’t always happen.

So we don’t have the fear factor that we might have. We just had to the ground running and the walls are tilting up and the gear is coming tomorrow. And by the way, are you guys available? And we have seen that before.

Wes

So you’re saying basically out of the need to move quickly, we’re not always giving ourselves the time necessary or that would really be optimal for ensuring that we’re really ready to go to site, right? That we’re ready to build whenever we go to build and just a little bit more collaboration in that pre-con phase would yield to the other end of the package.

Dale

Preparation, you know the old saying, if we could just, if we would make it sacrosanct, no one can touch these three weeks while we all get on the same page. But we don’t get that. And that’s probably pie in the sky.

Wes 

Yes.

Dale

But if we can all get on the same page, let’s do all electrical for this week. Let’s do all mechanical for this week. We’re all on the same page, the superintendent’s mechanical, superintendent’s electrical, general superintendent’s onboard. They understand how we’re do this and then how we’re gonna do the data. And three weeks is all it would take. But that is asking for a lot with these construction schedules.

Wes 

Three weeks on one of these data centers and operations is a lot of time, it’s a lot of money. So I don’t know if we can always get that, but definitely having a more established and grounded plan with all of the stakeholders, the subs, the contractor, everybody, is definitely the way to go, right? You don’t plan to fail, you fail to plan. So, it’s great.

Dale

Right. I go to an outage at any North American nuclear plant. Generally, it’s every two years. They went from 18-month cycles to 24-month cycles. So every two years, you’re going to refuel the unit. You get two years to plan that.

Two years to plan a 30 day refueling outage where thousands of people are crawling all over this place like ants. And I don’t think we need two years to perform 30 days worth of work, but 30 days should be really nice to do two years worth of work. Just flip it over, it will be valuable.

Wes 

The ratios are a little skewed there between the different activities, right?

Dale

Yeah, just sanctify those three, four weeks on the front end that there’s, if they knew how valuable they were to getting everyone on board, at least for us, we’re fortunate that we know what’s important. At least we think we know what’s important. 

Generally, a lot of folks don’t know yet. And we see it. We see it when they bring in a new commissioning agent. Maybe we only get quality and there’s a new commissioning agent. And a lot of times their jaws will just drop. ‘The client wants what?’ Yeah, no kidding. You know, we do. But here’s how you do it. So there’s some eye opening stuff that happens that you’re just not used to.

Wes 

Yeah, definitely. Well, it’s definitely a fast paced and kind of emergent field that’s growing more and more and changing every single day right now. 

So Dale, this has been a great conversation. Thank you, sir, for coming on the show and really for the work that y’all are doing at Fulcrum. And for me with getting the next generation of the labor force ready with all the training that you’re doing, I appreciate it. That’s definitely a soft spot that I have in my heart. So thank you, sir. I do appreciate the conversation.

Dale

Wes, I had a great time.

Wes 

Thank you sir. I appreciate it.

Dale

Alright, have a good day.