America’s construction industry is something of a paradox. On one hand, business is booming, with cities like Miami boasting skylines full of cranes and streets teeming with work trucks and hardhats. On the other, stakeholders must acknowledge the factors obscuring the declining productivity of today’s construction workers compared to their 1970s counterparts, highlighting the industry’s divergence from the overall productivity growth in other sectors. Not to mention, with the lingering effects of COVID-19 and related disruptions in labor and supply chains, the construction industry is in dire need of disruption. Suffolk is at the forefront of industry change, offering clients a comprehensive range of services that add value, enhance efficiency and increase productivity when planning and managing the most sophisticated building construction projects.
In an exclusive interview, The Real Deal spoke with Jay Fayette, President of East Coast of Florida for Suffolk, about the robust and innovative services his organization brings to jobsites on the East Coast and beyond.
Pioneering Innovation and Diversification
“Suffolk is a pioneer in the industry and has always been an innovator,” says Fayette, who helped establish Suffolk’s Florida arm in the 1990s and recently rejoined the firm as President of that very division. “We always look further down the road for opportunities, not just six months or a year ahead. As an organization, we see the big picture and play the long game.” Suffolk has distinguished itself from its competitors recently with a series of expansions into the investment, innovation, and design fields, each of which complements Suffolk’s core construction management business while creating new opportunities and tools that benefit not only its projects but the industry as a whole. As Suffolk Chairman, CEO and sole proprietor John Fish says, “Suffolk brings a diversified toolbox to its job sites that differentiates us in the industry and help us maintain an edge over our competition.”
Suffolk Design: Optimizing the Design Document and Construction Document Process
One of the major sources of construction delays today is design and construction documents that are lacking in completeness and coordination, which leads to an often time-consuming back-and-forth process between architects and general contractors when finalizing those documents to begin construction. Suffolk tackled this problem by founding Suffolk Design, an in-house team of twenty industry professionals, including licensed architects and one professional engineer, tasked with addressing gaps that appear in design documents during the early phases of a project, which can lead to cascading delays if left unaddressed.
“The goal of Suffolk Design is not to compete against architects, but instead to augment our Suffolk project teams earlier in the process to help ensure the documents are accurate and complete. This allows all stakeholders to seamlessly move from the design phase to the construction phase with no delays or rework,” explains Fayette. Suffolk Design has assisted on significant Suffolk projects. On the Cape Cod Healthcare Cancer Center and Cardiovascular Center project in Hyannis, Massachusetts, Suffolk Design saved the client a projected $50 million by providing the hospital a defined cost earlier in the design phase and shortening the timeframe of the entire design-build process.
Suffolk Technologies: Fostering Innovation for Safer and Smarter Construction
While Suffolk Design is aimed at augmenting the existing design and construction processes, Suffolk Technologies is a venture affiliated with Suffolk that funds and works alongside its portfolio of construction tech startups to help drive productivity and efficiency in the built world. Take, for example, one of Suffolk Technologies’ earlier investments, Newmetrix, with whom they also collaborated for R&D, sharing over 10 years worth of safety data to build the product. “It’s an AI-based predictive solution geared toward safety on our project sites,” says Fayette. “Newmetrix provided us with a predictive index about safety. It predicts a vulnerability on a given project or given task based on real data.” The tool gathers job site safety data via a smartphone app and then feeds the data into its predictive model, using its advanced algorithms to give a risk rating to jobsites, indicating how likely an incident is to occur based on conditions that have been observed to correlate with incidents in the past. Newmetrix then flags these potentially hazardous situations so project teams can take action to mitigate the risks before they can endanger workers on the job. “So, you can look at your jobs that might be leaning towards a very high probability of an incident, and then you have the opportunity to put in additional measures to minimize that risk before a safety incident can actually occur,” says Fayette.
This predictive solution for jobsite safety is just one of the many tech solutions in which Suffolk has invested and implemented thanks to its Suffolk Technologies arm; others include Moxion, a company that manufactures and operates all-electric equipment that can be rented out to contractors to provide cleaner power and WINT, a water use monitoring system that uses artificial intelligence to help detect and prevent leaks as well as distribute water efficiently among many users. Other tech solutions supported by Suffolk are working on automation and robotics as well as supply chain and manufacturing, all with the common goal of making Suffolk’s many job sites more efficient, productive and safe.
During our conversation, Fayette highlighted Suffolk’s Owner Dashboard, a tool Suffolk launched that leverages data analytics to help owners keep closer tabs on their projects. “An owner sees everything we’re doing on their project from a data standpoint,” says Fayette, “including cash flow, forecasts, design challenges, scheduling impacts, days of float, safety and other metrics all in one dashboard.” This tool provides owners with the kind of real-time oversight that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, and it provides a dramatic example of how Suffolk is bringing the construction industry into the 21st Century.
Suffolk Capital: Partnering with Developers to Help Finance Their Projects
With interest rates skyrocketing and banks becoming more selective writing new loans, Suffolk is well positioned to help developers fund their projects and help make their visions a reality. “Using Suffolk Capital, we are able to assist an owner with their financing by injecting more capital into the development so they can start their project,” Fayette notes. “There are not a lot of companies that will take that lead and become an equity partner with a client on their project. When Suffolk Capital is an equity source, our team has ‘skin in the game’ by playing the roles of investor and contractor which greatly enhances the alignment between contractor and owner. Suffolk Capital is one more tool Suffolk can deploy that provides better certainty of execution and improved predictability of success.
The same can be said of Liberty, Suffolk’s self-perform services company. “Liberty consists of approximately 1,000 employees, from talented tradespeople, laborers and carpenters to scaffold specialists, crane and equipment operators, staging experts,” notes Fayette. Liberty helps fill gaps in a project’s labor force to help the team maintain schedule and control costs. “Today, owners are feeling the impacts of the labor shortage just as contractors are feeling those effects,” remarks Fayette. “We use Liberty on the majority of our projects to minimize risk and provide a more seamless, predictable process.”
Suffolk’s integrated services and diverse business units collaborate harmoniously to add significant value for clients while fostering forward-thinking technological advancements in the built world. Suffolk delivers exceptional construction management services but also provides financing solutions, supplementary design and labor assistance, and an R&D and investment team that is helping to introduce cutting-edge technologies. The firm’s unique value proposition is changing the way buildings are financed, planned, designed and built, and it is redefining what it means to be a builder in Florida.
For more information about Suffolk, visit the website here.
This article was produced by The Real Deal’s Brand Studio Team in conjunction with Suffolk Construction. For more information about working with our Brand Studio Team please click here.