Structural Group - Brick and Mortar Streaming

Streaming Media Magazine July/August 2001 

Author(s): Max Bloom

A Blue-Collar Construction Company Nails Enterprise Streaming and Achieves Concrete Results in Demonstrating ROI.

For companies that do not have a financial stake in the success of the streaming media industry, the internal use of streaming today is generally an option, not a necessity. The question is, is it an option like leather seats and walnut trim, or more like an automatic transmission and anti-lock brakes? The former are luxuries. The latter significantly affect performance, and may even help prevent a crash. For Structural Group, a 25-year-old company based in Baltimore, streaming media has become an integral part of its core business practices, and has markedly enhanced the performance of the enterprise.
Structural Group employs 800 workers in 17 locations throughout the United States, repairing and reinforcing large concrete structures, including buildings, parking garages, industrial plants, tunnels and bridges. It completes 800-1000 projects per year, with budgets ranging from $10,000 to $7 million. Led by a visionary founder and CEO, Peter Emmons, Structural recorded revenues of $125 million last year, and has enjoyed annual growth rates of 25% - 30% for the past 10 years.
One of Emmons most farsighted innovations is Comprehensus, Structural's groundbreaking system for using streaming media to capture, archive and distribute the company's knowledge base. "A big challenge in any business is capturing information and knowledge, and making it available to others in the company," says Emmons. Because so much of its work is procedure and process intensive, Structural enjoys particular benefits from its knowledge management system.
Structural began collecting detailed text reports from the field in 1996. The next year, to more efficiently gather and store this information, Structural shifted to a video model. "The experts doing the work didn't have the time or skill to properly document the knowledge that they had learned on a particular project," says Emmons. "We realized that video could capture this information very easily." Video also allowed viewers to experience the environment and working conditions associated with each project or process.
Comprehensus' charter is best summed up in its mission statement: Create and implement a video and document-based knowledge management system which will improve the cost and quality of processes, procedures & strategies while empowering human resources. Marc Yeager, a longtime company employee (see sidebar), was recruited to become the first company videographer/reporter. His mandate couldn't have been clearer. "The goal is to get the nuts-and-bolts detail of everything that we do," says Emmons. "We told [Marc] to come back with enough information on the videotape so that he could hand the tape to the receptionist, and the receptionist could do the repair."
Response within the company to Comprehensus was immediately positive. "People were just amazed that they could watch these videos at their desktops," says Emmons. But by early last year, having grown to include over 400 "mini-documentaries," the Comprehensus video archive was expanding faster than Structural's ability to manage it. "People complained that they couldn't find the specific information they were looking for," says Emmons. Structural then turned to Virage's VideoLogger video search engine to index the archive in manageable clips of one to three minutes. "Virage enhanced the value of our knowledge management system a thousand-fold," says Emmons.
Yeager and production specialist Joe Kibelbek - the only full-time Comprehensus staff - work under a tight annual budget of $150,000. Yeager helps to minimize costs by shooting in Hi-8, editing in the camera, and wearing lots of hats. "[Marc] is not just a videographer... he's really a reporter," says Emmons. "He has to plan and recruit stories. He has to direct out in the field. And he needs to edit it... The skill of the reporter really dictates the cost efficiency of our system."
When analog Hi-8 video from the field is returned to the Baltimore facility, it is simultaneously encoded in RealMedia Surestream (20k to 220k) and MPEG-1 (1.5M) formats. At the same time, the video is entered into the VideoLogger for indexing. The MPEG files are used as a digital archive, and for the occasional distribution of CD-ROMs. "MPEG-1 is a basic format that's going to be around awhile," says Emmons. "It's not labor intensive at all [to re-encode the RealMedia]... We can do it in a batch process automatically from the MPEG-1."
Assigning the right metadata - keywords associated with each video or video clip - is key to the efficiency of the VideoLogger. Keywords link specific information - e.g. the types of facilities, procedures, tools, materials, etc. - that might be entered by users to search the video. Assigning metadata keywords can be a labor-intensive operation, and Structural is working to widen the responsibility beyond Yeager and Kibelbek. "We've identified about six people within the company that have different expertise," says Emmons. "We're in the process of training them to add the metadata so that no one person is overwhelmed by it." One helpful feature of the VideoLogger is that it uses a Web interface, allowing experts in the field to assign metadata to video files from anywhere at anytime.
Comprehensus currently stores about half a terabyte of content - over 500 mini-docs, running from 15 minutes to two hours long, accessible in 10,000 searchable video clips. The videos cover virtually every aspect of Structural's business. Project management videos include topics ranging from job cost analysis to job closeout reports, each with multiple case studies. Business development topics range from sales and estimating techniques to job bid strategies, again with multiple case studies. Numerous safety orientation videos cover a wide range of frequently experienced jobsite situations.
But the bulk of Comprehensus' content consists of documentary-style videos detailing various concrete construction and repair techniques. In the Comprehensus Table of Contents, videos and clips are organized into categories including facility type (e.g. manufacturing, airport, shopping mall, etc.); structure type (e.g. bridge, chimney, dry-dock, etc.); basic principles (e.g. moisture and thermal effects), construction techniques (e.g. how to minimize cracking); and repair processes (e.g. strengthening and stabilization). Most of these procedural mini-docs are narrated by the project managers, superintendents, or engineers most familiar with the processes being demonstrated - an aspect appreciated by customers. Emmons notes, "When the person who's the most expert on a topic is talking... there's tremendous confidence and ease of communication."
While Comprehensus makes a wealth of information available at relatively low cost - which is clearly beneficial to the company - it still must justify itself with positive, demonstrable ROIs. Structural sees positive returns on investment in a number of areas, including recruiting, training, and decision support. But ROI is perhaps most clearly manifest through increased sales.
Emmons believes that Comprehensus drives sales in a number of ways. "When we have a video in front of a customer, the credibility is immense. We're not just talking it. We're showing them that we've been there and done it." He adds, "We minimize competition because we are differentiating ourselves from our competitors." Emmons also believes that videos help educate customers about their own structures' problems, and illustrate how Structural's repair techniques can help. "When we can show them different solutions to their problem on video, it portrays us as a solution builder, which is really what they are paying us for."
Emmons has learned through experience the impact that Structural's extensive knowledge base can have when it is streamed to customers' desktops. "The most impressive thing we can do [is let customers] go right into our Comprehensus website and call up this information," he says. "They are just blown away when they realize how committed we are to developing our company's quality and efficiency for them." And while it may be difficult to clearly establish which influences have caused a customer to choose Structural, the anecdotal evidence in support of Comprehensus is compelling. Emmons notes, "We've identified certain sales that have happened because of Comprehensus, based on salesmen coming back [unsolicited] and saying that this tool got us out in front of the customer and made the difference."
The most valuable asset held by most enterprises is people. Comprehensus realizes additional ROIs through its impact on recruiting. For example, engineering construction management classes at a number of major universities use Peter Emmons' "Concrete Repair Maintenance Illustrated" as a textbook. Professors and students in these classes receive password access to Comprehensus, and use its streaming videos to bring the textbook material to life. Structural also demonstrates the Comprehensus system at up to 30 job fairs put on by college engineering and construction management programs each year. These initiatives have helped to establish Structural's reputation as a forward-thinking company that cares about and invests in its people. "[Comprehensus] showcases us as a progressive company with all this knowledge that will help [our employees grow]," says Emmons. "We get better candidates and we get less turnover. What more could you ask for?"
Structural operates a physical training center in Baltimore, where classes are videotaped for subsequent streaming through the Comprehensus distance learning portal. Subjects include new employee orientation, as well as administrative, field operation, sales, management and safety procedures. Class lectures and case studies from the field are combined to create online courses. Successful completion of some courses - verified through testing - is required for advancement within the company. Test results become part of annual reviews and employee records. In addition to a reduction in the cost of travel to and from the Baltimore training center, distance learning ROI's are realized through shortened employee learning curves. "It creates an operational efficiency," notes Brian Gallagher, director of marketing at Structural. "People are better trained. They better understand what they need to do and how to do it."
Finally, Structural employs Comprehensus for decision support, and to more clearly define best practices. Rather than walking the halls asking more experienced co-workers for help with a particular problem, employees can enter relevant keywords and view videos detailing the knowledge gained from past experience with similar problems. Company-wide best practices are established by comparing videos showing different methods employed on similar projects - often by project managers in different parts of the country. "You combine all the answers into a better solution and you've become the expert," says Emmons.
As the number of projects to be videotaped continues to grow, Structural plans to bring another videographer/reporter on board. It is also seeking creative new ways to utilize its streaming media expertise. Last year, for example, Structural videotaped 80 sessions at the American Concrete Institute convention, and made them available for pay-per-view streaming from the ACI website. In the near future, Structural may defray some of Comprehensus' operating costs by allowing key vendors to run paid advertising on the Comprehensus website. With an eye to the longer term, Structural is testing wireless streaming applications using Metricom's Ricochet technology. And Structural has already received so many inquiries about Comprehensus that it has even considered making a business out of helping other companies develop similar systems.
In the days of the dot-com boom - only a year ago - confident new companies spent millions on hopes of big profits down the road. Today, many fearful enterprises are loath to invest in anything that doesn't promise immediate returns. Like any "old economy" company worthy of the name, Structural Group keeps a tight rein on its streaming expenditures. But Structural has achieved consistently high growth rates, in part by being willing to investigate new technologies, and to invest in those - like streaming media - that can be shown to add value in excess of their cost.
In a world where most adopters of large-scale streaming are themselves high-tech companies, Structural Group is still an anomaly. It is a company engaged in the traditional task of building out America's physical infrastructure, while simultaneously pioneering the application of cutting-edge streaming technology. If Structural's experience is any indication, the road to more ubiquitous streaming within America's mainstream enterprises may be paved with brick and mortar - and concrete - after all.

Opportunities in Enterprise

Opportunities in Enterprise

Streaming Media Magazine , March 2001
Author(s): Max Bloom

By bringing tangible return on investment and increased efficiency, streaming technology is proliferating in the intranets and extranets of corporations - both old-school and new - on a major scale. The enterprise presents real opportunities for streaming product and service providers. Could this market form a more solid foundation for the streaming industry?

Much of the streaming media industry is facing the NEW millennium with a hangover. VCs and other early investors threw a great party by hiring large staffs and spending big ad bucks in the pre-natal streaming entertainment market. Now that the party's over - or at least on hiatus- many chastened streaming product, service and infrastructure providers have come to realize what those in the enterprise arena have known all along: ROI (return on investment) really does matter. Newly sober members of the streaming media community are now turning their attentions from the excesses of DEN, POP.com, and Pseudo to the more staid corporate boardroom.

There are a number of reasons why streaming media may find a more welcoming home in the enterprise space. For one, the streaming entertainment sector has tortured itself trying to guess what type of streaming content audiences want. This is not a problem in the corporate intranet space. There's no expensive talent to hire and no need to acquire a large audience. Corporate content - executive communications, training, marketing, and human resources content - has been in use for years, and only a moderate investment in time and resources is required to modify it to streaming. Corporations may be slow to change, but less expensive, more convenient and more effective ways to distribute content throughout the enterprise and beyond will be hard to resist.

Perhaps the most compelling reason why streaming media will have greater success, sooner, within corporations than in front of the general public, is bandwidth. Most observers agree that, for reasons of quality, streaming video is really a broadband game, yet well over 90 percent of home Internet users in the United States are limited to dial-up access. But corporate intranets are typically built on a high-speed backbone. "The great advantage that the corporations have is they have already made a lot of the infrastructure investments to have really great bandwidth," said Michael Aldridge, Microsoft's lead product manager for its Digital Media Division. "They can deliver a much richer experience than what consumers get."
And while many big corporations, to reach far-flung offices, are building out multicast-enabled networks - which can accommodate large numbers of simultaneous users without much impact on other network traffic - it will be a long time before the public Internet is truly multicast-enabled.

Predictably, high-tech companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, which have a direct stake in the success of the streaming media industry, are leading the way in the adoption of streaming technologies for their own communications. Cisco averages 30 live webcasts and 300 to 600 on-demand streaming events per month. Microsoft maintains more than 100,000 physical items and over 1,000,000 media files of various types in its media archive. HP did hundreds of webcasts last year, and made over 1,000 streaming videos available on-demand.
Still, most enterprises are moving cautiously as they integrate streaming media into their overall corporate media strategies. Contrary to what many vendors would have us believe, enterprise streaming is still in its infancy. The good news is that enterprise streamers are already seeing both hard and soft ROIs, and when the word gets out, growth will accelerate.

Return on Investment is Key
The most substantial and concrete enterprise streaming ROIs are being achieved through savings in travel costs - often associated with a new product launch. Michael Mitchell, manager of marketing communications for Cisco's Internet Learning Solutions Group, notes that product information for systems engineers or account managers makes up more of Cisco's streaming video than any other application. Mitchell observes, "The main way that we justify [streaming costs] is by looking at travel costs. If you take an audience and say they all have to fly to San Jose, or you take the presenters and say they have to be on a road show for six months, either way you look at it, you get a pretty good ROI."

The recovered employee productivity that would have been lost to travel days is a bonus. Marty Roberts, RealServer product manager at RealNetworks, offers a more concrete example. "If I can keep one training manager from flying around my five remote offices, I probably saved the company $15,000," he said.
Sometimes, however, a face-to-face meeting is preferable to a streaming presentation. Cisco's Mitchell notes, "[With streaming] you might be taking away face time with a product manager, but what you're giving these people is face time with their families. That's why streaming media is fairly popular with the [users]."

For some, travel is a fun part of their job. Salespeople may be less than enthusiastic about forgoing the annual sales conference, for example. Pat Kirkish, director of product management for interactive applications at Akamai, points out, "Sales conferences are kind of sacred. There is something about them you can't replicate over the Internet. Nothing will ever replace the sales conference because you can't stream alcohol."
A number of more specialized applications of enterprise streaming are reaping softer, less measurable ROIs.

For example, construction retrofit and upgrade company, Structural Group, uses its streaming video library as a recruiting tool. Director of marketing Brian Gallagher notes, "We give prospective employees access to the [streaming] library. They learn what we do. It differentiates us as a company and shows us being progressive and forward thinking - a company that really cares about investing in its people.

The line between a product launch and corporate training is sometimes thin, especially in high-tech industries where training may be required for salespeople and other staff to understand what a new product does. The streaming of corporate training content is an important and effective video application in the enterprise, in part because it has grown out of the dynamic, well-established distance-learning sector of the teleconferencing space. Most large corporations support distance-learning units, and many are now making the transition from broadcasting or conferencing to streaming. Jim O'Brien, director of streaming at streaming services company Digital Island, notes, "Distance-learning is the biggest user of the interactive element available in streaming, and it's an area that will continue to grow, probably for most of our lifetime."