201 - TZL - Raouf Ghali

there is in our industry and therefore we have to adapt. There's also an advantage of doing all this and that is it's an opportunity for us to look at the office space requirement that we have. So we're going to have some shrinkage in real estate that we do and we're going to invest it in our business.

Randy Wilburn [28:41] Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You know, Raouf, I hear design firm leaders saying that all the time here in the United States. I mean, they all are rethinking how they do work, where they work, and ultimately, what are their real estate needs to look like in the future. So I think it's going to be interesting for everybody moving forward. They’re going to be opportunities to pare expenses. They're going to be opportunities to increase things like personal and professional development for their employees. All the way around, there are upside opportunities here. Were you going to say something?

Raouf Ghali [29:22] No, I agree with you, Randy.

Randy Wilburn [29:24] So let me ask you on the business practice side, from the pandemic itself from a project management perspective at Hill, what were some of the most important lessons you learned about this pandemic, something that created awareness for you around how Hill was doing business that you were able to modify outside of the whole remote work and all that. We get all that but were there any other practices from a construction management standpoint, from a project management standpoint that you've been able to modify that you've benefited from? Raouf Ghali [30:02] Yeah, we use a lot more technology and not just from working from home, but for example, inspection services. Instead of actually having to go out and inspect some things in person, we use drones. Drones, that would be able to fly over, and we've hired some pilots for drones. For example, a highway, we go through and take videos, and once we look at it and our engineers look at it and would like to see some more details on it, we can send the drone down, and magnify it; the technology is there to be able to do it. Once there are defects detected from the videos, then the engineers can actually go out there and focus only on the ones where there are defects to inspect them personally - physical inspection, as we say. So we've used technology more efficiently to really streamline our work and change a bit the best practices that we do in certain things. So that's one modification that we've been able to see. And we did the same things, not just on highways, or horizontal, we are also on the vertical as well.

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