Construction is one of the least digitised industries, and as a result, many projects experience delays and cost overruns, which is why now is the time to come up with innovative solutions for bringing technology to the sector.
Drones and VR may be the flavour of the month with many industries today, but construction is an $8.5 trillion industry where much of the work is still being coordinated by pen and paper.
As a result, productivity in the sector has declined over the past 50 years, while nearly all other industries have experienced the digital revolution.
Yves Frinault, Fieldwire CEO, spoke to Inside Waste about their ambitions to digitise the construction industry, and highlights his recent company-wide partnership with Built as a concrete manifestation of how software technology can be used to empower construction workers.
Inside Waste: How did the partnership with Built come about and what are your ultimate goals?
Yves Frinault: Built had been using Fieldwire on several projects, as well as other tools over the last two years. Earlier this year, they decided to normalise on one platform across the entire company.
There was an evaluation process where they looked at capabilities. as well as past performance, and Fieldwire was selected for a company-wide deployment.
With every partnership we establish, the goal is to make our client as successful as possible, and in the process, improve our solutions and service. In this case, both Built and Fieldwire understand that software can do more than just removing paper in the field – the real goal is to measurably improve the overall productivity of a jobsite.
IW: How can software technology be used to empower construction workers?
Frinault: Technology companies need to look at the construction worker as the primary beneficiary of the service. In the past, construction workers haven’t been considered as users of technology, and even less as the target customer.
As a result, field technology – when it isn’t completely overlooked – often focuses on reporting and the needs of office staff, as opposed to actually helping workers carry out his job.
In contrast, Fieldwire considers the craftsmen our primary customers. We give them access to everything they need on site, including construction drawings, documents, and photos, and additionally, we connect them remotely with the engineers in the trailer so that everyone can communicate back and forth without having to stop work.
Not only is this really empowering for the field staff, but it saves them hours everyday, which is a huge economic benefit for their company.
IW: How will this help construction companies to better attract and retain employees?
Frinault: No one enters the construction industry to sit in endless meetings and sort through volumes of paper, nor to manage massive spreadsheets of outstanding deficiencies and issues.
Fieldwire takes a lot of the very repetitive tasks and makes them effortless. Things that used to take hours are now done automatically. This ranges from the organization and annotation of photos taken during a walkthrough, to laying out information to create a nice-looking PDF report.
With Fieldwire, photos can be attached to the plans during a walkthrough, which removes the need to organise them later. Generating a report is just about setting a few filters and then the report generation is done on our servers before being emailed to the entire team.
By doing the heavy lifting on mundane tasks, we help people focus on the challenging part of their job, which is often the part that got them excited about the job in the first place.
IW: The construction industry has been slow to digitise. Why is this and what more can be done to push things along faster?
Frinault: The adoption of software in the space was broken. By the time a piece of software was deployed and failed in the field, a company had often committed to a three-year deal with a vendor.
The massive adoption of smartphones and tablets has been a huge enabler for the digitisation of the space. Without new digital devices, 90 per cent of the people involved on a construction project would still spend most of their day offline.
Mobile app stores have also given individual employees the power to find and download the solution to their problems on their own. With a platform like Fieldwire, we often start with small deployments in the field that expand into company-wide agreements.
Overall, I think companies need to embrace the evolution of the distribution model and listen more to what their employees are telling them.
IW: Any other partnerships that our readers should be keeping an eye on?
Frinault: Yes, we’re always looking to build deeper relationships with large contractors, and we’re planning to announce another enterprise-wide agreement soon.