Digital Construction Week is taking place in London next week, and one of last year’s exhibitors, London-based Construct.pm has been in touch. I talked to the mobile-first construction project management app business in late December 2015 when it was working with early adopter customer ISG. A case study based on a project at London’s Broadgate suggests:
- the technology removes £1 million of non-productive time
- Construct app savies 1.5 hours per employee per day, and
- could “save construction industry hundreds of millions of pounds” of non-productive time in the future.
ISG trialled the Construct.pm app on Europe’s largest office fit-out, 5 Broadgate in the City of London, a 700,000 sq ft project. Matt Blowers, managing director of ISG’s UK fit-out business said:
“The built environment sector has been languishing behind many other industries when it comes to improvements in productivity, which has risen just 1.4 percent in the past 20 years. This trend cannot continue into the future and we’re absolutely committed as a business to explore every new technology and working methodology that can help us raise our game and that of the industry as a whole.
“We took an ambitious approach when we trialled the Construct app on one of the UK’s largest ever fit-out projects at 5 Broadgate – but the results clearly demonstrate the wider capacity for this technology to ratchet up productivity and save the industry hundreds of millions of pounds.”
Anthony Erwin, founder of Construct Technologies, said:
“This technology has the ability to change the future of construction as we know it. We have taken the BIM revolution to another level and created a one-stop-shop app for an entire complex project. The ISG trial has been vital in the evolution of the app and the results have exceeded all of our expectations. We’re now in a position to roll out this technology to the wider industry in 2017.”
Construct claims to be “the first end-to-end fully customisable information and process management system for on-site construction work,” helping sites to become completely paperless, and so reducing costs, administration and inefficiency (something that numerous AEC SaaS vendors have been proclaiming since the late 1990s). It says it “makes forms, processes, tasks, snags, drawings, files and programme details available instantly on a user’s mobile device or tablet and therefore ensures that they always have the latest information at all times”.
As regular readers will know, this is an intensely competitive market, with several start-ups as well as more mature businesses providing mobile-oriented project management applications, including UK and Europe-based Basestone, Finalcad, GenieBelt, SherLayer and BuildCloud (and mobile offerings from mature players includng Aconex, Viewpoint, Conject and Think Project!), plus US-based Plangrid, FieldLens, Jobsite Unite and Skysite, among others.
