Rhumbix automates construction workforce timekeeping and reporting at the field level via a mobile app, and provides real-time reporting, benchmarking and analysis to managers.
Sometimes being separated by an ocean and continent doesn’t help communication. As a London-based writer, I received a news release about San Francisco, California’s Rhumbix, and reached out for an interview, but the timings just didn’t work out (and there’ve been a couple of post-blog updates – latest 20.45pm GMT, 28 November 2017). In the meantime, I’ll briefly summarise….
Rhumbix was founded by two former US Navy personnel – Zach Scheel was a civil engineer, and Drew DeWalt was a submarine pilot – who met at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. In 2013, they were both working in northern Chile on separate projects, but both identified they had the same challenges of data collection on construction sites and estimating labour costs. Rhumbix is the result: a mobile platform that provides real-time project data and insights to project stakeholders.
The company’s news release claims it is currently being used by seven of the top 20 builders in the United States, including Turner Construction, which has seen a 790% ROI on its investment in Rhumbix, largely down to reducing the time taken to enter timecards. Foremen went from 4.5 hours per week of time entry to 20 minutes; superintendents and SPO engineers spent 90% less on manual timekeeping. It appears to be offered at three levels:
- Rhumbix BASIC is a mobile app deployed to foremen to collect field data. “Data collected is shared immediately with the home office through an administrative dashboard. Timecards, daily reports, cost codes, T&M tags, pictures and notes are now 100 percent digitised.” The app uses GPS and customer-defined geo-fences to create more accurate records of job-hours worked on projects
- Rhumbix CORE helps firms take their digitised data and feed it back to project managers, superintendents and foremen to provide real-time benchmarking and analysis.
- Rhumbix MASTER allows integration of third party data with custom professional services and deployments to optimise and proactively improve processes
The company closed a US$7.35 million round of funding led by Blackhorn Ventures, in October 2017. The technology provides integration with Procore, Viewpoint, Intuit Quickbooks and Xero.