Developed for Finland’s demanding construction health & safety market, the Congrid mobile solution is now targeting the UK.
Sponsoring a construction event can be one way to get your brand noticed. It worked in getting Finland’s Congrid on my radar – I received an email invitation to attend the Quality in Construction Summit in London on 3 July 2019, and clicked on the link to the sponsor.
Congrid: safety measurement
Based in Helsinki, Finland, Congrid was founded in 2013 by NCC construction site manager Matti Huusko and Timo Makkonen, a project engineer and later a field service manager at electrical equipment manufacturer Vaisala. Their focus was to create a mobile application for quality and safety management, which – judging from the company’s website – was launched in around 2016. According to Makkonen, “Finland is the front-runner when it comes to safety on the construction sites” as, by law, construction sites must perform a specific safety measurement on a weekly basis. This pre-emptive action is intended to both prevent potential safety hazards and to make sure that site workers get notified of anomalies at the site.
“The measurement in itself is relatively simple. It comprises of different topics that are measured by giving positive points when the safety criteria is met and negative points when it is not. Let’s take one of the topics, namely fall prevention, as an example. For each correctly installed fall prevention a positive point is given and for each incorrectly installed or lacking one a negative point is given. So a person goes through the site and records all the positive and negative observations for all the safety topics.”
The measurement is straightforward to perform, Makkonen says, and delivers quantitative data which can be further analyzed and used as a KPI (key performance indicator). As recording data can be prone to errors, and as different tools may be used to capture data, Congrid was developed to conduct safety measurements, and to work intuitively in challenging environments.
The business was one of a batch of companies supported by Microsoft’s ‘Turbopump’ programme in Finland in 2017, and the Congrid application expanded to include mapping information and signatures in 2018. Clients include Finland’s West Metro, contractors YIT and Fira, and housebuilder Bonava. By 2018, the company was also marketing in Sweden, and it sponsored a UK event: the Building Engineering Services Assocation’s conference and awards in London on 1 November 2018. Now, having appointed a UK territory manager, Daniel Hunt, it is sponsoring the Quality in Construction Summit event in July 2019.
The application is available on Android and Apple iOS platforms and, as well as the safety measurement functionality, provides punchlisting, quality inspections and document management tools.
