A mobile application acquired from Appear Networks by France’s Script&Go in 2016, Site Diary has been revamped and given a new brand identity as it seeks to expand UK adoption of the solution. The French company announced its plans to grow a UK presence in early 2018, and 10 months later had offices in London and Birmingham and was planning a major upgrade to Site Diary, adding new features, a new user interface, support for UK currency, and hosting by Microsoft Azure.
The revamped Site Diary solution (available in both Android and Apple iOS versions, plus a web-browser accessed edition) incorporates:
- a weather feed which automatically captures weather information for the mobile device’s location and associates it with the day’s reporting
- task management enabling site managers to create and allocate tasks to team members, while retaining a record in the Site Diary, and
- progress reporting including approvals management, with export to PDF, CSV or Excel.
The developers claim an average daily saving of 45 minutes compared to maintaining a traditional paper-based diary, with further savings in the event of disputes through more systematic and detailed time- and date-stamped data capture. One customer had switched to Site Diary having lost a previous dispute because their record-keeping had been inadequate.
UK customers include Alun Griffiths, Grosvenor Construction and Torsion Group, along with customers in Australia and the US. In total, Site Diary has over 8,000 users, and has over 140 paying customers in 34 countries, currently creating an average 14,000 diary entries a month. The company does not reveal revenues, but the product’s standard price is £10 per month per user when paying monthly or £96/year/user with annual billing (by negotiation, deals can done for project-wide or enterprise use).
The company says Site Diary is currently a point solution, but the development roadmap envisages integration with other solutions. This is vital, given that is competing with site diary capabilities incorporated into wider toolsets on some existing platforms in all its current English-speaking customer markets. For example, Trimble’s Viewpoint recently added a site diary to its Viewpoint Team solution (post); Australia’s Wiseworking (post), Tenderfield (post) and HammerTech (post) all offer site diary options; and in the US, Note Vault is an established competitor in the daily reporting field with strong integration with other solutions (post). US-based, but now growing its Australian and UK presences, Procore also offers a Site Diary feature as part of its Quality and Safety module.
Update (1 October 2019) – A new version of Site Diary was released in September 2019 (details), while the solution is now available in three different price plans: Shovel (basic, free), Forklift (£10 per user per month) and Bulldozer (for 25+ users).
