Enterprise Ireland Article
January 23, 2020
The construction industry is often misunderstood as a slow adopter to digitalization. Over the past few years we have seen a number of factors such as hiking insurance costs, tight margins and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerate our industry’s adoption of new technology to solve problems.
Making the switch from physical to digital solutions may be difficult, but according to a McKinsey study in 2018, “[in] organizations with fewer than 100 employees, respondents are 2.7 times more likely to report a successful digital transformation than are those from organizations with more than 50,000 employees”, which gives a huge advantage to smaller companies in making the transition to digital solutions.
We at Evercam want to help you make this transition as seamless as possible for you and your company. So where do construction cameras come in and how are they solving problems on our sites?
On a construction project, there are three main resources; money, manpower and time.
Time is one of the most valuable resources on a job site, and with our feature set, you will save heavily on the one resource you can’t get back.
With construction cameras, your data will be saved locally and to the cloud where your project’s stakeholders can have instant access to their most important information at a moment’s notice.
Gone are the days where you would have to set up a meeting to communicate minor project changes. Having a visual reference can minimize the amount of miscommunication-driven conflict within the team.
You will also no longer need to constantly visit the site to verify or inspect the work in person, especially if your time is wasted with the work to be inspected ending up unfinished by the time you’re there. With your construction camera setup, you can make sure that the work is finished before getting on the road and doing the in-person inspection.
These small productivity changes can help you bridge the $1.6 Trillion construction productivity gap (McKinsey, 2015), giving your company a competitive edge on the global construction scene.
One of the biggest enemies of a successful construction project is reworks. According to a 2018 statistic, the US construction industry alone loses $31.3 billion each year to rework. So what causes this to happen?
The main culprits for rework are poor communication (either between the end user and the contractor, or between the contractors themselves) and poor on-site data and information.
Having construction cameras remedies these issues by giving you a live view of the whole site, allowing you to back instructions with actual visual aids. With construction cameras, you can also overlay your BIM model on the active site, giving you and your entire team an instant visual of the project’s status versus the schedule.
You may be thinking that this is simply an updated version of the good old security trailer everyone’s familiar with, with the one worker watching 10 CRT monitors with a joystick to move the cameras around. However, these traditional methods of image capture can be easily damaged, lost or stolen, meaning data is lost.
Evercam stores your entire project both locally and to the cloud with full access guaranteed for you and any member of your team that you wish to give access to. Your data will always be regularly backed up, always up to date and always secure.
Disputes, accidents, and conflicts on a job site often boil down to a he-said-she-said situation, and protracted inquiries and investigations, which means more idle time on-site with activity shutting down until the investigation wraps up – a huge cause of wasted time and money. Construction cameras provide you with a clear timestamp of who did what and where. You can pull up the relevant videos at a moment’s notice and clearly display what happened exactly.
Did the tipping truck bring the amount of gravel that was agreed upon? Was the rental crane used for four days or five? Did the subcontractor hired for muck away do their job correctly? No need for protracted questions or disputes. All the relevant information including our AI-generated gate report can be pulled up through your dashboard, in 4K video.
How do you know whether a provider is trustworthy and worth your engagement? As with any investment, you have to check user reviews and testimonials. You’ll get a good and honest image of what your experience as a user will look like, without the bells and whistles.
You will also have to see how the access structure and functionality of the camera you have chosen, and whether they’re suitable for your needs on a given project.
Construction cameras are a tool like any other on a construction site. They serve a purpose. And as any construction worker will tell you, to use your tool properly, you have to know it inside out. To really make the most of Evercam, get started by booking a demo with your customer success manager, and be sure to check out our tutorials.
To analyze your usage of the construction cameras, and attach monetary values to the savings and gains you’ve made from using them. Assess your non-monetary gains as well. Consider how the introduction of construction cameras to your site has changed the workflow on your site and the speed at which things run.
The reduction of workplace conflict can go a very long way for the quality of the project. A less tense workforce works better, and is less likely to make mistakes.
After you’ve compiled your insights, share them with Evercam, so we can use your feedback in the development of new features and the updating of existing features.
To learn more about our construction camera software, book a demo today.
