

Plangrid (YC W12) Builds A New Market For The iPad: The Construction Industry - rsuttongee
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/02/plangrid-builds-a-new-market-for-the-ipad-the-construction-industry/

======
reneherse
Very very exciting! Assuming a thoroughly brilliant execution, I'm certain
that this app will find its fans amongst all groups within the design-build
chain. Architects, construction managers, general contractors and trades. Even
building owners and maintenance managers, perhaps.

I haven't tried the app, but having worked in both architecture and
construction and now as a UX designer, I'm quite familiar with the problems it
addresses. One of the biggest challenges on a construction project (even a
small one) is document control and management. Though most work in
architectural offices is done on computers, paper plans remain the final
method of output of construction information, and this causes numerous
problems.

Of course there is the cost of printing that the article mentions, but that's
only one of several inefficiencies. A little background for those unfamiliar
with construction: First, traditional prints are cumbersome, so they're
difficult to pull out and reference in any kind of adverse field conditions.
Large sheets of paper do not mix well with wind or rain. Even in good weather
or indoors they're a pain to carry around and handle, so they tend to spend
most of their time in the truck or trailer, often away from where they're
really needed. To make them easier to carry, construction managers often make
their own smaller photocopies of portions of the plans, which compounds the
second big problem: keeping the documents up to date.

On a large project, keeping everyone's documents up to date is a nightmare.
The more subcontractors you have, the bigger the nightmare becomes. And if you
have a fast-track or rapidly evolving design-build situation, the problem is
further compounded by compressed schedules. When plans or specifications are
out of date, estimations are off and things get built incorrectly. You get
waste, increased project costs, and the occasional lost shirt. One of my
mentors used to destroy on sight any out of date documents he found people
carrying. This app should be a much more elegant solution.

Essentially, paper plans are so difficult to manage that they waste a huge
amount of time and sometimes result in errors. They're a centuries old, paper-
based data bank and info graphic. So it's easy to see how this app could not
only save time and money, but also increase quality and accuracy of what gets
built: The people doing the work will have convenient access to the right
information at the right time, through plans and other forms of location-based
information on a device that's easy to carry.

Further, the ability to notate and communicate right from the UI has the
potential to fix one of the frequently broken feedback loops in the design-
build process: communication between builder and architect about unexpected
field conditions or difficulties with the current design. I have no idea about
the road map for the app, but there's a lot of potential here. Imagine you're
able to share screens and stream video or still images back to the architect
about something needing clarification, and have her be able to sketch on the
plans in real time. Then the changes can be saved as a draft copy, ported back
to the drafting software, modifications made and reissued as an official
document (and even change orders) in a matter of minutes. The potential for
this to speed construction and increase quality is not to be under-estimated.

As a designer, I'm very curious about the UI of the app and how well the UX is
adapted to the needs of folks in the field. Because there are just so many
variations on the use case, so many different ways that building plans are
used by different people in the process. And, there is _one_ advantage to the
size of traditional printed plans. Their bigness, at times, can be a virtue
when you're trying to get an understanding of the overall layout of building,
and extract key dimensions from it. Of course zooming in and out is how this
is handled on monitors when drafting, but I suspect the problem is a little
different on an iPad size screen, the solution needing to be a little more
creative to convey the needed information.

Phew, thinking about the possibilities of this app is exhilarating, and my
apologies if my post is overly long. Congrats to the founding team for
identifying and working to solve such a significant missing piece in the chain
of the construction process! :)

~~~
Anechoic
Folks have been talking about tablets being a natural fit for the construction
market, and frankly I don't see it (at least for field work. Construction
sites are nasty places - dust, concrete, bentonite, slurries, oil & grease,
rain, snow, heat these are not good things for an expensive tablet to be
around.

Furthermore, the trades guys are hard are their equipment. When it's time to
go to lunch, stuff gets thrown in the trunk bed or on the passenger seat of
the truck as they rush off. Even if a tablet survives the abuse, those guys
rarely lock or raise the windows of their trucks on the job, so I wouldn't
expect the tablet to be there when the contractor gets back from his break.

 _First, traditional prints are cumbersome, so they're difficult to pull out
and reference in any kind of adverse field conditions. Large sheets of paper
do not mix well with wind or rain._

This is true, but it's offset by their disposable nature. If I'm heading out
to the field and I know there is going to be inclement weather, I bring a
couple of copies and if one sheet gets destroyed by weather, oh well, I just
break out my second copy.

And while large sheets can be cumbersome, they allow field workers to look at
a small component of a plan in an overall larger context which can be very
convenient (that's why the minimum size I typically deal with on a site is
11x17). On a 10-inch tablet, you can only do that by zooming and panning a lot
and that's not nearly as useful.

I've been wrong before and maybe I'm wrong now but I can't help thing that
this will be a frustrating experience for a lot of folks.

 _keeping the documents up to date._

This is a very good point (nothing like getting an "as-built" that is not even
close to being accurate) but I don't think that offsets the downsides.

~~~
kennystone
>> This is a very good point but I don't think that offsets the downsides.

The downsides of out of date documents are 1% of the total cost of
construction. A project may have 1-3% margin for a GC, so this is an enormous
number. You save in three big ways with PlanGrid - we are cheaper than
printing, faster than dealing with paper for sharing and note taking, and
eliminate building from outdated drawings.

Our current set of users love having it in the field. We have superintendents
tell us they can't believe they are using an iPad everyday. They have all the
drawings all the time and they are always up to date - something people in the
field have never had before on large projects.

Several of our customers have purchased iPads just to use PlanGrid. It's true
that some will break, of course, but the cost savings offset it.

------
tyoung
There are tons of very obvious problems in many industries that are solvable
by software. The only problem is that great domain experts and great hackers
rarely overlap enough to do a startup together. It was a miracle that the four
of us found each other.

~~~
reneherse
Just read the "About" page on the PlanGrid site, and indeed your team does
seem to be a great combination of experts & hackers.

My background sort of puts me with one foot in either camp for this particular
problem set; it would be really cool to chat with you folks some time when I
make it out to the Bay Area.

BTW, how did you all come to find each other?

~~~
tyoung
3 of us went to school together, 2 of us worked together, 2 of us went to a
cello concert, not together. Its one of those tricky GRE math questions.

------
zmmz
I see that on your about page you mention only supporting PDFs.

As somebody frustrated by the lack of alternatives to Autodesk products,
seemingly due to the lock in by .DWG files[1] not being an open standard, I'd
be curious to hear your thoughts? Did you think about/try implementing the
file format? Do you have plans for others?

Last week, I told myself I'd give the OSS CAD programs a try, downloaded
LibreCAD and tried to open some architecture plans from my inbox. Could not
open. Then I read came across an excellent explanation of the problem of DWGs
in OSS[2], this is the most frustrated I've been for a while. The industry
standard is a proprietary file format with no published specifications.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwg> [2]:
[http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/whats-up-with-
dwg-a...](http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/whats-up-with-dwg-adoption-
in-free-software)

~~~
kennystone
Our approach is as practical as it can be - the actual builders need drawings
and the drawings are usually delivered in PDF. We've found very few of our
customers get the DWG files themselves, and even if they do, they are easily
exported to PDF.

~~~
zmmz
Makes sense.

I guess I just wanted a place to vent out my frustration with DWG :D.

The other comments in this thread make it very clear, you have a great
product. More industries need teams like yours.

~~~
ralphleon
I'm _so_ thankful that our customers don't want to deal with DWG files. I had
investigated it a bit for our original prototype... it was not pleasant.

------
mirsadm
Nice! That looks quite interesting. Is there any particular reason why the
iPad was targeted first? I wonder if Android would have been a better choice
because some manufacturers offer rugged tablets these days which seem like a
better fit for this industry.

~~~
kennystone
iPad is the dominant tablet platform (phones might have been different). We
may do Android eventually - our backend is written to support web and iOS
already.

~~~
mirsadm
It is the leader in sales but I'm not sure that will matter in this case. This
is domain specific so the choice of tablet is determined by the availability
of the software. Just my thoughts, great idea though :)

~~~
ralphleon
Thanks as well! We're waiting for a customer to actually request an android
tablet version. We're probably going to port our software in a "lite" version
to android focusing on the phone first then the tablet. Thankfully android
tablets work well with android phone apps (especially with ICS).

By the time we get around to this, we have our fingers crossed that google's
acquisition of Motorola begets a sweet android tablet from google directly.

~~~
mirsadm
Sounds like you guys have it sorted out. I bring up Android mostly because we
found lots of customers asking for specialized hardware (for military, police
and fire department contracts). They were really picky about that because the
guys using it were not very gentle. It is a different domain so the
requirements are not exactly the same.

------
sopooneo
I have to believe something like this already existed for pen based tablets.
And I believe that for real work, a tablet must have higher fidelity input
that can be achieve with fingertips.

------
samstave
This is interesting. As someone who works in this space (building hospitals)
we see a lot of trending movement to the iPad, though I question the longevity
of PDFs.

We have a software suite for the construction industry, which has modules for
inspection requests, punch-lists, occupancy planning (healthcare), room
completion (healthcare), room readiness (healthcare) etc.

We also have a service around providing custom reports... however, we find
that the need for dynamic data trumps the ability to simply view the latest
plan digitally, i.e. we provide the ability to run a dynamic report on all
inspections scheduled, performed, outstanding, etc... As well as the need to
run a report that would "Show me all the rooms that have a Medication
Dispensation Unit, on level two and assigned to unit Med Surge" - which
outputs a colorized visio (or ZUI iPad floorplan).

The future is in granularity of reporting, rather than just blanket display,
and I think this is a great step. Especially if you have many trades begining
to use it. There is no reason the trades can't run multiple apps for specific
purposes.

Although, I am not sure I agree with one number in the article; "For $1MM in
construction, you can have as much as $3,500 in printing" -- I am only
skeptical as I work on projects in the hundreds of millions (1.5B, 850MM,
800MM 100MM are the budgets for my (personally) active projects) I dont see
them spending 3MM on printing for the 850MM project... but I might just not be
privy to the numbers from every trade.

Here is an example of a dynamic room category report for an active project
here in SF. We colorize the rooms based on type/use to familiarize the org
with the spaces <http://i.imgur.com/2DRah.jpg> \- We do a great deal more with
the data and reports, this is just an example of many that the orgs use.
Hospital transition planning is very complex, and costly. The vitals of the
facility change a lot through the life of the project. The issue with
educating THOUSANDS of people in prep for opening day such that they can
SAFELY receive their first patient is critical.

Being able to very quickly synthesize and summarize vast amounts of
information makes for a better, more successful project and a better, more
educated and prepared staff.

Remember that while there are hundreds of people on a project team, there are
thousands of people on the facility staff who are expected to move into the
facility day-one and not cause fatal mistakes.

A project I am doing in Texas is 1.5MM square feet and dynamic, item-level
granularity reporting is going to be key in the smooth success of the project.

I would love to see what PlanGrid can offer such large projects - and while I
am a full proponent of the iPad in the field, in an industry where cost is
king, I'd like to better understand how they convince construction companies
of the ROI - esp. when tools and materials walk of the job all the time.

I think that Plangrid should talk to the designers (not just architects) as
well; RTKL, Mazzetti, TEECOM, RLS, SMWM, SFM, etc...

If PlanGrid (love the name) wants to talk to me - my email is in my profile.

~~~
rsuttongee
For us, the ROI on any project - but particularly large projects - is pretty
simple: An iPad ($800) plus 3 years of PlanGrid ($1500 for the big plan) is
almost always cheaper than the initial half-size set of thousands of drawings
(a hospital project Tracy was on spent $2700 per planholder set of 3000
sheets), but when you add in the printing cost of MEPF coordination drawings,
fabrication drawings, point-load drawings, deck-insert drawings, seismic
bracing drawings, P&ID drawings, submittal shop drawings and the constant
deluge of change order and supplemental sheets it's a huge money saver.

We are cheaper than just the printing costs alone, but our real value-add
comes from the huge reduction in document control hours we bring. This,
combined with our ability to mitigate the risk of building off outdated
information, makes a huge win for almost every project if you do the math.

~~~
samstave
I'd be interested to see what the differential between 2D and BIM projects is.

Let me give you a concrete example; a hospital here in SF that is building a
new facility has spent 30+ million dollars on coordination and
constructability issues between all the trades.

There was far less printing of plans than there was hours spent coordinating
the BIM model for changes.

Now, granted, this wasa project where there was an oversight in the design as
it pertained to the owners intent and a number of critical technology spaces
required were left out of the design.

This resulted in many hours of coordination efforts from all the trades to get
these spaces into the facility, but a fraction of this was in printing.

If you can help with this problem, coordination, you have a much larger
market.

The current industry trend is to err on the side of digital design and
coordination meetings with IPD models, and reduce printing and field
interference issues.

What might be an interesting opportunity for your service is to notify trades
when changes occur that may affect them. THEN show them the new, updated PDF.

I don't know how this would occur -- other than the pushing of a
constructability log or something....

Also, it would make sense that your app is much more focused on a the smaller
project (HUGE market) of residential, smaller commercial etc..

Trying to force yourselves into solving the issues of massive scale projects
may be suicide.

~~~
rsuttongee
I agree that BIM is totally transforming constructability reviews and
massively reducing MEP conflicts with clash-detection etc.

The problem is, after all this 3D BIM work, how does that information get to
the field? What are the actual workers building off of?

Paper. Outdated, expensive, paper. THATS the problem we are solving. Big
projects, little projects, they all use paper, they all pay waaaay too much
for paper, and they all have trouble keeping it up to date.

~~~
samstave
Sure, but do you expect the 500+ builders onsite on any given day to have a
fragile $800 device with a screen size less than 8.5x11" as their primary
interface to information?

I don't think that is realistic.

Others are working on augmented reality interfaces to provide that updated
information. Where a set of glasses connected through the construction wifi
network would provide the needed updates.

Sure, there is a much larger technical issue there WRT engineering a solution,
but the fact of the matter is that paper is actually a cheap way of conveying
a vast amount of information VERY efficiently.

They can write and scribble and troubleshoot on the plans.

There is a LOT more information to present on 30x42.

Their batteries wont die.

Training people to absorb information off plans is thousands of years
developed, efficient and CHEAP.

I think that granularity of message is important - and I think you can really
excel here.

Rather than presenting the whole plan on PDF - tell them EXACTLY what they
need to know BY ROOM/BY LOCATION that pertains to them at that moment.

I'd like you to see the Inspection Request Module that we have to understand
this; where on a PDF/Visio of a plan an inspector can just trace out the walls
that they inspected in the field at that time. This finger-trace gets captured
and recorded. Then synthesized into the colorized maps I showed aboved so that
the whole project team can run reports on status of the project (you can also
run reports that show which trades are succeeding and which are behind in
every aspect of deliverables... sometimes you just need to fire a plumbing
contractor because they keep failing inspections)

Anyway - paper is not always bad. It is an extremely efficient method of
conveying information.

You need to preempt the NEED for paper, not reduce it on the back-end. This is
what BIM and coordination and IPD are all about. Reducing back-end paper and
change-orders.

Paper is not what is bad, bad information is what is bad. Eliminate bad
information you eliminate waste.

LEAN processes are good.

~~~
reneherse
>I think that granularity of message is important - and I think you can really
excel here. > >Rather than presenting the whole plan on PDF - tell them
EXACTLY what they need to know BY ROOM/BY LOCATION that pertains to them at
that moment. >

 _This._

In my former life as an architectural designer and project manager for a
design-build firm, we experimented with creating document sets that provided
this level of room-by-room information. The documents were color printouts on
11x17 sheets, folded and contained in a binder. 160,000 SF remodel. Labor
intensive to say the least, and only possible at all because we were doing
mostly finish work.

But an app could make this level of granularity practical. The advantages to
all stages of construction are numerous, from takeoffs to punch lists and
inspection.

------
iRobot
At first glance I thought it was referring to a rival for the itunes
marketplace for jailbroken ipads...

..but who would want to do that! Silly me!

