Construction Firm Builds Field Success With Rugged Tablets By Teresa von Fuchs
Regarded as a national leader in wood-frame construction, Birmingham, AL-based Doster Multifamily celebrated 40 years in the business this year by maximizing workflow on the job site, improving on its already rigorous quality control process and saving time and money on every project.
How did they do it? By implementing rugged tablets and automating field-based processes to connect to backend systems. But, of course, it wasn't just a simple case of design and build.
Doster knew a mobile solution could help it:
improve communications with subcontractors;
reduce wasted paper and time spent inputting handwritten field notes;
improve accuracy of inspection records; and
track work flow.
The company had deployed PDAs in its Multifamily Division the previous year in an attempt to meet some of these goals. "We went the PDA route initially because it seemed simpler," explains Doster Network Support Specialist CJ Rainer, "We weren't sure if the guys in the field were going to take to using the PDAs, how well they'd grasp the technology, and how excited they'd be about it. We were pleased at how quick they did grasp it and even outgrow it. We were only up a few months before we started to realize we could do more with technology out in the field than what we were able to do with the PDAs."
The PDAs lacked processing power, the screen size was too small to easily collect data in the field, and there had been a few instances of major data loss due to the clumsy and time-consuming process of syncing the handhelds to backend systems. Due to these issues, many workers were still using pen-and-paper to track quality control inspections.
At every phase along the project, inspectors go through each building making notes about project completion and creating a 'punch list' of tasks that need to be fixed or have yet to be completed by subcontractors. Quality control specialists then take their notes and drawings back to the site trailer and transcribe the information or make copies for subcontractors. This paper-based process, though less frustrating than losing a day's worth of work from a faulty sync, was still error prone and did not help the company archive work flow and create efficiencies within its project management process.
Rainer and Bryan A. Love, Doster's Project Manager for Scheduling and Quality Control, spent about four months defining the needs of the quality control field team and researching better mobile solutions. Even after only nine months of using PDAs, the field team had a lot of ideas about how a mobile solution could be helpful.
Armed with this feedback, Rainer and Love started looking at software applications, eventually narrowing down their options and inviting vendors in to explore features and benefits of each solution. They chose the Encompass Product Suite.
"One of our complaints with the PDA solution was that the application was really basic and wasn't able to connect to our project management software," says Love, "One thing we really liked about Encompass is that if you're using a third party software it can basically sit on top of the other software and move info back and forth between our backend systems and tablets in the field."
Rainer and Love were already fairly sure they wanted to use tablet PCs as the new hardware part of the solution. "From an IT standpoint, a tablet seemed like a natural step up from a PDA," explains Rainer, "but going to the marketplace, a tablet is a bit more expensive than a PDA, so we knew we were definitely looking for a rugged tablet. Really, I just went to Google and started checking it out."
Motion Computing tablets came up in Rainer's searches often, because along with durability, he also knew he was looking for tablet with a built-in camera. Several of the software companies also mentioned Motion as a respected brand.
Doster chose to work with Allegiance Technology Partners to purchase and configure the new Motion F5 tablet PCs. "Allegiance has been a great partner," Love says. "They were helpful in selecting the exact configurations for our needs and whenever we've had questions, they have been helpful and responsive."
Doster has initially deployed 25 F5 tablets across multiple job sites. Rainer and Love said they were able to deploy and train employees on the new solution in less than two days.
"Really it was just a natural step. Since they were comfortable with the PDA it was not hard to switch up to a tablet. And the F5s were incredibly easy to learn," explains Love. The company is already looking at how to work the solution into other departments; it has been able to replace many legacy desktops with the F5s and docking stations in the trailers.
Love and Rainer say the sky's the limit for this new solution, which is easy to learn and capable of much more than simply a improving the creation and sharing of punch lists. "From an IT side, the future is wide open for us," says Rainer, "I don't think in two, even three years are we going to say, 'we need more features.' Sure you always want faster or lighter, but the primary capabilities of this solution leave us plenty of room to grow."
Among the capabilities Rainer and Love are planning for the future plans are:
tagging jobsites with barcodes
allowing inspectors to scan a location and bring up plans and drawings onto which they can make notes
using portable projectors to project plans onto walls or floors, rather than having to carry around bulky blueprints
"There's so much we can do with this solution, we just didn't have time to do everything at once," says Love.
Though the company hasn't done a formal ROI evaluation, Rainer wishes they had kept a more accurate record of how long it took to previously complete tasks, because he is so convinced it would illustrate just how successful the solution has been.
Anecdotally, a quality control team of four recently completed a punch list at a three-floor healthcare facility site in three days. Once completed, the team was able to sort through roughly 160 pages of data, arrange the data by subcontractor, and email it out to the appropriate parties in 30 minutes. "With the F5s, we completed in three days what would have taken about two weeks before," says Love.
