Construction Field Mobility Blog

Greetings from Austin, Texas, site of the FIATECH conference.  This is our fourth year in a row attending this well-run event.  Approximately 250 construction technology enthusiasts have been here for 3 days attending various educational sessions and keynotes following the Fiatech “roadmap” for innovation in construction.

Preliminary Survey Results on Barriers and Benefits to Field Mobility in Construction

One of the more relevant sessions for us was on the “Role and Potential of Mobile Solutions in Capital Projects.”  During this session, Neill Pawsey, Programme (yes, he is from the UK) Manager of COMIT, an organization dedicated to understanding the drivers and barriers to mobility in construction, presented a study on the key factors driving user acceptance of Mobile IT.   Neill presented the interim results of an ongoing survey of 170+ construction professionals (both office and field) which found the following:

• Usability of technology and change management were the biggest barriers to technology adoption in the field
• For field workers, the top benefit mobile technologies was “efficiency” (e.g., get more done in the same amount of time), with 41% of respondents ranking this as “very important”
• A close second was the ability to “interact with information in the field” (e.g., can look at my construction documents or other materials) was the next highest ranked benefit with  38% of respondents ranking this as “very important”

The COMIT final report is due out in the April-May timeframe.

Vela customers Barton Malow and DPR Construction both win CETI awards

Both winning projects featured the partnership between us, Tekla Structures for Construction Management and Motion Computing.    Barton Malow won their award for using BIM with Vela Systems to manage the commissioning process and create a BIM and Vela handover deliverable to the owner at Maryland General Hospital (click here to see the webinar).   DPR won for using Tekla BIM and Vela Systems for doors, frames and hardware tracking at a project with U. Cal. Pomona.  This was featured in a webinar last year.

Congratulations and a hearty thank you to both customers for their innovative work!

 

Hide Sites