The Problem: Too Many Photos, Not Enough Organization

Something Had to Change: Enter StructionSite and Tagged, Linked Photos

Case Study: Choate Construction

Whip out your cell phone and take a picture. It’s that simple, right? Well, for the team at Choate Construction, a large commercial and general contractor headquartered in Atlanta, this was the quickest way to eat up all the memory on their smartphones.

After the Choate team maxed out their cell phones, Tim Watson, Virtual Construction Manager, reports that they bought some hand-held digital cameras, and some bigger memory cards. Great, but the pictures just seemed to multiply like…well, photos in the digital age. How do you organize all of that? They had 100’s of pictures and they had to write down the location and unit number for each photo. Organizing the photos was a huge pain and taking valuable time away from construction projects.

When a big project came in, managing the number of photos got so stressful that the Choate team decided something had to change. Starting with StructionSite was easy because the interface is so simple to navigate---much easier than other products on the market. They were attracted by the pinning feature, meaning that locations were immediately tagged, and that information stayed with each photo. Plus, the price was right within budget.

In terms of cameras, the new 360° cameras have also made a huge impact on time. With either the Insta360 One X or the Ricoh Theta V, Choate managers were able to take one photo instead of 8. The Insta360 was easier to connect to the platform and took much clearer images than their previous camera. The Insta took a couple of seconds to wake up—after that, it was great.

“...the interface is so simple to navigate—much easier than other products on the market.”

Using a smartphone

Using a hand-held camera

Time management

Not enough info captured

Eats up your phone storage, battery life and exporting photos is complicated

Now you have too many photos that are disorganized, not tagged or labeled and you still have to export all of it

With all these photos, gathering them and organizing them was taking up valuable time

Doing it manually meant you had to write down the location, unit numbers for each photo

Workflow Problems

www.structionsite.com | (510) 340-9515

“Marrying” the Photos to the Plans Saved Time

Winning More Work

Takeaways from Converting to StructionSite

Case Study: Choate Construction

For Choate, the amount of money and time saved by using Structionsite made the investment in the technology and integration into the SOP completely worth it. The photos can be linked to architectural plans, punch lists, and all manner of other project management tools. Oscar Chica, VDC manager at Choate explained that because StructionSite integrates with Procore, it saved Choate a huge amount of time in categorizing images. “Dates and locations were tagged on the photos and photos landed in the right folders to link with areas in Procore,” said Oscar. “Being able to markup the 360° photos on the platform is very useful, too.”

Integration with Navisworks and the civil plan meant that for utilities or site clearing, they could just marry the photos to the plans all the way through to the end of the job. This minimized the trips out to the job site during coordination meetings. Linking the actual image with the model was invaluable for a team unable to get to the job site. When something went wrong, or a difference was found between the model and the photos, Structionsite allowed them to assess problems in minutes which would have taken hours or weeks previously.

Not only has Structionsite made it easier to organize site documentation, but it really impressed one owner before Choate even landed the contract. In a project interview walk-through, Choate was able to take photos and seamlessly integrate them to show off the workflow, adding just one more reason for the owner to go with Choate.

Owners who were not as tech savvy had no problem using the system and could navigate around the photos in an intuitive way. The buy-in from stakeholders was immediate, and all the photos live in the cloud, so no space on servers is gobbled up by this documentation.

Just seeing the StructionSite in action stirred excitement among various Choate workers and contractors, making them eager to start using the platform in different ways. Everyone who saw it had the wheels start turning in their heads, giving them their own ideas about how to use tech in ways they had never thought of before.

When asked why they would recommend Structionsite, Tim Watson, Virtual Construction Manager, enthusiastically said the “CYA aspect!” Being able to cover your assets with a picture, and one that you can easily locate is terrific. The whole package really took Choate from 0 to 100 quickly, with a good ROI. In fact, the value of the Structionsite process to clients all around the world is hard to calculate, since this lets them see exactly what is going on at any given time. At turnover, this is a huge value to owners and FMs, “like X-ray vision to see where things are behind the walls.” Tim Watson continued, “Structionsite is the most natural evolution of photo taking for construction---from Polaroid to the digital camera, to Bluebeam, and now to Structionsite.”

“...photos can be linked to architectural plans, punch lists, and all manner of other project management tools.”

www.structionsite.com | (510) 340-9515