How the iPad will change the construction industry | Hacker News Reader

How the iPad will change the construction industry

plangrid.com

13 pointsrsuttongee8 comments

Guys, I'm not trying to pooh-pooh on the parade, but it looks like none of the founders have ever touched the construction industry.

A) There is no organ for document submittal or review from the limited options here B) You assume that this will supplant printing costs. At $700/per (assuming iPad and case) + $30/month for cellular data, you're looking at ~$1,100/year/iPad. They're fragile and small compared to printoffs. Construction sites are rough places. Dust, dirt, sand, rain, idiots, you are dealing with everything here. If an iPad lasts 6 months on a construction site, you're doing it wrong. C) Printing costs of $3500/$1munit means that to break even, you need only 3 iPads per $1million job. That's 3 sets of plans, aka 3 supervisors. Highly improbable.

Again, as a field construction engineer, I'd love to have a rugged tablet that would be useful, but in terms of idiot-proofness and reliability, nothing's going to supplant a full size plot or clutch of 11x17s anytime soon.

The big construction companies are the same ones that require 4 signatures to activate a corporate cell phone. Please consider the path before sinking too much more time and effort.

You're in the SF Bay, so get Granite or Teichert on board, and see if you can move from there. A pilot case study showing how often they're broken, etc would be a good plan.

I'd personally pivot into rentals. Rent the iPad + plangrid package at a rate of $100(?)/month/iPad. Construction companies are much more open to rentals even if they don't save money than capital expenditures.

If you'd like more background or insight into a field engineer trying to bring his small corner of the industry into modern times, feel free to shoot me an email: tommytgt <at> gmail.com

Two of the four of us have extensive backgrounds in the construction industry: http://www.plangrid.com/about

Also, we've had dozens of users for several months and none of them to date have broken their iPads. You'd be really amazed at how good some of the ruggedized cases are. I particularly like this one: http://www.gumdropcases.com/drop-series-ipad-2-case.html

Its funny, that construction personnel have this awful stereotype of ignorance and clumsiness, who will break their ipads at first chance.

We construct your buildings, bridges, water treatment plants in sometimes harsh conditions, but still go home safe to our families everyday. We can also hold onto iPads just like everyone else.

I believe the dust and size is the larger concern. Where do you keep them?

It's not a stereotype - I guess it depends on who you're working with. Most of the supervisors I know don't tend to break things out of clumsiness but more out of stress, and many of them aren't so good with computers, even the guys that use them fairly often.

It would be really interesting if you could do technical facilities documentation as well (hospitals, datacenters, satellite earth stations, etc.). There, it's not just the as built configuration, but subsequent modifications -- and it's not just the people building it who need access, but various auditors, operations staff and engineers, equipment vendors, etc.

One of our first adopters was Lawrence Berkeley Lab's facilities management team. PlanGrid is for anyone who looks any type of drawings at all, which includes configuration diagrams and technical maintenance data.

Another interesting thing might be easy markup for HAZMAT or disaster planning -- having the actual plans as a background layer and then overlays with specific emergency information. Given the ~infinite DHS money for local police/fire/emergency forces for counterterrorism, you could probably get some good adoption.

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