News & Media Coverage

Viewpoint’s Service Tech™ app provides service technicians with a mobile field tool to manage and review work orders, assign and update labor, collect electronic signatures, upload jobsite photos and forms, and more. The app integrates with ViewpointOne.

It’s common knowledge construction is dangerous work. Over the years, the industry has built an extensive knowledge base consisting of safety do’s and don’ts. But when it comes to protecting people, it’s not enough to implement safety practices and post them on a wall.

Viewpoint, a Trimble company (NASDAQ: TRMB) and construction management software leader, announced today the release of its Service Tech™ app for service contractors that enables greater speed and integration between office and field.

The productivity gap is one of the biggest issues contractors have had to wrestle with on their projects. Unlike most other industries — manufacturing, for instance, where work is carried out and tightly controlled in a central location — work is not uniform. Each project has its own unique set of challenges — from remote locations and disconnected jobsites to weather and environmental issues to communication, collaboration and ineffective data mining across project teams.

Viewpoint, a Trimble company and construction management software leader, announced the release of its Service Tech app for service contractors that enables greater speed and integration between office and field.

Pan-Pacific Mechanical, a mechanical design-build subcontractor, has begun to develop bot software to automate its construction management workflows. According to Contractor Magazine, the software automates tasks a human would typically do, such as making data easily available to teams in the office, and the field. The bot can also simplify and automate data entry.

Pan-Pacific Mechanical is currently exploring process automation, assisted machine learning, computer aided engineering, and most recently, bots.

The frequent portrayal of contractors as technological laggards is in some respects unfair. While it’s true that construction has fallen behind other industries in using technology to manage the enterprise, it’s also more difficult to integrate data in construction than in other sectors.

The construction industry is in the midst of a significant technology transformation as contractors adopt the latest cloud technologies to help enhance operations, automate workflows, streamline data into single streams and extend collaboration beyond the walls of the office. Yet, for an industry that has historically struggled with change, many contractors who have yet to modernize may not know where to start—or how to integrate and maximize their technology investments to get the most out of new solutions put in place.

Very soon, Matt Lamb will be able to tell you exactly how long it should take his electricians to install a foot of pipe or wire, by job type, anywhere in the country. To the uninitiated, that might not sound like a notable achievement. But when it comes to analyzing and leveraging data within the construction industry, that simple metric has the potential to unlock insight into the trades that’s never been accessible before.