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Project Overview

Aconex Field is a mobile application that radically improves the way project teams conduct building inspections. It replaces inefficient and error prone paper and manual processes with slick technology to capture, distribute and track issues.

If you’re a builder, it means faster project completion with fewer complications, and if you’re an owner you can be certain you get a quality project delivered on time.

Not only that, since it’s integrated with Aconex, you can do it all on one platform, so there is one standard process for managing information across all project participants, and no need for additional systems.

Organisation

Aconex

Team

Justin McKinlay, Product Manager (Project Sponsor)
Marcus Coghlan, Senior Interaction Designer,
Ben Birch, Mobile Development Lead,
Yoram Kulbak, Web & API Tech Lead,
Gretchen Pitt, Business Analyst,
Rahul Kashyap, Quality Assurance Engineer,
Nicole Lawther, Senior Visual Designer,
INXS, Melbourne Development Team,
Imaginea, Outsourced Development Team

Project Brief

Managing issues in construction is a headache for everyone involved. Most contractors still use a traditional, paper based process involving handwritten recording of issue information onto paper. These records then require data entry back in the office into a spreadsheet. Hardcopy lists of issues are printed for tradespeople, but because the process is so manual and inefficient, these often take days or weeks to produce. We set ourselves three goals for our mobile solution: 1) Reduce the time it takes to turnaround issues, 2) replace paper with a single source of issue information in the cloud, and 3) encourage standardization on a common platform across projects and participants.

Project Innovation / Need

Aconex Field is optimised for speed, designed to deliver fast and highly efficient inspections. It’s faster than paper systems and extremely easy to learn and use. Inspections can continue to take place, even when internet access is unavailable, as the mobile app automatically syncs issues to the cloud when a connection is found.

Scan a project location with the in-built QR code barcode scanner to begin an inspection, or to view issues for a given location.

Project teams can explore the project’s locations and capture issues fast with predictive lists. It’s easy to take, attach and mark-up photos. This immediately removes uncertainty about what needs to be fixed. Save issues with a due date for completion and they are instantly available to project participants assigned from the Aconex project directory. Once issues are resolved, re-inspect and close them out with ease.

Aconex Field is a secure, cloud based permanent record of all issue information collected from the job site, exchanged between participants, or received from external sources.

User Experience

The Aconex Field project has been a really exciting challenge where we were able to quantifiably measure the difference good design makes.

Time really is money. And in the case of large construction projects, a lot of money. It's inevitable for a project to have issues, but knowing this doesn't make it any easier when you come to covering all the costs of their resolution and the resulting project delays.

To minimize the impact, construction projects invest in teams to identify and drive the efficient resolution of issues. Sadly, the tools made available to these teams have been inefficient and painful to setup and use. Pen and paper is often still the mobile device of choice in the field.

With Aconex Field, we've set our sights on delivering a lean, streamlined mobile app that saves valuable time in all aspects of its use. Not only for the key issue management activities, like capturing new issues and issue reinspection, but also being intuitive enough that first time users can feel confident in a matter of minutes.

Through close collaboration with real teams on real projects, the app has evolved to be an ideal match for its environment. Ongoing user feedback and validation has stripped away the excess fat leaving a tool that is truly focused on its purpose - enabling the people using it to be faster and better at what they do. Feedback so far shows time savings in excess of 50% across all key issue management activities.

Project Marketing

More than 40,000 organisations are already using Aconex, so we have a fantastic direct marketing opportunity right from the start. We will promote Field using the login screen of the application, targeted emails to specific target groups and using our customer and user newsletters as well as staff email signatures.

Beyond this “captive” audience, our promotional strategy targeting prospects globally is a mix including PR driven by client and 3rd party endorsements, enhanced by social media and direct marketing. Since the value proposition is quickly understood when people see the product, we are developing a highly visual campaign, with simple, bold messages. The campaign theme centres around the key benefit delivered by the application; massive time saving in managing issues in construction, and is delivered in a very simple, easy to digest message; it’s all about Field Time.

The use of video will play a key role in making the value proposition come alive and cut through. Client endorsements as well as “commercial” style videos that show the product off in a fresh, engaging way will form a key part of the content that will drive enquiries to our website and ultimately to our lead nurturing engine and direct sales force.