Background
The Hong Kong-based company set its sights on replacing their current legacy system that was causing siloed data repositories, disorganized site photos, and overall collaborative bottlenecks. In the long run, and with multiple large-scale projects lined up, the company knew optimizations were needed. Their search for an innovative tool, then led them to HoloBuilder™, now Sphere XG, as their platform of choice.
Challenge
The construction and engineering contractor wanted to modernize their workflows to eliminate three major pain points: capturing and uploading 2D site photos, manually consolidating siloed data repositories, and grouping photos saved without standardized naming conventions according to their metadata.
“The use of HoloBuilder (now Sphere XG) allows the team to take site walk photos and directly upload them into a centralized platform, simplifying the process of comparing photos while ensuring high specificity in image capture. The images can be annotated and shared, making them very useful to illustrate construction progress during client or consultant meetings.”
– Project Digital Engineer –
Solution
The firm, known for being at the forefront of construction technology, began using HoloBuilder. This quickly evolved into using 360° photo capture as the primary documentation method and managing project progress through a digital reality platform. They piloted the technology on a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant from 2019-2022, and 1 year later implemented it on an airport terminal expansion project.
Results
Developing efficient processes and data management workflows
- Site capture time reduced from up to 12 hours to minutes, enabling 3x more site captures per week
- Automatic data organization cuts processing time by 40% saving the firm more than 40 hours a month
- Automated sorting and data analysis enables tracking at 1.5x the speed, or 50% faster
Improving safety standards, oversight, and profitability
- Fast and seamless work verifications for quicker payments
- Cost savings through reduced physical site visits
- Detecting unsafe locations and safety hazards early to eliminate accidents
- Historical photo evidence of work avoids commercial or legal disputes
Improving collaboration with stakeholders through cloud access
- Digital representation of jobsites simplifies cooperation with designers
- Stakeholders pinpoint and address incomplete and sub-par work in real time with markups or ad-hoc smartphone photos
- Promote better communication with other trade partners
