Congrid – Improving Process Transparency in Construction Management

There are two main issues Congrid wants to improve using a transparent site management. 1. Quality & Safety should be a shared and common matter. Everyone should be involved to the project to take responsibility for quality... [ view full abstract ]

There are two main issues Congrid wants to improve using a transparent site management. 1. Quality & Safety should be a shared and common matter. Everyone should be involved to the project to take responsibility for quality & safety related issues. When these issues and assurance are made as transparent as possible a common involvement is enabled. Every actor in the construction process, e.g. workers, managers and team members, will see their own involvement at the end. 2. We lose data at each handover during projects’ phases. Planning, construction and facility management are isolated and therefore, the common goal is lost during the process. Shouldn’t we do something for it? Our aim is to use an existing data, enrich this information and keep it available for a further use in standardised formats. These are nice goals but what have we done to change the status quo? We believe, not only managers should collect data and ensure quality and safety. These tasks belong to the whole project group. Congrid involves everyone working in construction projects to take a part for quality & safety management. Our user-friendly application makes issue-reporting available for everyone. All recorded issues are collected transparently to the project portal and the information is shared to all relevant stakeholders. The software gives a project & company-wide view for safety and quality assurance. Using Congrid, everyone can take a part in reporting and documenting. What have we achieved? We started our journey in 2013 and released a MVP tool in 2014. Since then over 3500 sites have used Congrid to document quality and safety issues at worksites. In autumn 2017, we achieved a milestone of one million recorded notes. What makes this amount even better, is that 80 % of the notes were recorded with a photograph. This means that we encourage people to record more and more issues and make the data more valuable with supplementary information and meta data. All data is structured and available via publicAPI for our customers for a further use in their own systems or in another external system. Some of our customers already use API to collect and visualize their data. What will happen in the future? We have seen that unresolved issues still exist at site documentation. Many issues are also linked to earlier and following phases of the process. We will continue our journey to encourage an open information sharing culture at worksites. To support our goal, we will provide a more valuable visualization & analytics to our customers. Currently, we are working with our partners to combine data sets and to transfer data between systems to give an easy access to necessary information. When the data amount grows we need to provide only a relevant data for our users.