Document control is a big issue. “Construction companies have to get drawings out to personnel in the field, and then give that personnel an opportunity to collaborate and provide information back to the office or whomever else,” Minick says. When a good mobile app can reliably serve as a single source of truth for those documents, significant gains in efficiency can be achieved.
“Historically, paper drawings have been the common method,” Minick says. “This inefficiency is made even worse today because of the tendency to use a design/build approach on many projects. The problem is that you have all of these updates to drawings, which results in additional documents. Having to print and deliver these documents over and over results in a great loss of efficiency. A good mobile app will allow numerous people to add notes to the same document. Since apps can store all of this data in the cloud, all updates are in one place for anyone to see at any time.”