Home Property Australia How technology is disrupting the construction industry

How technology is disrupting the construction industry

  • March 21, 2018

How technology is disrupting the construction industry

Innovative new tools tailored for the construction industry can improve safety, enable access to plans on the go, and help teams collaborate, says Dropbox’s Dean Swan.

According to McKinsey, construction is one of the “least digitised industries in the world”. But the construction sector can add as much as two per cent to the global economy by doing things differently, says Swan, Dropbox’s director of enterprise.

A range of tools – including Fieldwire, Aconex, Autodesk, and PlanGrid – can all be integrated with Dropbox Business to simplify work processes on site.

Take Built, one of Australia’s largest and fastest-growing private construction groups, which uses Dropbox Business to set itself apart from competitors.

Where once plans were restricted to reams of paper or large files on desktop computers, Built now maintains real-time access to plans onsite by integrating Dropbox with Fieldwire. Onsite teams have access the latest file from a single source of truth.

Built’s marketing team uses the Trello and Dropbox integration to streamline the construction bid process. With Dropbox in place, Built has increased the number of tenders its marketing team produces without any increase in headcount.

“Being able to use the Dropbox commenting feature on PDF documents means that we’re able to mark up a file in real-time, no matter where we are,” says April Shields, Built’s senior marketing and bid designer.

“As a team, we’ve improved productivity because we’re able to have multiple people collaborating on a file in a more natural, conversational way.”

Plus, Dropbox lets Shields easily manage her team’s workflow across time zones.

“Submissions have very specific deadlines, if you’ve been working on a tender for months and you miss that deadline by even a minute it doesn’t matter. Dropbox gives us the certainty we need to be able to access those files at any time.”

When the team can review and produce tenders more quickly, they can also spend more time focusing on producing quality tenders and keeping that creative energy flowing.

“Rather than just ‘getting work done’ we’re able to consistently provide a higher-quality tender for each bid.”

With Dropbox Business, everyone has information onsite and at their fingertips. The result? Greater quality control, transparency and cooperation.

“By working with Dropbox, Built and its partners can be nimbler in their decision making, and enjoy an end-to-end process that is both collaborative and transparent,” Swan concludes.

To learn more about how the construction industry uses Dropbox, download Build Smarter with Tech.