Volanti Displays was showcasing a large touchscreen portable unit that is great as a jobsite incident command station. No worries about breaking the screen with this set-up.

What do you use on your jobsite when you need a larger than 17″ monitor at your jobsite? Not only will this display let everyone see what you’re working on, it’s touch screen and unit comes with all the bells and whistles for communication, touch and more!

Those metal Conex boxes aren’t really helping you logistically, are they? Now that you’ve seen the components, what would you suggest adding to make your work at the jobsite easier? I was thinking about building in a Bluebeam Mousepad into the styrafoam myself. How bout a Nvidia graphics card and make this a BIM and Bluebeam command center?

Add your ideas into the comments and I’ll make sure to pass them on to Mike.

If you liked this post you might also enjoy:

Multiple monitors for estimating productivity

The post Volanti Displays at Bluebeam XCON 2019 appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

The construction industry has transformed drastically over the past 20 years. Smartphone apps have enabled real-time information exchange; armloads of files and blueprints are being replaced by a few taps on a tablet. Technology is changing almost every aspect of the industry, and companies that refuse to adapt and implement it risk being outdone by tech-savvy competitors.
One of the biggest fears construction company owners face when considering implementing new technologies is understanding what they do and how to use them effectively. Below are snapshots of some of the newest and most innovative construction technologies available to the industry:

1. UAV Technology

Unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs are a hot technology in several industries today because of all the different business use cases they can provide. In the construction industry, companies are sending camera-equipped UAVs into the air to take dozens — if not hundreds or thousands — of images. The pictures, which are linked to GPS data, can be stitched together with special software, transforming them into a 2-D or 3-D site model. The model can be used to:

• Assess progress on a project — daily, weekly or at some other regular interval
• Locate specific areas where work is falling behind schedule
• Measure stockpile volume
• Determine the amount of overburden that needs to be removed from an area
• Monitor width and slope of haul roads
• Analyze quarry faces and berms
• Inspect hazardous areas
• Confirm that employees are wearing protective gear and working safely
• Get a high-level view of operator technique, load-zone placement, tire rotation and other factors that affect efficiency
• Show clients work in progress
• Create images for marketing presentations and materials

These tasks and many others can be done quickly, accurately and economically with UAV systems — assuming you have access to the right technology, analytics and expertise. Caterpillar has a small team of UAV experts whose sole focus is determining how the technology can be used to improve site safety, efficiency and profitability.

Companies that are considering taking advantage of UAV technology need to be aware of the laws governing the commercial use of UAVs because they are different depending on where you do business. The United States has the tightest federal regulations in regard to UAVs, with new laws slated for 2016. We think UAVs are going to take off in the construction and aggregates sectors over the next few months and years. As this technology evolves, you’ll be able to combine machine data from your telematics systems with geo-spatial data from UAVs, giving you the power to take site efficiency to all-new levels.

2. GRADE with Assist
Grading technology helps make excavators, dozers and motor graders more efficient because it allows operators to get to grade faster with less effort. Caterpillar’s precision grading system, Cat® GRADE, part of Cat Connect technology, can help both new and experienced machine operators deliver dramatic improvements in grading efficiency over a wide range of applications. GRADE with Assist, which adds automated grading sequences, is featured on Cat Excavators, is the most advanced worksite technology available. Among the benefits grading technology can provide:

• Keeping people off the ground and out of trenches
• Reducing the cost of staking and grade checking
• Cutting grading time by up to 45%
• Conserving fuel and materials when you finish in fewer passes
• Saving time and costs related to rework
• Helping less experienced operators work like pros

Grading technology, like Cat GRADE, enhances jobsite safety, improves reliability and adds to the machine’s value, both on the job and at resale. Just to show some real-life examples, below are 10 things you can do faster and more efficiently with grading technology:

1. Dig a basement
2. Build a detention pond
3. Put in a sewer line
4. Dig foundation footings
5. Cut a drainage ditch
6. Prep a commercial site pad
7. Build an access road
8. Install underground utilities
9. Slope an embankment
10. Construct a retaining wall

3. Workplace Safety Technology

Several new technologies have become available to safeguard worksites and better manage risk. One of the most common accidents in the construction industry is being struck by or trapped by equipment or vehicles. Blind spots and backing up accidents account for between 25 and 50 percent of the total. One in 10 construction workers are injured every year, so worksite safety is paramount. Here are some of the newest worksite safety technologies that can help prevent injuries:

• Object Detection technologies
o Complete object detection systems include back-up cameras and pulsed-radar object detection. Cameras give operators a view of what is typically their biggest blind spot, and radar identifies objects and people hidden from the operator’s view and sounds an alarm.

• Fatigue Detection technologies
o A camera installed in the cab that monitors pupil size, blinking and how long eyes stay shut determines fatigue detection. If the system senses the operator is falling asleep, an alarm sounds and the seat vibrates.

• “Smart” wearables
o Safety gear with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), sensors and bio-monitors has all hit the market within the last several years. The
most common are RFID systems that alert workers and equipment
operators when they are both moving through a work zone.

As it becomes more evident that technological innovations will shape the future of the construction industry, it’s up to you to determine if your company is going to embrace these new construction technologies or be left behind. We here at Caterpillar encourage you to re-think the process of using, managing and owning heavy equipment by incorporating these new technologies to help make your equipment more productive and efficient, and your business more profitable.

Thanks again Caterpillar for this article. What new construction technologies are you planning to implement at your firm? How will it integrate with your existing systems and automate or enhance your workflows? Which of these safety technologies hold the most promise? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

The post The Most Revolutionary New Construction Technologies appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

With guest speakers, Adam Green and Travis Becker of SEGI (segisalespros.com), we learned that cooling costs typically account for 38% of the energy consumption in a data center. Heat Loads and Hot Spots are the culprits so control of the air flow is critical for energy efficiency. They explained the advantages and disadvantages of hot air vs cool air containment and that both methods can reduce cooling power consumption by about 50%. More can be saved using a Vertical Exhaust Duct System (VEDS), a CPI passive cooling method used to remove 30kw heat loads. Imagine turning off half of your air handlers and you can extrapolate what your project owner’s savings can be. The VEDS system can be designed into a building or retrofitted afterwards. If you design ahead, you won’t have the extra expense of unnecessary air handlers as your Mechanical Contracting Design professional can attest.

It was good to meet other women in IT from the City of Chandler, APS, Amkor Technology, MDI Group, Vistx, Wesco, Berk-Tek Leviton and Enterprise Network Solutions. The Arizona IT Women’s Network meets monthly for lunch at ASU Skysong in Scottsdale. Gigabit Passive Optical Networks, Distributed Antenna Systems and Data Center Infrastructure Management Solutions are planned as topics through July. If you would be interested in attending let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

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Turn Your Whiteboard into a Touch Pen Display

Construction presentation effectiveness is the difference between winning and losing a project. Since Powerpoint came on the scene, the innovative contracting firm has mastered storytelling and realizes than communication is a two way street. Proving your understanding of the project scope, site challenges and constructability is paramount to success. The static slide is being usurped by interactive presentations. Here are a few ideas to convert your next presentation from drab to interactive:

Make Your Information Visually Appealing
One of the most common presentation mistakes is made when displaying numbers in a row and column format. Most people think, I’ll make a chart or graph which is old school. Instead, create a Heat Map using Excel. This is especially effective when presenting energy data on a LEED construction project to an owner. This video from Annielytics is an excellent tutorial of how to create a heat map:

Add Interactive Elements
Links to supporting project data, photos, videos etc are the basics. Hyperlinking Slide content to construction documents or real-time data collection that translates these field updates into easily understood moving visuals are recommended. How you render project progress completion by building, floor or room can transport an owner inside his own building. Here’s an example of a design coordination meeting recently shared by Ryan Companies using Bluebeam Revu in a Studio Session:

All annotations and task statuses are captured in the Markups list of Bluebeam

Update Your Construction Visual Aides
Using whiteboards, projectors and flat screen monitors is so 2008. Convert your Whiteboard or wall-mounted flat screen monitor into a touch pen screen with the U-Pointer. It’s small and portable to take with you to a client’s office. Wherever your need to present, you can make a lasting impression, even at the jobsite:

Interactive Display at Jobsite with U-Pointer

Add a Liquid Multi-Touch Display and immerse your audience with an iPad-like project kiosk experience. Show your construction team link portal, interactive

32″ Liquid Display with Stand

plan sets, your visual punch process, the job site check-in process for your workforce and how you communicate when resolving time-sensitive issues.  The electronic documents of today necessitate mark-up and annotation capabilities.  Your client is expecting a mobile, connected and collaborative team that communicates efficiently.

Whatever cost effective technology you use on your construction site that adds value, improves communication and streamlines processes is a winning proposition to the construction team and the project owner.

For additional information on any of these technologies, please contact me directly via Email and please specify what product you are interested in.

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Volunteers arrive with a special delivery

Update 12/21/12:  Amazing! Fantastic! Unbelievable!  Someone will need to figure out the value of ABA’s Toy Drive.  In addition to an abundance of toys delivered yesterday, over $2,000 in gift cards were presented.  Sunshine Home reps said in their 18 years, this is the best Christmas they’ve ever had.  Additionally, the GC’s who put the bid on the street enjoyed the involvement and were successful in getting donations from companies the ABA executive director has never heard of! The above depicts the huge success of this endeavor.  Thank you to all who participated and volunteered!

Original Post: The Arizona Builders Alliance (ABA) is having their Toy Drive to make a difference in the lives of Phoenix Area displaced children.  Instead of a regular press release, McCarthy used SmartBidNet to get the word out about Sunshine Homes to their subcontractors.  Many other commercial construction companies that belong to the ABA are planning to do the same with their own invitation to bid software.

Here are the details:

Project:                The Sunshine Project

Location:            Phoenix, AZ

Type:                     New & Renovation

Bid Date:             12/17/12 @ 4p MST 

Status:                  Invited Bidder – GC Bids to Owner (By invitation Only) December 17^th, 2012 at 4 PM MST)

First Report Date:            12/5/12

Target Start Date:            12/21/12

Description of Project:  This project consists of providing goods and services to brighten the holidays of 330+ kids and young adults (ages 6 to 18) forcefully removed from their parents and homes due to neglect, physical abuse, alcohol, and drugs.  The Sunshine Project helps to provide these 210 boys and 110 girls a safe and stable environment so that they can heal, grow, and eventually re-enter society as whole citizens.

Approved Building Materials:

• Footballs
• Basketballs
• Soccer balls
• Frisbees
• Board games
• Electronic game systems & games
• Hand-held electronic games
• Disposable cameras
• Movie passes
• Gift cards
• Ear Phones
• Art Kits
• MP3 players
• Popcorn tins
• Cookie tins

Restricted Building Materials:

• Toy guns
• Toy knives,
• NC-17 games and movies
• Stuffed animals – lice carrier

Submit Bids To:                Bids (donations) can be made to any of the soliciting general contractors.  The important thing is that we give regardless of which general contractor receives your donation.  All of the donated items will be consolidated in one location for final delivery.

Notes:                                  Because of the security concerns for the kids, no bids/donations are to be delivered directly to Sunshine Homes.

If you are interested in donating or participating in this Christmas Construction project  for Sunshine Acres and bring smiles to hundreds of children, please contact Matt Adcock at McCarthy, 480-449-4700 or any other member of the Arizona Builders Alliance to donate toys

We’d also be much obliged if you’d share this with other Arizona Contractors and spread the news. Merry Christmas!

The post A Unique Christmas Construction Invitation to Bid appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

This year over 1000 teachers and students toured the exhibits and had opportunities to operate power tools, heavy equipment and experience the diversity of work that the construction industry offers.  Whether you have a high school diploma or a college degree, the jobs in construction offer good pay and a career path that can take you from laborer to CEO.

Here’s a pictoral story of the 2012 event held at the Army National Guard facilities in Phoenix:

To participate in next year’s event as an exhibitor, sponsor or school visit the official Arizona Construction Career Days Website.

The post Arizona Construction Career Days A Huge Hit appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

With email storage growing 37% year over year, limiting your employee’s mailbox size may improve your email server performance but you are simultaneously losing valuable documentation. Construction operations managers often create policies to drag n drop emails into a document management system. Some project management systems log the email on the project as they are sent. The problem with these approaches it that it requires a human to stop and take time to drag the email or always log into a project management system. With the smartphone prevalent throughout the construction mobile workforce is this a reasonable expectation of your project managers and field teams? Add texting, instant messages and social media to the mix and it seems that more often than not, there are exceptions that may sidestep your project system’s design. Even marketing and business development communications may be locked in a silo that knowledge in operations could benefit from. Then there’s the dreaded discovery when a project has turned sour. Accessing what’s been said in email can be a godsend or at least identify your exposure to risk.

Construction professionals are not only mobile but often project team members are recruited from firm to firm and their knowledge goes with them. When an e-discovery issue arises and a key employee no longer works at your firm, if you haven’t retained the emails you may not have any idea what’s been said. Worse yet is the opposing council may have an email sent from your firm, that you are unaware of. Being in the dark by forcing email deletion may have just worked against you. What’s worse is that email discovery costs are rising

How can a construction firm capture everything? Email archiving or integration to an Enterprise Content Management System(ECM).

Not every email archiving system can capture everything but some are worthy of discussion as they incorporate new features as technology advances. For instance, Arcmail Defender which can instantly archive your chats and attachments. It has also addressed communications shared in SalesForce Chatter, an enterprise social network mentioned by a few contractors who have deployed the Salesforce CRM system. Armail has been working with construction companies since 2006 as they offer a case study of Pinkard Construction online [PDF].

By having a email archiving system in place you can search across the enterprise for all incoming and outgoing communications, project related or otherwise. If you’ve ever searched in Outlook through 6 months of saved emails, you may be waiting awhile for results. Searching from an email archiving system offers additional search functions and shortens the time to locate critical communications. If you can increas productivity and reduce risk it’s a win-win. Once overheard in a construction management meeting, “The firm with the most documentation wins” is a mantra that is only true if you can also find what you’re looking for. As a reseller of ArcMail I’d like to invite you to an on-demand email archiving demonstration. Simply Click here to watch a 30 minute overview or Email Me to ask questions and schedule a one-on-one demonstration.

If you found this post interesting you may also like these:

Construction Communications and the Email Tidal Wave

Email Records Retention Can Be Tricky

The post Construction Email: Friend or Foe? appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Mike Rowe Works for You

The mikeroweWORKS Trades Hub just launched and pulls together blogs, articles and news stories relating to the construction trades,
It’s an easy to navigate site, to quickly find the popular blogs and websites that might normally go unnoticed if you’re not a regular subscriber. You may recognize the name, Mike Rowe as he’s been at apprentice in over 300 “Dirty Jobs” Episodes on TV. He’s passionate about the trades and the construction industry.

Building Up the Trades Community: “The skills gap is a real concern that’s getting more worrisome every day. Fewer skilled tradesmen in the workforce will affect us all. Younger folks need to have a better understanding of how they can benefit from learning a trade, and parents need to encourage their kids to consider this worthwhile and important path. mrW strives to reinvigorate the trades. The mrW Trades Hub will help us in that effort.”

Carol’s Construction Technology Blog is honored to be included in the Trade Hub. Here’s a screenshot of the Trades Hub and I hope you read it often!

Carol’s Construction Technology Blog in Trades Hub

Your comments and feedback are always welcome. Please share this with your friends in the construction industry.

The post Construction “Trades Hub” For Quality Content Across the Web appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Can't make it to FutureTech next week? Follow @ENR_FutureTech for what's happening! http://bit.ly/fiy6Xh via @AmyEcolino #aec

— Carol Bluebeam Hagen 🏗️🚧💻🛠️ #i♥️revu (@carolhagen) April 1, 2011

The post FutureTech begins Wednesday appeared first on Hagen Business Systems.

Begin a Dialogue with Your Employees
Don’t just lock everyone out of everything! This reactionary approach will make your firm look like a dinosaur to your team as well as your customers. I’ve seen this implemented at large publicly held construction companies and I think they’ve shot themselves in the foot by locking out everyone with URL filtering. Determine which employees and social media applications can contribute to your company brand, market reach and customer relationships. Ask your marketing, communications and sales people including anyone involved with customer relationship management or customer support for their input. Check out your competitor’s website to see what social media applications and tools they are using. Often you’ll see a few icons listed somewhere on their site, an invitation to connect in the sidebar of a blog or perhaps an RSS feed of their social activity.

Establish a Social Media Policy
Start with defining what is acceptable and unacceptable when using social media sites as you do for email and cell phone usage. Yes, your Legal and Information technology teams will probably influence (scare) you enough that risk tolerance decisions will need to be made. My favorite book for addressing social media policy is The e-Policy Handbook by Nancy Flynn. You may have already decided that “we only allow LinkedIn”, period. Think again. The most popular Business to Business (B2B) network by far in the United States is LinkedIn and they’ve just added the ability to display Twitter feeds and blog posts on the Company Profile. Since blog posts often have videos embedded in articles, you may have just policed yourself into not being able to view your own marketing materials.

Get the IT Department on Board
With budget cuts across the board, IT is trying to do everything without spending money and often takes the “lock down” approach as the only thing they can do with the tools they currently have. Perhaps you should consider budgeting for new equipment, particularly firewalls that address social media. It’s not good enough anymore to rely on old technology. Traditional firewalls rely on port and protocol to classify traffic, allowing tech-savvy applications and users to bypass them with ease; hopping ports, using
SSL, sneaking across port 80, or using non-standard ports. It may be time to have your network traffic analyzed for applications, users and content, you need to know what bandwidth is used by social media and have a way to monitor and enforce your policies effectively. The Interface2010 Technology Symposium has this topic covered and while I attended the Scottsdale, AZ event last week, you can still catch them in a few other US cities this year.

We’re in the process of scheduling a webinar to help educate business owners and their IT departments on social media policy, monitoring and network security. If you’d like to receive a webinar invitation, be interested in a network audit or have questions, please ask us by posting a comment. Please share this with your business partners, IT friends, and customers.

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