Building In Efficiency
Portal sites target the brick-and-mortar world of construction
By JUDY DEMOCKER
E-business has arrived in the construction industry, promising to add Palm organizers and Web browsers to builders' tool chests. This market is getting its fair share of attention as two sites offer project management services and communications tools to the construction industry.
The latest to join the fray, Buzzsaw.com, is an Autodesk spin-off that hopes to parlay its clout with architects and engineers into an e-commerce hub for building owners and contractors. Buzzsaw this month launched ProjectPoint, a project management tool. Other services include a document repository for AutoCad files and online meeting rooms.
Buzzsaw's positioning brings it in line with BidCom, which has been offering its Web-based project management services for more than a year, cultivating a construction industry audience. These start-ups are trying to transform the industry by giving construction businesses, including building owners, architectural firms, contractors, subcontractors and materials suppliers, access to Web apps at affordable prices.
At the outset, Buzzsaw is offering its project management app service for free, making its money from advertising and sponsorships, and value-added services like document storage.
BidCom charges a monthly subscription fee for its hosting services. Eventually, these ASPs hope to capture a small percentage of the $650 billion construction industry through e-commerce transactions.
The savings businesses can reap using these services is hard to quantify. But one company says its trial run of Buzzsaw's Project-Point let it nearly cut in half the number of phone calls, faxes and e-mails required to keep 50 people informed on a large project.
"If we have to update a drawing, we post it to the Web, track who's viewed it and have discussions about it in a central place. With e-mail, we can't be sure that each person has read the most recent version of each document,'' says Doug Cochran, a CAD director at LPA Inc., an architectural firm based in Irvine, Calif.
"As far as time savings, I'd say we reduced the process of updating people by 30 percent to 40 percent," Cochran says. "What we save in costs is probably a similar amount, although it's hard to quantify what we're spending on couriers, overnight delivery, and Jaz or Zip discs.''
For the most part, the commercial building industry communicates on paper. Forms are filled out for acquiring materials, filing permits, updating blueprints and submitting bids. These sheets must circulate among dozens of people, going through multiple revisions. Eliminating paper could save the industry millions of dollars each year.
The city of San Francisco tried BidCom's process management app for a recent public works project. In conjunction with logging on with BidCom, the city also tested using Palm organizers for data entry. Instead of taking notes on paper in the field, city inspectors used handhelds to enter survey results into the BidCom system, eliminating redundant data entry when they got back to the construction trailers. The project finished six months ahead of schedule. But the real benefit was that everyone involved--from the city inspectors to the contractors--had immediate access to project information.
"With BidCom, our team has an ability to communicate faster, so decisions can be made quickly. In construction, time is money. We'd have a request for information, and it would take 14 days to get a response. We need it in minutes,'' says Harlan Kelly, city engineer and deputy director of engineering at the Department of Public Works for the city and county of San Francisco. "It's hard to estimate the cost of a contractor having a piece of information today versus tomorrow.''
Both BidCom and Buzzsaw have focused on the information management piece of the puzzle. Still, to make an e-commerce play and cement themselves in the industry, these forerunners have to get their least-wired constituency on board: contractors and subcontractors. Getting them to search for and purchase online everything from windows to toilets will be no easy feat. Buzzsaw.com and Bidcom are taking the first step.
Judy DeMocker is a writer based in San Francisco. She can be reached at jdemocker@sprynet.com.
