Safe Site Check In — Q&A with CEO and Founder
What happens when you bring together old and new technologies alongside super-modern software architecture and focus it on one the world’s oldest industries? You get Safe Site Check In.
David Ward has been in software development for over a decade and has some interesting lessons about how to make technology work in construction (his philosophy is “frictionless, affordable, and of immediate value”).
The product combines easy-to-use QR codes with cloud-based computing in a way that helps owners and general contractors log site activity, provide induction materials, and manage daily health screenings. They’re now used on thousands of sites in the U.S. and could prove increasingly useful given recent federal contractor vaccine requirements.
Safe Site Check In has seen great growth over the past year, largely in the realm of Covid health screening. And while your business has definitely had some tailwinds at its back with respect to the public’s newfound acceptance of QR codes, I think you’re also tapping into some real needs in the construction industry beyond the pandemic. What has been the most surprising thing about the company’s journey over the past 15 months?
My entire career has been in the B2B technology sector interacting with other technologists, so what’s been most surprising is the amount of resistance to technology adoption in the field by construction firms. My guess is that the field culture is set by the trades and consider themselves a breed apart from the typical knowledge worker who uses software all day. Yet the field is where these firms either make money or lose money, so bringing digital data efficiencies to the job site makes total sense.
So how do we address this issue? Google’s mobile and cloud computing put reliable, secure, scalable and affordable digital infrastructure into everyone’s hands. We then made a huge effort to make sure implementing our app in the field would be effortless. That’s why it’s a web app — no downloads or pre-registration required, eliminating any need for IT support in the field. Web apps execute in a browser, so we selected software technology that works in any browser without modification. That meant we would run on any device, mobile, tablet or desktop. We also work hard to make the web app small and compact so it loads and executes fast. But probably the most important factor is usability, making the web app as easy and intuitive as the best consumer apps. Field personnel or site visitors don’t need any training — it just works.
You’ve written great articles in leading construction & technology outlets about the challenges in the construction industry. How have your past experiences as an entrepreneur shaped the way you approached these challenges?
As I quickly learned, the key challenge in construction is local variability. Construction is almost the opposite of accounting with its “generally accepted principles.” In construction, it’s all about local variability, with one off requirements at the street address level. How do you constantly adapt and enhance software in an industry where local customization and variation is so prevalent, yet the consequences of failure can be so catastrophic? The usual Silicon Valley approach of “move fast and break things” won’t work.
We adopted a methodology called lean product development, which is based on the principle of building a product with only essential features and getting it into customer’s hands as quickly as possible. Lean development got us to market fast — and the pandemic meant we needed to move fast to reopen the economy and keep people safe. We then iterated as new requirements became known until after a year we had grown from pandemic screening into a full-feature site management solution.
The ability to learn fast — as a leader and as an organization — has been crucial. You have to have the right talent, and as anyone in software management knows, maintaining high quality while adding features is tough. Luckily, my long experience in the software sector meant I had a great talent network to draw from. We’ve been blessed with world-class software architecture, design and programming skills, and our product has remained essentially bug free.
One other lesson is retaining strategic focus through all the smoke and noise when forming a new business. From the beginning, we believed that crowdsourcing digital jobsite data with our web app would make an immediate difference to safety and productivity while reducing risks and creating a data archive crucial to long term optimization. It took us a year, but we made it happen.
With your background in software, are there any other insights you can provide that are analogous in the built environment?
Well, an analogy I’ll give you is the increasing adoption of — what we call in software — “frameworks” for application development, which is very similar to modular components in construction. What we’re using to build applications are just bigger off the shelf bundles of functionality that handle specific tasks. For example, Twilio is the company that does all the SMS messages and IM messages and email messages that an application needs to send out. We can just sort of sign up and use Twilio instead of having to code it all ourselves. So it’s analogous to prefab or modular construction techniques where you’re just building with bigger components and can accelerate productivity that way.
We’re hopefully coming out of the worst of the pandemic sooner rather than later, but I definitely think there have been some permanent changes in the way we in the industry operate on a daily basis. This has likely opened up new avenues for QR code-based use cases in construction. Give us a sense of your direction and vision with Safe Site Check In in light of this changing environment.
Digital data which eliminates paper records always finds new uses. QR code initiated check-in/check-out data is no exception. While our focus was always on site management optimization, it’s been remarkable the number of use cases within HQ for our data, such as in accounting and HR, and as an archive for resolving legal disputes. AI tools applied to digital site data promise better estimating, bid and project plan validation. And QR codes are beginning to be used to automate and optimize site activities such as tool and equipment access, maintenance and training. We hear about more such uses every day.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
If you found this article insightful, please consider signing up for my newsletter at placersolutions.io
