Why was this important to construction management teams?

Construction management team needs reference documents to build a project. Drawings are the most widely adopted and understood form of information that construction teams use to build off.

Drawings are the ubiquitous artefact for the construction team's knowledge

How many documents in our system are drawings?

63.5% of documents in Aconex’s Document Register are drawings. It is interesting to highlight that about 71% of these are in PDF format.

Data shows that across all our instances majority of the documents in Aconex are drawings in PDF format.

So every authoring tool like Revit, AutoCad, SketchUp etc for architects and engineers allows the functionality to export a PDF and send it along different systems. It has become the universal format to pass documents across platforms.

What we have understood so far?

• Vast majority of construction management team needs drawings to carry out their work.
• Majority of the documents stored by users in our system are drawings and in PDF format.
• We have key processes digitised over the last decade for the construction management teams that they rely on like quality assurance, site inspections, health and safety supervision etc to name a few.

Why is ‘pin the plan’ so important?

Cognitively it is easy to add things on to an artefact people are familiar with. Give a child a blank paper or a newspaper, without any training you can expect them to start interacting with it by pointing on it, marking it and drawing things on it.

In a digital environment it is not too dissimilar. Someone would expect to interact with a drawing on a mobile device by trying to zoom, rotate, pan etc.

Then the next step is to be able to augment the drawing with content for the purpose of referencing, discussions, collaboration and tracking.

Our competition has understood this and as a result every construction app addresses this need.

What does ‘pin the plan’ mean within Aconex?

So, ’pin the plan’ as per our understanding is to reference a record on a drawing with a precise co-ordinate system. This in return helps any interacting party to create, view, edit and delete both the record and the reference co-ordinates. The very act of pinning can be defined as creating that record to document reference co-ordinates.