Dive Brief:
- Construction technology company Pype is preparing to launch its latest software product, SmartPlans, which company officials say can drastically reduce the time it takes project teams to locate and organize critical information from blueprints.
- With just one click, SmartPlans can read a set of uploaded blueprints using artificial intelligence and machine learning. It then identifies all the embedded submittal information including product, equipment and finish schedules and extracts that into an Excel spreadsheet, according to the tech firm. Compiling this information using traditional means typically takes days or even weeks, depending on the size of the project and complexity of the plans, but takes only a few hours using SmartPlans, according to the company. After the extraction, SmartPlans notifies users if there is common submittal information missing from the set of blueprints.
- Pype CEO Sunil Dorairajan said the company plans to release the final version of SmartPlans in the fourth quarter but that there is still time for contractors to apply to join the beta testing.
Dive Insight:
The company has been testing and soliciting feedback on SmartPlans for more than a year, and, according to Dorairajan, the response has been positive, with some even calling the program a "game-changer." Some participants have offered suggestions like integration with common construction software, and Dorairajan said that Pype is working on that with the most popular providers, including Oracle, Procore, Autodesk and Bluebeam.
With the labor pool so stretched in the construction industry, SmartPlans also will give project engineers and managers time to focus on more productive tasks than sifting through pages of blueprints and cutting and pasting together the necessary information, he said.
"Our customers and prospects are eagerly awaiting its launch," Dorairajan said. "We're excited to get this going in Q4."
Pype's Closeout and AutoSpecs projects are popular with contractors, filling the need for useful solutions to common, time-consuming construction tasks.
Closeout equips contractors with a single portal for closeout documentation management, helping construction companies cut the time between finishing construction and collecting final payment.
AutoSpecs reads project specifications, also using artificial intelligence, and pulls out action submittals, product data, closeout submittals, tests and inspections so that contractors quickly can create definitive submittal logs. AutoSpecs also tracks changes between different versions of a project's specifications and points to where log modifications need to be made.
Pype announced in April that it had reached an enterprise agreement with Mortenson to use AutoSpecs on the general contractor's hundreds of construction projects in the U.S. Pype said that during a pilot test, Mortenson had realized significant time savings and enhanced productivity while using the software. Dorairajan said more such partnership announcements are forthcoming.
