“It could have gone unnoticed without Buildie” – Buildie helps tackle quality defects at Finland’s largest environmental investment worksite

Easy-to-use Buildie took site documentation and quality control to a whole new level – construction transparency is a competitive advantage for contractors.

Finland’s largest single environmental investment is currently underway in Sulkavuori, Tampere. A new wastewater treatment plant will be built in the area, which, when completed, will be responsible for the wastewater treatment of a total of six municipalities. The preconditions for the plant’s operational reliability and good wastewater treatment results are created already at the contract stage, so the quality of construction must be in order.

However, it is difficult to monitor quality during site visits, as there are several sites under construction at the same time for transmission line projects alone.

– Site visits are important, but when there are many construction sites underway and their preparation are at different stages, it is not possible to visit them every day, explains Marko Männynsalo, Project Manager of the central sewage treatment plant’s transfer sewer project.

The problem with photography documentation, on the other hand, has traditionally been that the photos have not been taken so systematically that they could have been used to monitor the progress of the site, at least not in real-time. When there are several contractors, the quality of the documentation has also varied and the documents have been scattered around.

– If something has had to be checked in the documentation, a considerable amount of hassle has been created when searching for photos in the mixed archives of the developer, supervisor and contractors, Männynsalo says.

In the Sulkavuori transmission line projects, these problems were solved with Buildie, which quickly became a key way to share information between the various actors in the project and the construction sites.

Quality defects are revealed without daily visit to the site

According to Männynsalo, Buildie’s trump card is that it fits well in the grip of both the shovel man and the engineer sitting in the office. Ease of use lowers the threshold for documentation and has been well received on site by contractors.

– I have not looked at how many photos we have so far, but there are a lot of them and they are of high quality. A huge thing about Buildie is just its ease of use. Photo documentation takes place in exactly the same way as taking any photo with a mobile phone, Männynsalo says.

When photos are routinely taken by all parties on the site, from the excavator operator to the supervisor, you can quickly get a real-time overview of the site by browsing the Buildie photo stream.

– It is topical today that the photo taken on the site is automatically saved in the cloud and is visible to everyone involved in the project. On one occasion, during a meeting break, I browsed through Buildie and noticed shortcomings in the way we worked. I messaged the contractor right away, and the deficiencies were fixed. It could have gone unnoticed without Buildie, Männynsalo says.

Ever-developing Buildie will be an integral part of construction

Männynsalo considers it particularly good that Buildie is being developed flexibly and the wishes of the users are taken into account.

– For example, when we wanted a simple site inspection report, we got one. Next on our wish list is a checklist for plastic pipe installation work that we could fill in directly on the field with Buildie, without having to dig up a laptop and Excel, Männynsalo lists past and future development projects.

Männynsalo believes that the transparency and openness of the construction industry will increase even more in the future. If Buildie is not a reality on all construction sites today, it will be in the future.

– I see that transparent documentation of construction is a competitive advantage for the contractor. Contractors who transparently document what they have done are surpassing those who are just quickly digging a mound, throwing pipes in it and hastily covering their tracks, Männynsalo sums up.

Want to bring your site documentation and quality control up to date? Please contact us!

Taneli Ristmeri, CEO
+358 400 610 102

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