360-degree Images: Hoarding Data Will Not Improve Your Margins

A 360-degree camera is a fantastic piece of hardware, capturing enormous amounts of details with every shot. Any image might contain a key piece of information that would affect your next course of action.

But as much as this is an incredible opportunity, it’s also a huge problem. No one is going through the thousands of images captured to prioritize the issues, identify trends, and make sense of the piles of data collected.

An average site using Buildots captures 7,068 images per week, covering an average of 5,920 sqm. Each image holds critical information about dozens of different elements, each with a few different stages or potential issues throughout its lifecycle.

What is the industry doing with those images? Not much. Perhaps they may be accessed when an error is reported or used to review a specific area waiting for inspection, but mostly they’re stored away, ignored or even forgotten.

This represents a huge missed opportunity. Those images contain an unbelievable amount of data that can be utilized to act immediately on existing issues, and head off potential ones.

Those images “know” that the drylining team is four days behind schedule, that the pace of your electrical work is 70% of what it should be, that no one has done anything on floor seven for a week now, or that an electrical outlet is still missing in the toilets on the second floor while tiling starts on Monday.

Those images also “know” how much you should be paying to each subcontractor at the end of the month, and they “know” that the productivity of your bricklayers is low (which you’d discover is because they spend most of their time waiting for materials if you only dug further into the data).

Our job at Buildots is to extract those insights, make sure that those images are not only a snapshot in time to be used for understanding what went wrong and who to blame but to avoid significant issues in the first place and make sure you build in the most efficient way possible.

With that knowledge, the managers' role changes from chasing data to making decisions. It's a whole new way of managing construction, and it's already happening all over the world on construction sites using Buildots.

To learn more about unlocking the data behind your 360 photos, set up a demo with one of our experts, or review our blog section.