Picture this site in San Antonio: The project manager and supervising engineers are finishing a 16-story, 285-unit Embassy Suites Hotel, and they are huddled around an assortment of Windows tablets, iPhones and iPads. They all go online and open folders on their screens linked to a cloud-based shared file. They open a plan of the hotel’s 14th floor. Each person zooms in on separate rooms and creates their own punch list. They flag issues by dragging icons—coded by issue and trade—to the plan, from pallets on screen. Sometimes they hand-write notes and attach them.
At any time the users can see the icons their colleagues are placing while working elsewhere because the shared file synchronizes as they work. At the bottom of their screens, a spreadsheet translates the icons into data, turns handwritten notes into type and builds an Excel report for generating notifications to the subs. They will get an e-mail with the spreadsheet and the plan identifying issue locations. By the time the inspectors break for lunch, they are done.