With parents who had a passion for residential remodelling, Yves Frinault, CEO of Fieldwire, had the opportunity to work alongside contractors on job sites and developed an interest for construction early on. While attending the Civil Engineering Department at Stanford University, Yves noticed the stark contrast between the technology used by engineers in the office and the tools available to the crews in the field. Leading construction companies were adept at using Building Information Modelling (BIM), yet they stumbled to actualize that information on the field. General contractors and specialty contractors were faced consistently with the same on-site challenges—accessing documents and specifications, planning and coordinating across different companies, and finally collating all the information to generate accurate progress reports.

Helping on-field construction contractors overpower these obstacles is Fieldwire, the state-of-the-art job site collaboration platform. It is a hub where the entire project team, from each foreperson to the project manager, collaborates and shares information in real-time. “We are a job-site management platform with an absolute focus on the craftsmen and craftswomen on the field,” states Yves.

Using Fieldwire, project managers, general contractors, or even sub-contractors, can now seamlessly integrate their BIM and field data to execute highly efficient workflows and realize their ideas in the most valuable way. It offers a comprehensive 360-degree understanding of a project, including access to metadata on specific elements, and tools to take accurate measurements, that provides a comprehensive overview of the project.

The on-field crew can also view, edit or share their documents in real-time with Fieldwire. Doubling as a blueprint app, Fieldwire enables them to manage all their plans and specifications like a document control engine. As document control is a painstaking activity requiring a lot of time, the digital platform helps on-site workers get hold of all the information and drawings without printing new paper copies, and saving copious amounts of time and money. Then comes the task management feature, which is the defining piece of the collaboration platform. The web-based software is used for short term planning and execution, empowering project managers to assign work no matter where they are effortlessly, and set priority for due dates while never losing sight of the task progress. “The beauty is once you have the document control and task management done through the same platform, the report generation becomes smooth sailing,” says Yves.

Fieldwire’s relentless focus on revolutionizing the construction space has helped them attain a vast client base that has successfully used the app and reaped its benefits to provide real value-based services across 750,000 job sites. “One of our clients in Europe is using Fieldwire to track all the steps throughout the project to keep a check on the on-field assemblage of various construction modules manufactured in their shop,” mentions Yves. Likewise, an electrical sub-contractor in Florida is using Fieldwire to access all the pre-planning information their team has included in the BIM, and use that data to strategize their on-field construction. Yves believes one of the striking features of Fieldwire’s success is the ability to scale well for projects of all sizes. It is simple enough to be deployed for a small job while sturdy enough to be implemented on a billion-dollar airport project too.

While helping the largest construction companies in the world more efficiently manage their job sites, Yves wants to continue emphasizing on the BIM-to-Field concept more to help on-field workers connect these two dots effectively. This ensures the information generated on the field is consumed and incorporated back into the BIM archives, which is essential while delivering a building to a customer. “Focusing on both project management and BIM, we will keep following our guiding principle—rebuilding the entire technology of construction from the field up,” concludes Yves.