Where it all began. A brief history of Field View.

Back in 2001 the construction sector was beginning to come to grips with the idea EDMS (Electronic Document Management Systems). Palm OS owned the PDA marketplace, mobile phones lasted days without charging, and the iPhone was just a twinkle in the eye of Apple. It was also the year when the original Field View team started a conversation with the UK Construction Industry about the value of replacing the clipboard, pen, and paper with PDAs for construction site inspections.

Working with innovative, thought-leading UK construction companies including Laing O’Rourke, Mace, and Sir Robert McAlpine, the Field View team was challenged to take a look at punch lists (or snagging as it’s known in the UK). We needed to come up with a more effective way to capture information when in the field and a method to communicate it accurately and quickly throughout the subcontractor community. Technology with these capabilities would help the project management team get the right people to the right place at the right time without the burden and overhead of time-consuming paperwork. However, there was another challenge, too: “We need a more productive team but also need to accurately measure our performance” was what we were told. So we set about building what was probably one of the world’s first mobile device-based punch list tools; if the term had been coined at the time, it would have been called an “app.”

Fast forward 15 years and the technology landscape is drastically different. We live in a world where everyone carries around a mobile phone with computing power (that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars/pounds in 2001). Technology has evolved at an incredible rate and now touches every aspect of our lives, and in some ways Field View’s journey and evolution had a similar trajectory. What started in 2001 as a mobile punch list system has evolved to becoming an essential field tool for dealing with the challenges of information management, communication, reporting, and business intelligence facing the largest construction companies on the planet. Yet Field View is also widely used by much smaller subcontractors that strive to achieve the same goals: to increase productivity and reduce waste.

Over this series of blog posts, I will share with you the Field View story – a story of collaboration with an industry that knew it could do better, and about rapidly changing technology, diverse operational demands, and innovation made possible by a great team of people who share a common passion and vision to make a difference. Thanks for reading.

- See more at: http://blog.viewpoint.com/2016/03/where-it-all-began-a-brief-history-of-field-view/#sthash.yIXTBhlp.dpuf