Hi, I'm Emidio, and I lead FieldAtlas at Converge.
We've spent three years building tracking for offsite construction, and this is the first time I've written up what we've learned from it: two customers, two very different problems, and what changed for them.
But first, the question we asked ourselves at the start of building FieldAtlas:
You can easily track a £5 parcel from China to your doorstep. So why does tracking a £5,000 façade panel still mean relying on phone calls, a two-day trip to see it for yourself, or simply blind trust?
The sticker price of the panel is the cheap part. That panel, however, is on the critical path. The real cost is the week of prelims it burns through if it arrives late – and the weeks of your best planner’s time spent finding out where it, and the rest of the panels are, instead of planning.
Offsite gave us a new collaboration problem. You used to be able to see your jobsite by looking out of the trailer window or taking a walk. Now, part of your site is a factory two countries away.
The precast factory in Doncaster is waiting on doors from Edinburgh and windows from Belgium. The MEP shop is waiting on a design approval but can’t tell you who currently has it. The site is waiting on all of it – and only finds out something is late when it doesn’t turn up.
Everyone is doing their job properly. But nobody can see what anyone else is doing.
This is why we created FieldAtlas – a product focused on the offsite part of offsite construction.
FieldAtlas tracks the entire offsite chain, starting as far upstream as possible: the cast-in components and embeds, conduits, heating mats, door frames and windows feeding the precast factory. Then the precast units, façades and cladding, MEP modules and plant, and structural steel.
That first part matters most. A unit isn’t necessarily late because the factory is slow. It might be late because the door frames that had to be cast into it went to the wrong country. Door frames are cheap. The programme behind them isn’t.
Nobody is being monitored, and nobody needs to chase. Everyone is looking at the same objective picture at the same time, instead of arguing afterwards about what happened and whose fault it was.
But the best way to explain it is to show you how customers are using it.
At HMP Welland Oaks, Wates was coordinating 14,000 offsite-manufactured precast and steel components across nine buildings and several countries. When a supplier queried whether a delivery had arrived, FieldAtlas provided the answer in two minutes – not a week.
As Rokas Vareikis, DfMA Manager at Wates Group, puts it:
“It saves us time, it saves us money, and it helps us deliver this project on time and on budget.”
At Explore Manufacturing, part of Laing O’Rourke’s CEMC, there are more than 4,000 units in the yard, and no two are interchangeable. Miss a single manual scan, and finding the right unit can take twenty or thirty minutes.
Eighteen months live and the work won Best Use of Technology at the Construction News TechFest awards.
The technology also gives operational teams a clearer picture of what is really happening across the yard, helping them identify inefficiencies and make better planning decisions.
Two very different customers, same offsite collaboration problem.
If any of that sounded like your week, reach out at emidio.piermarini@converge.io. Always up for comparing notes over a coffee!
Emidio
Head of FieldAtlas
Offsite construction didn’t just move work away from site. Now, the people who know where each component is are spread across factories, suppliers and countries.
Hyperscale data centers are among the most complex projects in modern construction. This article explores the challenges contractors face when delivering large-scale facilities and how monitoring technologies help manage risk and maintain quality.
Large data center foundations often involve mass concrete pours that generate significant heat during curing. Learn why temperature monitoring is essential for preventing thermal cracking and ensuring structural reliability in data center construction.