As a Project Manager at Level 10 Construction based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jacob Freitas works on projects worth anywhere from six to nine figures. He was intrigued by the potential of 360 cameras to document job sites and do away with the need for manual capture, which many teams don’t even attempt because of how onerous it is. “A lot of teams don’t even bother to walk their full site,” he said. “They think they’re doing fine without it because they don’t know what a difference complete and up-to-date documentation can make.”
The challenge
A few years ago, Freitas started testing a competitive product to capture job sites, but its software had significant limitations. On a large job site, for example, it simply took too long to find the right place on a project plan to capture, walk to it, take a photo, and then repeat the process over and over.
The solution
About a year ago, Freitas switched to OpenSpace and hasn’t looked back. He’s found the biggest differentiator to be the ease of capture, since OpenSpace automatically maps images to project plans.
“The biggest value-add is being able to take your phone out, click record, do the walk, load your images to a computer and be done,” he said. “OpenSpace is 5X faster than its competitors and orders-of-magnitude faster than manual capture.”
Documentation captured using OpenSpace is also much more detailed, since images are captured continuously throughout site walks; in the past, Frietas only took a picture every 30 feet or so.
Freitas also found that using OpenSpace helped to resolve issues on jobs, especially when they involved intensive MEP work or a coordinated model.
In a recent project where a metal panel was damaged, the team responsible for installing the panels blamed the team responsible for scaffolding. By reviewing OpenSpace documentation, Freitas and his team were able to quickly establish that the damage had taken place before the scaffold had gone up, proving the scaffolding team wasn’t responsible.
On another recent job to gut and build out a new cafe for a Silicon Valley tech company, the existing as-built drawings were poor. To compensate, Level 10 used laser scans augmented by OpenSpace imagery to produce an as-built Revit model, which was shared with the BIM coordination team and architect to help them understand on-site conditions and prevent further coordination issues. Freitas also uses OpenSpace for RFIs, since he can easily pull up imagery from previous days and drop it into presentations.
The biggest value-add is being able to take your phone out, click record, do the walk, load your images to a computer and be done. OpenSpace is 5X faster than its competitors and orders-of-magnitude faster than manual capture.
The results
OpenSpace has delivered tangible benefits to Level 10 Construction in terms of time savings and improved progress documentation, sub accountability and issue management. Freitas relies on it daily.
5X faster documentation
10X faster
Time savings OpenSpace captures job sites 5X faster than 360 documentation competitors via truly passive capture. “It saves a lot of time,” Freitas said. “When we’re on a video conference call with the field team and they’re trying to describe current conditions, we can just pull up OpenSpace in real time and see the lay of the land.”
Enhanced progress documentation “By quickly taking me back to specific points in time on specific dates, OpenSpace has been game-changing for progress documentation,” Freitas said. By comparison, he observed that the orientation of images captured with a competitor’s product wasn’t as consistent, which made it arduous to pinpoint the state of the project at any precise point in time.
Greater subcontractor accountability Freitas has found that OpenSpace helps to keep subs accountable, making it easier to monitor progress over time.
Improved issue management OpenSpace improves coordination by enabling complete documentation of job sites, making it easier to resolve issues when they arise. “In OAC (Owner- Architect-Contractor) meetings, we can point to potential problems visually rather than just describing them as best we can,” Freitas said. “As a result, issues are understood—and addressed— more quickly.”
