Rhumbix Starts New Trials, Adds New Partners

Rhumbix is beginning a new round of construction trials on a California hospital project by deploying their mobile timekeeping solution with an indoor location technology that uses Redpoint, an emerging location-sensing platform.

“In the trial, crafts perform their own timekeeping within the app to measure installation unit rates against construction tasks,” says Rhumbix CEO Zach Scheel, Rhumbix CEO. It’s an improvement, he says, over traditional foremen-led tracking.

The San Francisco-based company is hoping, with this and future trials, that their app will continue to improve productivity in the field and close the gap between on-site actions and decisions.

HOW DOES THE TECHNOLOGY WORK?

The Rhumbix mobile app uses workforce telematics to capture field data across a range of construction management areas, including time-keeping and cost coding, GPS and indoor location, delay reporting, and field notes. This data is then used to provide insights that are not currently available to the industry via location based analysis, measuring delays and impacts, and daily reporting.

“Using this approach, we have been able to gather very accurate data on construction durations to benchmark construction unit rates, as well as tracking learning curves, cycle time and variance,” says Scheel.

In the hospital project trial, any workers engaged in the study carry a small device that interacts with beacons installed on the job site to record the location of the workers at a detailed level. Using algorithms, the Rhumbix system will capture the workers’ direction of travel, velocity, total distance travelled, time spent at the workforce and clustering.

PLANNED PARTNERSHIPS

In addition to launching new trials, Rhumbix also recently announced a partnership with Procore, a global project management software provider based in Carpinteria CA. The soon-to-be-released Procore Connect will allow complimentary software solutions such as Rhumbix to integrate with the Procore platform. Rhumbix is also working to partner with other firms in a range of industry sectors, from established BIM software developers to construction insurance.

“This represents an exciting relationship through which Rhumbix will have access to a significant number of potential users, as well as a diverse set of industry participants,” says Scheel.

Rhumbix will discuss these efforts and other ways digital technology is impacting the built environment on June 6 at the 2016 MCAA Construction Technology Conference in Indianapolis.