Elwin Green profiles FAST-CAT in the Pittburgh Post-Gazette:
Original article / printable version (PDF)

Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Jack Jones, a project superintendent with P.J. Dick, holds a Fast-Cat -- a tablet-style computer that contains portable construction documents.

A casual comment three years ago launched Ray Steeb on a journey to develop a product that could dramatically reduce both the time and the cost of building construction.

Knowing of Mr. Steeb's 20-plus years experience in the construction industry, most of it with Turner Construction, Jared L. Cohon, the president of Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that it would be great if Mr. Steeb could capture his experience in a way that would make it available to others.

That led Mr. Steeb, who founded his own construction firm, Steeb Crawford Construction, four years ago, to thinking about not how to capture all of his experience, but how to eliminate a pet peeve that had dogged his experience: the management of construction drawings.

Construction drawings are nothing like the architect's renderings that appear in the newspaper when a developer announces plans to put up a new building. Rather than showing how the building will look, construction drawings show how it is to be built -- the design and placement of electrical systems, heating and air conditioning systems, plumbing, wallboard, ceiling panels, and so forth, down to the most minute items, placed within a 16th of an inch.

Mr. Steeb's peeve was that the complexity of a building requires the maintenance of several sets of drawings: one in the office of the architect, one in the trailer that serves as the general contractor's on-site headquarters, one in the hands of the superintendent overseeing the work of plumbers, electricians, welders.

At any time, a change in one set of drawings might require that all sets be changed. Or worse, people working from other sets might never know about the change -- or learn about it only when it becomes a problem costing time and money to fix.

The pursuit of a solution resulted in Fast-Cat -- a tablet-style computer that contains portable construction documents.

In today's computing world, the Fast-Cat's hardware is not impressive -- it is built upon a 1.1 GHz Pentium processor and comes with either 512 megabytes or one gigabyte of RAM, with a hard drive of either 40 or 80 gigabytes. Its real value lies in the software, which was developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

It allows field superintendents to navigate from one set of drawings to another, for instance from a electrical drawing to one that shows a building's plumbing. The superintendent can use a stylus to create mark up drawings on the Fast-Cat's 9-inch screen. The device also sports a wireless card that allows workers to update drawings via e-mail, as well as to request information from other members of the project team.

Mr. Steeb's development of the Fast-Cat was funded in part by the Pittsburgh Infrastructure Technology Alliance, a partnership between CMU and Lehigh University that provides seed funding for projects. The Alliance's money was used for research "to determine which ways might be the most effective to support somebody working with drawings," said James H. Garrett Jr., professor and head of civil and environmental engineering at CMU who helped to develop the software.

Given the device's intended market, a typewriter keyboard-based interface was never an option. First, because construction workers are not noted for their clerical skills. Second, because on a construction site, a keyboard would invite dust and grime to lodge between the keys.

"We were looking at the possibility of speech interaction, but soon got dissuaded from that," Mr. Garrett said,

The prototype for the Fast-Cat was completed in the spring of 2004, and Mr. Steeb began to present it to potential users, including a construction crew at Carnegie Mellon -- a presentation that initially did not go well.

"This one guy was reading a newspaper while I was doing the presentation. Finally I just gave up and said, 'Here,' and gave it to him, to let him play with it," Mr. Steeb said. "Five minutes later, he's going from one drawing to the next and he's marking things up, and he says, 'How can I get one of these?' That's when I knew we had made it easy enough."

Making it easy enough to use was key to the product's development, because building construction is a more information-hungry process than most people realize, Mr. Steeb pointed out.

"The average project has 800,000 lines of information," he said. And it all has to be correct, because "a building is done once."

"You have 3,000 parts from 2,000 manufacturers, being used by a group of people that never worked together before and will never work together again."

In such an environment, lost or inaccurate information becomes expensive quickly; for instance, when workers installing the heating and ventilation system discover that a wall is not where they expected it to be.

The Fast-Cat is just coming to market, so its full impact on the construction industry remains to be seen. But just last week, Innovation Works, the regional consortium that makes investments of state funds in technology start-ups, expressed confidence in the product by investing in Fast-Cat. Mr. Steeb that he was not yet at liberty to say how much, but added, "It was significant enough to make us really happy."