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What’s the value of two hours? Two hours goes by fast in most business days. In that time we can watch most movies, or prepare a pretty good meal, or we could watch about six innings of baseball or most of three quarters of a Steelers game. For a construction superintendent, two hours can make all the difference in running a successful job.

Finding those two hours each day is one of the main goals of FAST-CAT, a hand-held device designed to put the latest working set of construction drawings into the field supervisor’s hands, and allow those drawings to be portable throughout the site. “One of the realities of the industry is the superintendents have ten hours work in an eight-hour day,” says Ray Steeb, President of Field Assistant Systems Technology (FAST). “Superintendents understand that’s part of the job. It’s when the ten hour day becomes twelve that you start to lose quality and people.”

Steeb is a career construction guy, working as a project manager and eventually Vice President for Turner Construction in Pittsburgh. When he parted ways with Turner in 2002 he was not planning to return to contracting, until an opportunity to start his own firm came to him. During that same time, however, another opportunity came to him that would ultimately lead him down a different path.

“In April 2002 I was at a function where I ran into Jared Cohon from CMU,” recalls Steeb. “He asked if I would be interested in working with the university to get their technology developments out into the marketplace.” Cohon introduced Steeb to Jim Garrett, who was trying to develop something specifically for the construction industry, rather than adapting technology to construction.

Steeb steered the project toward an area he felt was untapped - the field.“One of my interests was in focusing on the field staff, which never seemed to get the tech improvements. They had first year students interview hundreds of superintendents to see what they needed,” explains Steeb. “The low-hanging fruit was portable documents-a way to have access to current documents without running back and forth to the trailer.”

For the next couple of years, through 2005, the concept underwent engineering to create a durable, portable device for viewing documents, and then extensive software design and proof of concept testing in the computer schools at CMU. Steeb got to see first-hand the conundrum that haunts technology transfer to industry at research universities. The emphasis at universities is on publishing groundbreaking research, whereas industry works towards patents. As you might imagine, the urge to get to research published has an equal but opposite urge to keep competitive advantages secret until patented.

As the dust cleared at the end of development, FAST-CAT became a working prototype that was tested in the field during 2006. Using it on his own company’s projects, and then getting use from other contractors, such as P. J. Dick Inc., Steeb began to see how FAST-CAT would be different from any similar devices.

“We offer end-to-end service – hardware, software, communications and installation- which no one else does,” says Steeb. “Because of that all the information flows through FAST-CAT, which gives communications channel control to the project manager, so that the PM knows the superintendent has access to the latest set of all the documents.”

The emphasis on an innovation that focused on current documents and channel control makes FAST-CAT a productivity tool that also has the potential for improving installation quality as well. Field staff can look at the drawings and specs right at the location of any questions on the jobsite. Questions and notes can be handwritten and saved to the documents permanently (with date/time stamps and signatures saved). The same forms are used for jobsite reporting. The RFI process is compressed, which allows superintendents more time to ensure proper installations. And the fact that all the data flows through the master set of documents, which can be continuously synched with the field set, means that the risks associated with independent field decisions are all but eliminated.

Steeb points out the importance of current documents. “I always said that if you give me five minutes on a jobsite that I could find someone using the wrong set of plans. That might not mean the wrong documents will cause a problem at that moment, but it eventually will.” Resolving conflicting documents costs time and money that could be better spent moving the project forward.

The contractor isn’t the only member of the team who benefits from FAST-CAT’s technology. “After the job the owner has accurate as-built drawings – accurate for all time- and a record of the decision path,” explains Steeb. “Besides maintaining the contract documents themselves, FAST-CAT saves all the cut sheets, shop drawings, even photos of mockups.” The technology eliminates the costs and time associated with drawing reproduction, which is appealing to the project’s architect and engineers. And, again, the control of the communications channel ensures the designer that his or her instructions flow through the project manager to the field, and are stored with the master documents.

Contractors who have tested FAST-CAT seem to get that the real payoff is in their increased productivity and accuracy. Ray Steeb gives an example, “Say you have three carpenters working in an area, and a question arises that stops work. If you have to wait for written instructions you’re probably waiting two hours.” FAST-CAT allows for a written response to be communicated in minutes. “A carpenter costs a contractor $60 an hour. If we can save three carpenters three hours downtime, that’s more than the $500 per month charge,” says Steeb.

When FAST-CAT became ready for rollout in March 2007, it became obvious to Ray Steeb that it would be impossible to operate a contracting business and FAST-CAT, so he has been closing out the final Steeb Crawford projects, and will devote himself full-time to FAST-CAT in the fall. That will give him the time to find field superintendents those elusive two hours. BG