Saw a builder using iPads on site in Houston and it actually worked

I was walking through a new development in Katy last week and noticed every foreman had an iPad running some kind of blueprints app. No paper anywhere. They pulled up live revisions from the architect during a framing issue and fixed it in 10 minutes. That would have taken days going back and forth before. Has anyone else seen this actually stick on a real job site or is it mostly a gimmick?

3 comments

3 Comments

julia_anderson15d ago

You really saw that in Katy? I used to think iPads on site were just a gimmick for show, but then my crew had a nightmare with misaligned conduit last month. We pulled up the latest MEP overlay on a foreman's tablet and fixed it right there instead of waiting for a revised print. It completely changed my mind once I saw how fast we could solve problems without heading back to the trailer.

casey68215d ago

Wait, has anyone thought about how this changes the safety meeting dynamic? I feel like the real game changer here isn't just fixing problems faster, it's that we're finally dragging blueprints into the 21st century where they can actually keep up with what we're doing. When I was working night shifts on a hospital expansion last year, our foreman had one of those iPads with the MEP overlays and it basically stopped three different arguments before they even started because we could all see the same thing at the same time. The old way of running back to the trailer for a print just created this weird bottleneck where the smartest person on site wasn't always the one holding the paper, you know? It's funny how a little screen changed the whole power structure on site without anyone even noticing.

burns.jenny14d ago

Did you ever catch yourself being the one who actually argued against tablets on site? I'll admit it, I was totally that guy a few years ago. I thought they were just expensive toys for foremen who wanted to look important, or like a way for the office to micromanage us. Then we had a massive rework on a data center slab because someone misread a paper detail at 5 in the morning. After that, I started carrying a cheap tablet my brother gave me, and honestly, it's way easier than trying to keep a wet roll of prints from falling apart in my rain jacket. It's not about having the coolest tool, it's about everyone having the same clear picture at the exact same second, which is something paper just can't do.