Construction teams have started relying on project photos to manage, measure and eliminate delays in project progress. Mobile applications for storing, organizing and filing digital images have also evolved. They enable construction and design firms to record project progress and increase accountability by streamlining and mobilizing project communication and documentation.

Photographs serve as a permanent record of your project’s progress, memorialize major construction milestones, and have the added benefit of acting as irrefutable evidence during disputes. Given the increasingly important role of project photos in managing construction, ARC Document Solutions introduced a Photo Management module in its most recent upgrade to SKYSITE.

SKYSITE Photo Management is designed for construction professionals allowing them to share, exchange and collaborate using photos on a single platform.

SKYSITE Photo Management offer tremendous benefits to project members.

1. Enhance efficiency

To increase efficiency construction photos must have a connection to a specific construction blueprints to provide relevance between drawings and photos. SKSYITE Photo Management enables users to:

• Pin a photo to a drawing sheet.
• View the photo associated with a specific location on the sheet.
• Access photos on both a tablet or in a web browser.

2. Easy management & controls

SKYSITE photo management helps users effortlessly manage their photo library:

• Delegate uploads of photos to other contributors and team members
• Upload, manage and host all photos in a single application
• Share, exchange and collaborate using photo content anytime, anywhere and from anyplace
• Store and save photos on personal devices for quick and easy access
• Search and filter your photos fast
• Create galleries or use a flat folder structure
• Link photos to drawings, RFI’s, and Punchlists
• Import photos from other devices in seconds.

3. Supports a wide variety of file formats

The application can store and manage JPEGs, GIFs,TIFFs and BMPs

4. Increase productivity

SKYSITE Photo Management offers quick and easy photo collaboration. You can take photos in the field, add a date and time stamp, and share them instantly, or you can sync and save them to your central database for access and analysis at a later date.

5. Manage & search

Taking a photo is easy, but finding it can be difficult when all you have to work with is a title.

SKYSITE Photo Management adds key attributes for precise and arcuate photo search. Not only are photos are associated to specific projects, but users can tag images with key words associated with a specific building, level, area, room, and description. Photo metadata are also preserved, including the GPS coordinate of where the image was taken.

6. Access and accountability

SKYSITE offers a full range of permissions to control who can take, tag, upload, or view photos and other file types.

SKYSITE Photo Management is designed for Construction Professionals to connect seamlessly. It enables project users to collaborate and communicate from anywhere by using any device using Photos as the medium.

These comprehensive functionalities serve a purpose for every project member providing accountability, transparency, time and cost saving benefit for the entire project.

Go to SKYSITE to learn more.

We’re happy to announce the 2015 Summer Release of SKYSITE!

Input from our customers and months of testing has helped us upgrade performance and usability to work like you work! No other app matches SKYSITE’s ability to store, manage, mark-up and distribute your construction documents.

SKYSITE’s Fall Release is full of improvements, including:

1. RFIs
2. Photo Management
3. Punch Lists

Keep reading to get the details on the 3 main new features.

1. RFI

In construction, time is money—and saving time amounts to saving money not spent on employee hours and other potential costs. That’s why responding fast to requests for information (RFIs), quickly altering incorrect documents, and getting the right info to subcontractors and other team members is crucial, whatever the stage of the project.

With our new RFI feature, employees can streamline workflows and save time and money. Through SKYSITE 2.0’s new RFI feature, team members can create RFIs at the project level or the street level, and can distribute those documents within cloud-based SKYSITE as a link, rather than as an outside email exchange that could be overlooked by some of its recipients.

Specifications, plans and other documents can be linked to an RFI, and team members can always know the current status of these documents, while also having a thorough audit trail showing the history of the RFIs. The feature also enables addition of custom attributes for further sorting, searching and filtering of RFIs.

The Save As feature of the RFI function allows the user to collate all attachments and links in a single mouse-click. This new feature ensures that RFIs can’t be tampered with, while providing accountability among team members, since each RFI is automatically dated and time-stamped when it is created.

We added the RFI feature to better serve its clients, said James Mercado, Product Manager for ARC. “All of our SKYSITE enhancements are driven by our customers. Even though we’ve released SKYSITE 2.0, we’re still enhancing it as we go along,” he said.

While paper-based progress can take two days or more for major tasks, SKYSITE’s RFI feature eliminates costly delays, as well as employee errors, from slowing the info transfer process. Team members can create tasks, or view, review and respond to the current status of RFIs through mobile and desktop devices.

RFIs that are received can be quickly reviewed, with comments or attachments added, marked up online, and cross-referenced with other documents. Since this can be done without paper copies of documents, costs associated with printing, collating and shipping paper documents are eliminated.

2. Photo Management

ARC’s release of SYSITE 2.0, which includes a new Photo Management feature, is the culmination of a process that began in March 2015, starting with technical specification creation that was completed in June 2015. ARC’s key customers were consulted to ensure that the new SKYSITE would help simplify their work as much as possible.

That collaborative approach allowed the key clients to be the first to enjoy a 1-stop method of handling their construction documents

“A lot of them were able to get rid of consumer grade solutions they had been using, and now can use the same repository for photos, drawings and other documents,” said James Mercado, Product Manager for ARC.

The Photo Management feature provides employee accountability by streamlining project communication and documentation. Thanks to the widespread use of mobile technology, construction is quickly changing. An industry that previously had been focused on project plans to manage, measure and remove delays in projects, now is increasingly relying on photos to record, manage and gauge jobsite progress.

With SKYSITE’s Photo Management, users can store and interact through photos anytime, anywhere. The feature also is scalable, allowing workers to store and save photos on various sites, and while using different applications. Users can upload photos from a mobile device or desktop computer, and store any number of digital photos, which also can be individually tagged with details and comments. This enables employees to create inspection-grade construction photos that can serve as permanent records which could prevent litigation.

This new application also can help employees to delegate uploading of photos to other team members, and enable previewing and sharing of photos between collaborators. In addition to being able to search and filter photos quickly, users can create photo galleries. The Photo Management feature works on all kinds of digital content, including JPEG, PNG, BMP and GIF.

3. Punch Lists

Punch Lists are crucial to successful project completions, because these lists note the tasks that must be finished to satisfy a construction contract’s terms. Since small details can easily be missed, especially on a large project, punch lists are important To Do sheets.

We endeavored to simplify punch lists and other tasks while creating SKYSITE 2.0. Utilizing ARC’s deep domain knowledge we created a system that enables project users to manage all construction related document in one place.

“One of our key clients said, ‘I want to be able to walk into a room and access the voice recorder, rather than the whole project description.’ So now, the recipient can access the actual audio recording, which makes sense, for example, if you are using a mobile device,” said James Mercado, Product Manager for ARC.

SKYSITE’s Punch Lists feature enables workers to save time by creating punch lists items from the field, which can be assigned to an employee, and tagged with a specified due date for completion. Punch Lists items can be dropped directly into a drawing, and filtered by status: open, closed or pending.

Like SKYSITE’s other new features, the Punch Lists function helps provide employee accountability by tracking all actions related to the punch lists. Progress on the punch lists also can be tracked—due dates can be monitored, and “overdue” notices automatically sent for uncompleted items. This handy feature frees employees from spending excessive time creating punch lists, while providing clarity in such lists, and streamlining the administration of the tasks associated with those lists.

Learn More about SKYSITE

The SKYSITE mobile apps are free and available now for Android, iOS, and Windows. To learn more you can attend our webinar featuring these new enhancements:

Or you can speak to one of our construction document experts by calling the SKYSITE Customer Success Team at 1.844.SKYSITE.

New to SKYSITE? Go to www.skysite.com and get it for free.