Inertia + Procore: Greater than the Sum of the Parts

The construction industry has been reliant on PDFs to track workflows and status for decades.  All of those in the industry are familiar with clouding building elements and assets and then pinning documents, records and notes to those elements.  In addition, clever users will also add colors to represent status, typically as an overlay.  This sounds like a useful approach but the more elements you add to these PDF drawings, the more confusing and convoluted they become - in other words, the more information you add to the drawing, the more useless it is!

There is a reason for this dichotomy, the PDF describes pictorially what the project looks like but it does not inherently understand what any of the elements in the drawings represent. For example, you look at a drawing and see a couple of parallel lines and by position and context, you instantly know that those lines represent a wall, conduit, pipe or a railing. In order for a PDF to "understand" the drawing elements, one has to use the markup tools to cloud and pin information to the PDF. For example, one might draw a cloud around a wall and pin an RFI to it. The PDF doesn't know it is a wall but the person clouding the area does. However, the RFI they pinned to this wall might apply to another 300 walls in the project. Therefore, one must find all 300 walls and cloud them and pin the same RFI. Of course, they might have marked up the architectural set of drawings but not the mechanical set. This is quite common and the subcontractor working on mechanical sheets misses the RFI which results in errors and rework - costly and wasteful.

Now what if the construction drawings were self-aware and knew what the elements were and where they existed across all drawing sheets and perspectives? Then when one wanted to associate the same RFI to those 300 walls, they only need to select the wall type, attach the RFI and instantly the RFI is visible on all those 30 walls on all drawing sets across the project. Pretty cool, right?

That is where Inertia's Intelligent Construction Drawings (ICDs) come into the picture. Inertia has invented an approach that looks like the classical PDF drawings but the Inertia ICDs are interactive, click on a door and see all the properties of the door, all RFIs, submittal, observations, inspections, coordination issues and photos related to that door. Want to select all conduits on a drawing, easy, with one click all the conduits are highlighted and all information common to those selected elements are immediately visible. Want to see status on structural steel on your project, click a button and see all the steel light up on the drawing with a colored status of what's been ordered, received, installed and inspected. Want to attach submittals to all your chillers, just select the type and pick the submittal and the information is instantly available across all related drawings along with its status.

Imagine in mere seconds being able to simply click the construction drawing and it tells you the status of inspections for ceilings, the tasks left to do before closing walls and the HVAC equipment still needing commissioning. Add to that, when closing out a project, being able to quickly aggregate and handoff to the operations team O&M manuals, photos and installation information per each asset. That is just another benefit of Inertia's ICDs.

By embedding Inertia ICDs in your Procore application you now have the ability to see all of your Procore RFI's, Submittals, Inspections, Observations, Photos, etc... linked with each and every related asset or building element.   By adding Inertia's fully customizable statuses, you are able to create statuses for procurement, installation, concrete pours, commissioning or any other process you want to track throughout your project.   As an added bonus, at job completion, your ICD's can be handed over to the owner/facility management which now has captured all your work throughout the project and makes it easily accessible throughout the lifetime of the building.  

Want to hear more - schedule a demo or if you are at Procore Groundbreak in Chicago, stop by booth 122 and we'd be happy to show you what we've been up to.