Rick Hensley, CIO and VP at Messer Construction

WHAT WE DO:  

“We provide national builders expertise on a regional basis. We live and work in our communities; we don’t import project teams and then leave. We are very involved in the community and we want to continue to be a significant partner to all our communities. If the communities we are in are thriving, then building will thrive.” 

What’s the state of business technology in greater Cincinnati region? How do we compare to other cities nationally or globally?

“Construction used to be laggards in technology – we were not doing leading-edge things – but tablet and mobile technologies have driven some rapid changes. Ruggedized computers were once very expensive; one cost between six and nine thousand dollars. We went very quickly from having zero of those to having over eight hundred iPads and about a thousand smart phones deployed to the field.  In the past, each person was running around with their own little piece of paper; now everyone goes online and looks at the same list while out in the field. Folks who once sat behind screens to get their information, now get it on their mobile devices. Not much construction happens inside a trailer after all, but on-site where the expertise makes a difference.

In construction, IT’s biggest objective is to equip workers to be at the point of attack, where they are doing the building, watching it happen, ensuring that quality and safety is ongoing, improving schedules and meeting cost budgets. Until just a few years ago, everyone recorded their information on spreadsheets to put time and units of production in the system. Today they input that information on their iPads and in just seconds, they get reports back to know if they are meeting or exceeding production rates, and they can also make adjustments or put comments on for review before the next day’s work.  Now while out in the field, we can look at all our blueprints and drawings; we can use virtual reality applications to compare what a building is looking like with what it should look like; we can bring up all our tools from a sort of virtual gang box and we can roll 60-inch smart screens from floor to floor as a building project goes up.

All these on-site technologies have enabled us to reduce schedule time, improve quality and have fewer close-out items at the end of a job. We have found that we have much less warranty and follow-up work because our ability to control quality during a building project is much improved.”