by Andreea Rimniceanu

The construction industry, like any other industry is facing its own challenges. These could range from planning to team management, supply to resources management, labour shortage to recruitment or even cost to time efficiency and much more. It’s complex to say what construction managers are dealing with in terms of site challenges especially because every site is different. This is why over the past 2 years, Site Diary’s Chief Product Officer, Khaldon Evans set out to find answers to these challenges by visiting various construction sites across the UK. One of those challenges he identified was the slow adaptation to digital tools among field workers. The slow adaptation was due to the digital tools they were given were too complex or didn’t fit their requirements. Which is why we decided to bring to them a simple site diary app which requires no training to get started and they would use on a daily basis.

The history of Site Diary app

Let’s turn back time for a bit to look into the past. Site Diary originates from 2014 when it was initially developed by a Swedish company called Appear Network as a part of the funded European Union project MobiCloud. Two years later, Script&Go, the French construction software developer acquired Site Diary as a strategy to address the needs of field workers and ultimately to expand internationally.

A major milestone of Site Diary was accomplished in 2019 when the app saw its first major update since its first launch in 2014.  This update consisted in the redesign of Site Diary along with the addition of a new task management feature and new technologies. The reasons why we decided to redevelop Site Diary were because we wanted to make it more innovative, for us to have better mastery of the technologies used and for it to be simpler for our customers.

Site Diary’s mother company, Script&Go was built to simplify field team’s daily activities so that it helps them reach their full potential. The vision of Script&Go is to digitise data collection, data processing and sharing by facilitating and increasing mobile devices and internet penetration on the field. The distribution of Script&Go covers high standard and bespoke pc, tablets and smartphones software for clients located in 32 countries operating in a variety of sectors such as: real estate, construction, telecommunication, energy, automotive and aircraft. The last three years have led to a 414% growth for Script&Go which joined the Technology Fast 500 that rewards fast growing tech companies all over the world.

Where we are at

Over the recent years, not only have we listened to our clients’ feedback but we have also researched further after getting client testimonials. Ultimately, we have decided to integrate new features into the Site Diary app in order to better accommodate its users’ needs. We always want to make sure the app runs smoothly at all times and we are keen vis-à-vis integrating new features based on the challenges we hear about from our clients. In a digital world of apps, we believe it is essential to follow constant improvement, especially because we want to see happy clients. Some of our well-known clients include names such as: Costain, Ayres Associates, Amey, Torsion, Alun Griffiths and many more who are using the Site Diary app at present and have been firmly happy with Site Diary’s features. More to be found at sitediary.com

Top features

The features we are most proud of include reporting your past and live weather, which means that the app will geolocate you whilst having your smartphone connected to internet or Wi-Fi spots. As a result, this keeps you organised hence it also helps you manage and systematise your resources (manpower, equipment and material) effectively depending on the weather for the day. The Site Diary app also features task management where Site Managers can create and allocate tasks to their team members. This way, all activities are quickly and fairly shared amongst the team and no more time is wasted whilst trying to communicate tasks via emails/phone calls. All these activities are stocked into the digital diary where Site Managers can access and view the progress of the tasks created. They can even approve or reject events, take pictures to show when the work is done. This progress can be monitored from the back office or directly from the site. It also allows the management team to export reports through PDF, CSV or Excel across any date’s selection wanted and can be used in case of disputes.

Site Diary benefits

The core values of this are that Site Diary helps avoiding penalty fees of up to £1M in commercial disputes and saves an average daily time of 45 minutes filling your site diary compared to paper.

The Commercial Director of Torsion Group, one of our customers has claimed that they “lost a dispute proceeding because records were inadequate. Even though the argument was correct, without records” nothing could be proved – therefore, Site Diary was designed in such way that cases like this to be solved and not lost. Regarding time waste, another of our customers, the Site Agent from Alun Griffiths has stated that the old-fashioned paper site diary used by them “was time consuming and the quality of the information was poor or incomplete”, which is why we allocated all the features of Site Diary so that it helps users save time and to have all the information in one place.

A simple, yet powerful, collaborative app, Site Diary will bring a variety of benefits. To summarise, it increases productivity on construction sites by the improvement of the daily activity recording to keep track on projects level. The app also helps reducing the risk of commercial disputes and penalties. Moreover, it optimises the gathering and use of key management data, so it works like a data hub and to top it up, it decreases the number of apps used on site and maximising its utilisation since it’s designed with having everything you need in one app.

The app requires no training to get started because it was smartly designed in a way that is easy and fun to use.

Site Diary app can be used from any device, be it Apple or Android device, also available for web versions use.

Feel free to test it yourself and to see how simple it is to create a diary entry and how easy it is to report progress on a task, whether you are doing this from your back office or from the construction site. Available at sitediary.com