Building A Case For Rugged Tablets

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies magazine

Construction management firm Pinnacle/CSG has improved efficiency by 35 percent with tablet computers.

When selecting mobile computers for a given application, function often dictates form. Pinnacle/CSG, a Tallahassee, FL-based construction management firm, had this principle in mind when it opted to deploy rugged tablets to its construction superintendents to help eliminate paperwork and improve productivity. Thanks to the new devices, Pinnacle/CSG has slashed its printing costs and improved efficiency by 35 percent in the field.

Prior to the tablets, superintendents used paper-based forms to manage operations in the field, including the generation of daily reports. Construction superintendents would use pencil and paper to complete field reports while walking a job site, then return to a trailer to scan or type the information into the PC and email the data to the central office. “If their handwriting was poor, we wouldn’t be able to understand what we were trying to type,” says Cory McFarlane, chief visionary at Pinnacle/CSG. “We were using a lot of labor to type and retype this information, and that was not a good use of our time.”