5 Groundbreak Takeaways That Make You Smarter About Drones
1. “The goal isn’t to put a drone on every construction site”
Increasingly, businesses are straying away from DIY drone programs that make it easier to own and operate drones, and instead migrating to solutions that eliminate drone logistics and produce rapid, effortless visual insights.
Drones are promising new vehicles that have the potential to transform industry, but they also inherently introduce new costs and complexities. The thought of adding new tools, new responsibilities, new certifications and permits, and new burdens to an already complex operation is the exact opposite of what most project managers consider helpful.
Drones will be on every job site in the next few years, but not as another tool on the tool belt. The project manager isn’t adopting a drone program. They’re adopting a visual insights program that captures a new, historical perspective across their job sites. They’re providing situational awareness holistically throughout their organization. They’re making decisions based on the actual state of projects, and the insights afforded by new perspectives and sensors. Drones become the afterthought.
2. “Drones are a portfolio-wide decision, not a site-by-site decision”
When adopting drone insights into job site workflows, it’s important that drone data is captured, presented and recorded consistently — across every single job site. This means shifting from traditionally manual flights, to executing completely autonomous missions on every project, capturing the same data the same way for each capture. In doing this, stakeholders can view individual project data consistently over time, as well as explore portfolio data in one objective manner. Stakeholders will be able to rely on a standard of visibility, creating new opportunities for drone insight usage across new roles within an enterprise.
3. “Drones are a pain in the *ss to manage in-house”
The hidden costs of implementing a drone program are easily overlooked, but for companies who have launched in-house drone program trials, the choice is obvious — it’s just not scalable. Between the time and expense of equipment, accessories, software and pilot education, the economics of building and managing an in-house drone program simply isn’t feasible.
CAPEX
- Purchase
- Maintenance
- Repair
- Licensing
- Data Processing Software
- Data Storage
OPEX
- Salary
- Education
- Travel
- Storage
- Batteries
- Asset Tracking
- Insurance
- Fines
- Theft
- Depreciation
4. “What the h*ll is the ROI on drones?”
It’s a fair question, and one the drone industry has done a poor job of communicating adequately. For most Drone Service Providers, the utility of drone data has always been somewhat assumed, and the focus has instead been on enabling workers to more easily deploy drones on job sites. This is backwards.
The true value of drones is in the agility they provide, and the insights they enable. ROI is therefore fundamentally rooted first in the variety of perspectives in which drones enable. Drone sensors point downward, yes, but they also are capable of pointing 360 degrees, at nearly any angle. Companies discover ROI when they gain situational awareness from a top-down perspective, as well as sideways and all the way around.
With this in mind, we’re seeing different companies finding value in different ways, as they incorporate drone insights into their existing workflows.
Progress Reporting: Drones are a simple and inexpensive way to provide frequent, routine contextual project updates across stakeholders, from subcontractors to owners.
Surveys: Drones provide a safe and efficient means of conducting site surveys, giving teams access to documented topography, conditions over time and identified defects.
Site Inspection: Drones enable site-wide inspections at regularly scheduled intervals, enabling greater visibility and helping you streamline checklists and identify mistakes sooner.
Materials Management: Frequent drone captures provide new visibility into what assets and materials are onsite at any given time.
Safety: Drones also offer a rapid means of conducting site inductions, streaming procedures and ensuring workers are educated on site logistics and organization.
Marketing: Drone imagery and data provides Sales and Marketing teams with impressive, immersive perspectives to update stakeholders and win future bids.
Collaboration: Drone insights provide an up-to-date, visual context for team to communicate with and refer to throughout the lifecycle of a rapidly evolving site.
5. “Drone insights aren’t nearly as valuable as drone insights seamlessly integrated within Procore”
It’s crucial that drones insights don’t exist outside on your existing workflows, within a siloed system of record. Drones are simply enablers, providing a new way to collect data at a frequency and perspective previously impossible. If your drone data supply chain isn’t integrated into your existing tools and workflows, the data can easily become unstructured, making it challenging to manage and access.
Drone insights are a visual layer of the data, complimentary to the data you collect already (such as your daily logs, observations, emails, punch lists, inspections, etc). If your data already exists within Procore, your drone data needs to be available and accessible within Procore also. Likewise, the tighter the integration between the systems, the more valuable the visual data becomes.
