Avvir, a New York City-based software company which provides an automated risk analysis platform for construction firms, announced early this month a suite of new product enhancements. Per their release of the news, the new enhancements include “Clash Results, User Generated Inspect Reports, Project Metrics, and more,” and the company says the enhancements are “all designed to enable construction teams to simplify reporting and quickly identify potential issues to prevent errors and delays in the construction process.”
Among these product enhancements, the clash detection tool has the potential to be the most fruitful for construction firms who are surely cognizant of timeline issues on their projects. Using reality capture technologies – Avvir is crucially hardware-agnostic – along with BIM, users can use the platform to detect clashes within a design. Further, they can now select a clash and the enhanced product will show which elements that have not already been built would be impacted by the clash, helping save costly headaches later in a project.
The company has also highlighted their new Custom Deviation Reports which Avvir claims will “revolutionize” the way their customers analyze and report installation deviations. With the new feature, users can generate their own reports on these deviations and clashes with “just a few clicks,” which can then be shared easily among other stakeholders on the project.
In addition to those two added features, Avvir has added capabilities to speed up workflows and start the processing of scans aligned to BIM models started by the users. They’ve also added new ways to report technical issues directly to the company, as well as putting in a new landing page showing all of the key metrics in a project. Users also have the option to dig deeper into these metrics to view them within a 3D model.
Avvir was founded in 2017, first releasing their product in the fall of 2019. They specialize in automated processes to catch potential mistakes and risks for construction projects by autonomously tracking things like scheduling and cost analysis, along with the aforementioned clash releases. As noted above, too, the platform is hardware-agnostic, opening up its usability for a larger number of potential customers. As they describe it, they say they allow “customers to focus on solving issues, not finding them.” Avvir was acquired by Hexagon and is now integrated into some of its construction platforms.
While offerings like Chat-GPT, Midjourney, and other generative AI products have captured the hearts and minds of the consumer and mainstream audiences, it’s artificial intelligence and automated products like this that will likely have the most profound impacts in the short-term. An industry like construction is ripe for disruption by automation for a couple of key reasons. One is the workforce shortage, an issue that has clouded the space for a few years now and only figures to get worse. By automating tedious, but important, tasks, workers who are on the team can be freed up for other, more important work.
Furthermore, we are starting to see more technology added into the construction process with BIM becoming commonplace on projects and use of reality capture technology no longer being few and far between. These tools and others are extremely valuable for these workflows, but they also add a tremendous amount of data which can be cumbersome to parse for humans. By adding in AI and automation like what is provided by Avvir, these key insights can still be derived, making projects more streamlined and preserving profit margins.
“Our main goal at Avvir is to equip construction industry professionals with technology that will enable them to build smarter, safer buildings that are on-time and within budget,” said Zoe Abboudi, Senior Product Manager at Avvir, in a statement. “These product enhancements allow us to deliver on that goal by identifying potential issues in a new build well before they ever make it to the physical world so that they can be corrected in the planning phase and to avoid causing delays once construction has already begun. It’s our hope that this technology will improve the safety of construction sites and ultimately the buildings themselves, in addition to saving time and money.”
