OUTSIDE IN: This is the third in a five-part series.
A house renovation may seem like an unlikely laboratory for an artificial intelligence software, but this is exactly how the tech company harbr was born.
Ashley Kielbratowski was managing a house renovation for Dave Kim and his wife.
Kim, who came from a background in Salesforce where the focus on was real time data, was now doing a renovation with no such data or process.
“I'm going through construction project and I don’t know what’s going on and it’s driving me nuts. I’m going, yeah, but where’s the data?”
If scheduling and co-ordinating was this complicated for a small, one-time residential renovation, then what it would be like for a large industrial construction project? Orders of magnitude more complicated.
Kim, Kielbratowski and her husband Jeff started thinking about ways to apply real-time data and automation to construction projects. They wanted to simplify communication between all the moving parts.
They started working on a solution to provide instant communication between construction project managers, vendors and service suppliers. The idea was to connect everyone automatically and improve delivery schedules.
When a task is completed everyone on the project is updated. This saves project managers from calling contractors daily to update the schedule and keep the project on track.
“We let the technology help people get out of each other’s way,” says Kim.
This technology is particularly useful in the retail industry where multiple stores are opening across the country. Each individual location has so many moving parts and people working on the project.
Using artificial intelligence to do the coordinating, the technology makes sure that all people working on a project know where progress stands so that the right people show up when needed and tasks are competed on time.
harbr is based at Volta Labs in Halifax.
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