Improving Situational Awareness
WeatherBuild® Helps Project Teams Make Better-Informed Decisions About Weather Risks
While you may not be able to control the weather, you can use modern analytics to take control of its impacts—both threats and opportunities. WeatherBuild® delivers scheduled and real-time, hyper-local weather risk reports directly to project teams in the field where the work gets done and it’s most needed.
The software company, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, allows contractors, owners and operators to tap into a suite of weather-based, decision support solutions to improve situational awareness. This offering also enables consumers to make better-informed and data-driven decisions about potential weather-related schedule impacts and safety risks.
“When you have a crew working on a roof or scaffolding, you want to know whether an upcoming rain or wind event or lightning strike could create a hazardous condition,” says WeatherBuild CEO Adam Omansky. “WeatherBuild not only alerts project teams to weather events, but also provides information on construction activities, equipment operations and work results that could be impacted.”
Omansky developed WeatherBuild in direct response to industry demand. “Weather is one of the top three reasons for missed milestones in the construction industry and the built environment. When crews miss work and schedules are impacted, the cost to our industry is tremendous,” he says. “Customers have been asking for a solution that delivers weather event, schedule impact and safety risk forecasting for their exact project location. WeatherBuild delivers that.”
Predictive, Historical and Customizable Weather Tools
WeatherBuild Solutions™ suite includes WeatherBuild Notify™, WeatherBuild History™ and WeatherBuild Enterprise™.
WeatherBuild Notify delivers hyper-local, automated weather risk reports to project teams. “These are daily weather reports and risk assessments of construction activities delivered by email, text and push notifications,” Omansky says. A project manager, general superintendent or field engineer typically chooses to receive the hyper-local weather risk reports at the start of the daily work shift and at the end of the shift for the next-day forecast. These reports detail the probability and intensity of weather events, schedule impacts and safety risks.
“If there’s a 40 percent chance of a high-intensity rain event in the afternoon but only a 10 percent chance in the morning, a project manager may rearrange the day’s work to accomplish outdoor activities earlier in the day,” Omansky says. “If concrete is planned to be poured and temperatures are expected to drop below 40 degrees, field personnel have that information right at their fingertips for cold-weather concreting practices.”
The tool also delivers automated notifications when weather takes a turn. “If wind speeds increase and exceed 20 miles an hour, a field superintendent may decide to take precautionary measures for crews working at heights,” Omansky says.
While WeatherBuild Notify looks to the future, WeatherBuild History provides a picture of the past. The solution delivers hyper-local weather history reports with claims management tools. “WeatherBuild History tells you what weather events actually transpired during a given time period. The tool integrates information from onsite weather stations, webcams and data loggers to create an historical weather analysis for the exact geolocation of your project,” Omansky says. “WeatherBuild collects these readings 24/7 for the duration of the project. If weather negatively impacts a project, stakeholders have the evidentiary data needed to help substantiate a weather delay claim.”
For users wanting additional customization features, WeatherBuild Enterprise is a hyper-local weather risk solution with risk management tools that can be tailored to project-specific requirements. “This solution integrates with your scheduling software to enable weather risk probability for each project activity,” Omansky says. The tool works with a customer’s existing enterprise solutions software and is compatible with Oracle Primavera P6, Microsoft Project and Excel, as well as many other formats common to the construction industry and built environment.
Proactive Field-Management Tools
Omansky began his career as a building architect and urban planner and has worked in the fields of real estate development and construction project management. “We’re focused on solving real-world problems for the built environment, to create new value for the leading organizations in our industry,” he explains.
Before founding WeatherBuild, Omansky was the co-founder and Vice President of Product Strategy at Vela Systems, a field management and field-based building information modeling (BIM) software company for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. “At Vela, our software automated the execution and oversight of field activities,” he says. Autodesk acquired Vela Systems in 2012, and Vela System solutions, now part of the Autodesk BIM 360 platform, is Autodesk’s fastest-growing product. “I’m very proud of what we created at Vela Systems,” Omansky says.
Following his success at Vela Systems, Omansky began talking with customers about other pain points in the construction industry. “What I found was that, when it came to the weather, much of what was done in the field was reactive versus proactive. Contractors, owners and operators didn’t have the tools they needed to manage field work in expectation of weather events, struggling to connect the dots between generic weather forecasts and complex project schedules.”
WeatherBuild has attracted significant industry acclaim. Among its numerous accolades, CIOReview, a technology magazine focusing on enterprise solutions, ranked WeatherBuild among the 20 Most Promising Construction Technology Solution Providers in 2017.
“The construction industry is critical to our nation’s economy, the single-largest category of GDP (gross domestic product), but the profit margins are razor thin,” Omansky says. “WeatherBuild Solutions leverage weather data, machine learning and predictive analytics. Our tools give contractors, owners and operators information they need to enhance productivity, improve safety and maximize profits.”