Tech Soft 3D Helps Fieldwire Rapidly Bring BIM Viewing to Its Construction Management Platform

Fieldwire is changing the future of con¬struction with its productivity tools for the construction field. The company’s field management platform – which is accessible via browser, tablet, or smartphone – gives customers access to critical project-related information while they’re on the job.

“We’re basically a one-stop shop for the field,” explained Looly Lee, product manager at Fieldwire. “Fieldwire is the place where the entire project team – from the foreman, to the project manager – comes together to collaborate and share information in real-time. Customers can view and markup construction plans, access important contextual documents like RFIs or submittals, assign tasks, view progress reports, and more.”

Fieldwire had always offered robust 2D plan viewing capabilities, but sought to evolve the product with new features around 3D model viewing, to better support its customer base. Additionally, it was important for Fieldwire to support BIM viewing on both web and mobile, while providing offline capabilities for those mobile users as a lot of construction project sites that are just getting started up don’t have a Wi-Fi connection, and there might not even be LTE or 3G in those areas. That made offline support a need-to-have.
“More and more projects are starting to use BIM, and we wanted to meet our customers’ growing need for that 3D information,” said Lee. “First and foremost, it was crucial for our BIM viewer to provide a high-quality user experience. It needed to be something that somebody in the field could effortlessly use without running into any hassles – because once you lose the user’s confidence in a par¬ticular feature, it’s really hard to gain it back.”