The Essential Construction Communication Software: KYRO's Must-Have Features for Keeping Your Field and Office Connected

The construction industry faces unique communication challenges between the field and office. With teams working long hours in disparate locations, keeping everyone aligned presents difficulties. Critical information around progress, issues, changes, expenses, and more needs to flow smoothly between field teams and office managers to ensure smooth progress and key data collection. Let’s dive into how we have solved these key issues at KYRO.

We have seen earlier how bad field-office communication can cause a multitude of problems for construction teams. We also saw how an effective cloud-based software could mitigate these issues, and how such a system could look like. Today, we look at how we have resolved these issues at KYRO. Let’s take a closer look at KYRO’s field-office communication solutions for construction companies.

Forms & Reports

In construction, daily field reports are an essential part of not only keeping track of project progress, but also collecting valuable data in the field. However, it can be very time consuming for field workers who already spend 8-12 hours a day onsite doing hard labor to fill out these forms and reports every day.

With KYRO, filling out forms and reports takes just minutes. Workers can quickly fill out forms, take photos, mark them up, and attach them instantly. This allows workers to provide the necessary daily updates and data through forms and reports in a fraction of the time. Rather than spending over an hour filling out paperwork, workers can complete high quality reports in just minutes with KYRO.

By streamlining the process of filling out important daily reports, KYRO ensures construction companies receive the data they need while allowing workers to complete paperwork quickly. Workers can provide updates and finish their day sooner, instead of having to spend over an hour on administrative work after a full day of physical labor. The easy-to-use forms save hours of time while collecting the essential data construction firms rely on.

AI Voice Notes

KYRO's AI Voice Notes features allow construction field workers to record spoken updates in their native language, even if just brief bullet points, and the AI will automatically transcribe and summarize the recordings into coherent English-language notes.

This provides several key benefits:

  • Field workers can simply speak their updates quickly after their shift, saving them time compared to typing up full notes manually. This is crucial since construction crews work long 8-12 hour days doing physically demanding labor outside on job sites.
  • Updates recorded in the worker's native language, such as Spanish for Hispanic workers, are seamlessly translated to English. This removes language barriers and ensures managers get the full details.
  • Even quick voice notes with just bullet points get turned into full sentences and paragraphs by the AI transcription, avoiding confusion from fragmented information.
  • The voice-to-text AI produces updates with more context and detail compared to workers jotting down bare minimum notes. This provides management with richer, more meaningful field reports on the project status.

The end result is construction field crews can provide detailed, timely daily updates to the home office without spending their limited free time writing full reports. Management in turn gets the complete information they need on construction progress and issues, improving decision making and reducing delays.

Document Markups

KYRO allows users to annotate and markup drawings directly within the app to show changes or point out issues. The drawing markups feature is extremely useful for collaboration in construction projects.

With KYRO, any user who has access to a drawing can add markups on top of the original file to call out changes, mismatches, problems or anything else that needs to be addressed. Markups can include text comments, arrows, shapes, highlights, and measurements.

Users can precisely define a scale on the drawing, and then add measurement annotations that automatically calculate real-world dimensions. For example, a user could indicate on an architectural drawing that a particular wall section is 17 feet long based on the defined scale.

The major benefit of the integrated document markup tool is that all annotations immediately sync and become visible to every other user who has access to that file. This keeps everyone perfectly in sync at all times, with the latest redlines, notes and comments. There is no ambiguity about the most up-to-date state of the drawings.

By empowering on-site teams to instantly mark up drawings and share changes with the rest of the project team, issues can be identified faster, reducing costly mistakes and wrong work. The drawing markups in KYRO vastly improve field-to-office collaboration and ensure the most accurate, up-to-date information is available to everyone on the construction project.

Timesheet Approvals

With KYRO, companies can define limits on expenses incurred per week, as well as overtime hours logged. By setting predefined thresholds, the system can automatically flag any timesheets or expense reports that exceed those limits.

For example, if a company sets a policy that any overtime over 10 hours in a week requires manager approval, KYRO will automatically flag any timesheet submitted with over 10 overtime hours. The manager is notified and can easily review and approve or reject the timesheet.

Similarly, if the company sets a policy that any individual expenses over $50 require a receipt, KYRO will automatically check expense reports and flag any items over $50 without a receipt attached. Employees are prompted to add the receipt, or the manager can review and request the receipt if needed.

Defining these types of limits and validation rules allows companies to catch potential issues proactively. Managers have clearer visibility into overtime hours being logged and expenses being claimed. At the same time, employees are guided to follow company policies, reducing confusion and mistakes.

Overall, the automated timesheet and expense auditing streamlines the approval process in KYRO. Common issues can be flagged quickly, and managers have the context to resolve discrepancies efficiently through notes and prompts within the system. This saves time while ensuring tighter compliance to company policies.

Ensure better field-office communication with KYRO

KYRO's innovative features provide streamlined field-to-office communication that improves coordination and productivity for construction companies. By enabling field teams to efficiently capture rich data including photos, voice notes, and document markups, KYRO bridges the information gap between the construction site and head office.

Meanwhile, field staff spend less time bogged down with administrative work and avoid miscommunications around changes, expenses, and overtime. With field and office workers on the same page, projects can stick to the plan and avoid costly mistakes.

The bottom line is that efficient communication in construction translates to a more productive business. KYRO delivers the solutions that construction companies need to connect field and office for better execution.

March 14, 2024