Harbour Build Ltd: site inspections, in one place.
Prepared after free scoping, from a call with Sarah (operations director) and Tom (site manager), their inspection forms and two sample reports.
What you told us
Your site managers inspect each site every week on paper. Someone types the forms into a spreadsheet on Friday, and the defects list for the client goes out the following week. Defects get missed between the paper and the spreadsheet, and when a client asks “when was this first spotted?”, it takes half a day to find out. You looked for software and found products built for large contractors, at large-contractor prices.
What your product does, in one paragraph
Site managers record inspections on their phones, with photos, on site. Every defect has an owner and a due date, and the client gets an up-to-date defects list whenever they ask, without anyone typing anything up.
First version (three weeks)
- A site manager signs in on a phone and records an inspection against a site, using your current form
- Each defect gets a photo, a location on the site, an owner and a due date
- The office sees every open defect, by site, and can mark it fixed
- A defects list for the client, as a PDF, in your format, from one button
- Your own sign-in for your staff, your data in your own cloud account, hosted in the UK
Later, once real users have tried it Follows once you start
- Reminders to owners when a defect is overdue
- A login for clients to see their own defects list
- Working offline on sites with no signal
Not at all Follows once you start
- Planning, costing or timesheets. Good products already do these, and you already use one
- Your own phone app in the app stores. A web page that works on any phone does the job and costs far less to change
Week one, exactly
A demo video arrives 24 hours before each weekly call. The first one shows a site manager signing in on a phone, choosing a site and recording an inspection with photos, and the office seeing it straight away. Tom tries it on a real site the following Monday. Week one doesn’t include the client PDF or due dates: those come in weeks two and three.
This is what week one looked like.
Two things only you can decide Follows once you start
- Who can mark a defect fixed? (a) Only the office. (b) The owner, with the office confirming. We recommend (b): it saves the office a step and keeps a check.
- Which sites first? (a) One site, with Tom. (b) All four. We recommend (a): one site in week one, the rest once it has worked for a week.
What it costs
A week of building costs $5,600CAD $7,900£4,200€4,900. The first version takes one to four weeks, and this one’s is three, so it costs three times that. You approve the scope before paying anything, and you can stop after any week. The code, the data and the cloud account are yours from the first day.
After the version: 30 days of bug fixes at no charge, then maintenance in tiers by what is kept running. The tiers are on Price and terms.
What we need from you
Your current inspection form, an hour a week from Tom on the weekly call, and Sarah’s yes or not yet on each version.
