An April, 2023 update from Assignar brought an important new enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration and some slick improvements. IRONPROS caught up with Assignar Chief Product Officer Marcel Broekmaat to get some visibility into how this may change the equation for contractors evaluating field productivity management software and may be considering products like:
- AGTEK
- Assignar
- B2W Software
- Busybusy
- CrewTracks
- InEight, with its Field Data Capture
- Bentley with SYNCHRO Field and SYNCHRO Control
- Cenpoint
- AboutTime Technologies/Workmax,
- Procore with Field Productivity,
- Raken
- Sage, with Sage Field Operations
- Stack Construction Technologies
See Field Productivity Software Solutions on IRONPROS
Venture-Funded Construction Software
Assignar’s growth has been fueled by $47 million in venture capital, including a 2020 Series B round in May of 2021. The software includes some functionality for equipment maintenance including reminders for scheduled maintenance tasks and capturing information on failures as they happen. Some customers will use Assignar for preventive maintenance while others have pre-existing enterprise asset management (EAM) or computerized maintenance management software (CMMS). Assignar is not a solution for tracking all of the factors that feed into a successful preventive maintenance program, like spares and repairs parts inventory, equipment warranties, fuel used, vibration, trouble codes or other data that would support predictive or condition-based maintenance. But it will establish the rhythm of service for the equipment and help enforce the provision of regular maintenance based on time periodicity, duty cycle, tasks and loads during those duty cycles and regulatory requirements.
In the IRONPROS State of the Industry: Construction Technology Study, among the product categories studied, more respondents were in the planning stages on adopting Field Productivity/Job Ticketing at almost 30% than any other category, making it a product category ripe for growth and investment in both functionality and new integrations.
When IRONPROS debriefed Assignar CEO Sean McCreanor in March of 2022, McCreanor said the company was also completing an integration with Caterpillar VisionLink for telematics real-time equipment data and was in discussions regarding an integration with Tenna for telematics data collection and maintenance management. Other integrations in place or in the works are with Komatsu’s Komtrax and potentially Samsara.
Broekmaat said the integration effort had been reshuffled though, pointing to the Sage Intacct for Construction integration announced the previous quarter.
“That integration contains six or seven workflows that can be synched with Sage Intacct,” Broekmaat said. “At a high level, the integration covers data regarding clients, projects, users, workers, assets and time sheets.”
While Assignar offers functionality to track equipment usage on projects, equipment connectivity via telematics “not in place yet—we have tackled the most complex ones first, which was not easy in hindsight,” Broekmaat said. “The ERP ones are not easy to deal with because they enable you to configure the software according to the way you run your business, so our workflows had to have configuration behind them as well. We have done that, and these integrations are now in the Integration Hub, which allows us to connect to other applications as well. Before we tackle the equipment part, we will tackle a few more ERPs. Quickbooks Online is coming up as well as Xero. Then we want to tackle the Tennas of the world.”
Assignar will have a strong value proposition when it does invest in equipment connectivity due to the extensive degree of related functionality already in the application.
“Equipment tools that are part of our solution provide the ability to manage the skills of the people in the organization that are the best fit for a task,” Broekmaat said. “If you are a crane operator, the software checks against your skills and makes sure the operators who are assigned to those jobs are compliant. There may be certain requirements that are defined by the owner or a security clearance for airports—all of those things are handled by Assignar too.”
Advanced Scheduling and Flexible Geofencing
Other new functionality in the recent updates focuses on timesheets—functionality that any contractor with a field workforce can use to save back office time reconciling payroll and job costing. A new Site Diary enables time sheets to be filled out for a full crew at once, including multiple breaks and time tracked against multiple assets. While nobody likes to do it, the scheduling application now allows the extend the project timeline, including a prompt if assigned crew are not available.
While there are other solutions in the space, including upstart CrewTracks which this week announced new production tracking features, Assignar is focusing on flexibility in work scheduling and time tracking that could help differentiate it from some other sin the field.
“There are a lot of point solutions in the space,” Broekmaat said. “On the scheduling side, there is a gap between the ServiceOne type of (field service and work management) solutions—with dispatchers of technicians, and planning software where you would use Oracle Primavera or Microsoft Project, which are more general contractor-oriented. In between is where we sit. Our focus is work beyond a day typically that involves crews, equipment and requires specific skills to perform the work.”
Assignar also offers one piece of low hanging fruit for most contractors—a time sheet with clock in/out and geofencing that is flexible enough to get out of its own way.
“For geofencing, we use it as an attribute of the time that folks check in and out,” Broekmaat said, stressing that unlike some other systems, moving outside the geofence does not automatically clock an employee out—a pain point with some other applications. “It captures the location when they check in or out. We can compare that to the boundary of the project. We released a daily log in the previous quarter, which made us compliant with California regulation on hours working and when to take breaks. You have to have an exact time down to the minute. Those hours must also be available to workers afterward, as part of California rules.”
