Andrew Irwin, a section engineer at Costain working on the Crossrail C360 contract in east London has won a contest to come up with the next must-have construction app.
The contest, which was set up to celebrate the end of MobiCloud, a €4.45m project to develop a European corporate “Appstore”, received 47 entries from nine countries.
Irwin will receive a €1,000 prize for his winning idea, an app that will improve the management of machinery and powered tools by replacing the current paper-based system, which takes up a lot of engineers’ and foremen’s time.
Winner: Andrew Irwin
Utilising electronic identification the app would display and record equipment’s vital information, including maintenance certificates, to manage requirements under LOLER [Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations] and PUWER [Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations], as well as health and safety information, such as the safe period of use for vibrating hand tools.
Astonishingly, Irwin was the creator of not only the winning idea but no fewer than five of the top 10 apps chosen by the international panel of judges. Commenting, he said: “My frontline role enables me to continually identify real site problems or areas for improvement. The challenge provided me with the opportunity to submit my innovative ideas to develop solutions to these problems.
"My ideas looked to enhance and improve the effectiveness and safety of working on major civil engineering projects in the industry and within the Costain business.”
Senior civil engineer Katie Swanick, a judge on the Construction App Challenge and MobiCloud project lead at Costain, said the Apps were marked on “several criteria, such as feasibility, simplicity and effectiveness. All the entries were examined on a completely anonymous basis, so judges had no idea whose entries they were scrutinising.”
What is MobiCloud?
MobiCloud was established to help close the technology gap between consumer-facing apps and smartphones, and the construction industry’s back-end business systems. It exploits existing cloud-based and web-based technologies to create corporate mobile apps, without the complexity and up-front cost normally associated with mobile application development
The project received €2.27m of EU funding under the Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme, which is part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP). The rest of the funding came from consortium member companies, which include Costain.
The system enables users on site or in the field to securely connect to a portfolio of corporate IT services stored in the cloud. It can run on any smartphone or tablet and is also “context-aware”. This means that depending on the context – such as location, role, skillset, weather, task etc – it can display different services.
MobiCloud is also designed to exploit construction technologies that generate information which needs to be captured, viewed and shared, such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
