Industry solution

Construction & Engineering

Keep crews, equipment and deliveries in step with the lookahead

Crews, machines, deliveries and site conditions checked against the lookahead, so gaps show up on screen instead of at the gate.

Products
8
Challenges
6
Concepts
15
A mid-rise construction site at dawn with a tower crane, a delivery truck at the gate and two workers reviewing a tablet.
PlanMagnet(opens PlanMagnet in a new tab)CrewFoundry(opens CrewFoundry in a new tab)AssetHandler(opens AssetHandler in a new tab)MoveTheWheels(opens MoveTheWheels in a new tab)EcoImpactHub(opens EcoImpactHub in a new tab)FluidGrids(opens FluidGrids in a new tab)BigConsole(opens BigConsole in a new tab)Botlit(opens Botlit in a new tab)

The problem

Why jobsite coordination breaks down at the seams

On most jobs the schedule, the crews, the machines and the deliveries live in separate files, chats and paper tickets, so the gaps between them surface at the 6 a.m. gate, when they cost the most to fix.

A construction project is a temporary factory, rebuilt on a different site every time, staffed by the contractor's own crews and a rotating cast of subcontractors. The master schedule may be sound, but the work happens in the three-week lookahead and the daily plan, where every activity depends on a crew with the right certifications, a machine that is in service, materials that have arrived and site conditions that allow the work. Each of those lives somewhere different: a scheduling file, a foreman's group chat, an equipment workbook, a supplier's dispatch office, a monitoring vendor's portal.

Margins in contracting are thin and a lost day compounds: crews on standby, concrete that cannot wait, rental machines billing while owned ones sit idle, and milestones tied to liquidated damages. At the same time owners, lenders and public agencies ask for more evidence, from payroll and safety records to embodied-carbon figures for major materials, and the people asked to report are the same people trying to build.

Most of the tools contractors rely on were built for one department. The opportunity is not another app for the site office, but a shared foundation where the schedule, the workforce, the equipment, the deliveries and the site monitoring can see each other, so a gap is noticed while it can still be fixed.

Who this is for

  • Director of operations or project controls lead

    Every active job at a glance: slipping milestones, idle equipment and crew conflicts, plus a monthly report and carbon figures that trace to field data.

  • Project manager

    A lookahead that reflects open RFIs, submittals, crews and deliveries, and a completion date for the owner that comes with its reasons.

  • General superintendent

    Crews with current cards on the right site, machines that start the shift ready and deliveries that arrive when the crane is free.

  • Equipment manager

    Hour meters, hour-based services, owned-versus-rented utilization and where every machine is sitting today, without phone calls.

  • Safety and environmental manager

    Dust, noise and runoff readings against the site plan's action levels, and toolbox talks with a record of which crews received them.

  • Engineering manager at a civil or EPC firm

    RFI and submittal responses tracked against the contractor's lookahead, so design answers arrive before they hold up the field.

A day in the life

The story behind the solution

A week on three jobs, from the Monday crew call to the month-end report

Grace runs field operations for a general contractor with a self-performed concrete crew, an owned equipment fleet and fourteen jobs in progress. This week three of them need her: Selwater Commons, a mid-rise residential building heading for its level-5 deck pour; Eastgate, a parking structure pouring its ramps; and a culvert replacement on Route 9 for the county. This is how the week could run when the schedule, crews, machines, deliveries and site sensors share one workspace.

  1. Monday, 6:10 a.m.

    The crew list that used to live in a group chat

    Luis, the superintendent at Selwater Commons, is building Thursday's pour crew and has just learned the pump operator is also promised to Eastgate. Last month a gap like this surfaced at the gate with trucks already batched. This time the crew readiness board shows the double-booking in amber and a rigger from the steel subcontractor in red, card expired on September 28. Luis swaps in a qualified rigger from the suggested list, Eastgate's ramp pour gets its own pump operator from the same list so Kwame, the pump operator, stays on the deck, and by 6:40 the lookahead shows Thursday's crew constraint cleared.

    How this is solved: Right crew, current cards, right site
  2. Tuesday, 7:30 a.m.

    A weeping hose and a telehandler nobody missed

    On Route 9 the excavator operator's pre-shift inspection fails on a weeping hydraulic hose. The machine is tagged out and a work order is open before the trench is reopened. The equipment board also shows an owned telehandler idle at Eastgate for nine days while Selwater Commons pays rent on the same model. Grace approves the transfer, a lowboy and driver are booked for Thursday at 1:30 p.m., after the pour, and the rented unit goes on the list to call off rent.

    How this is solved: Machines that start the shift ready and never sit idle
  3. Wednesday, 10:15 a.m.

    Rebar at the gate, crane in the air

    The rebar for the level-6 deck arrives two hours early while the tower crane is on curtain-wall panels. Instead of an argument at the gate, the delivery scheduler shows the load outside its slot and the site team re-slots it to 11:30, with room in laydown zone 3. The late precast stairs for Eastgate surfaced as an exception at 9:05, when the supplier's dispatch update came in, early enough to move the erection crew to ramp formwork. At 11:42 the receiver photographs the ticket and the lookahead clears rebar on site for the L6 deck.

    How this is solved: Deliveries that arrive when the site can take them
  4. Thursday, 2:00 p.m.

    A coordination meeting with nothing hidden

    The weekly subcontractor meeting opens on the lookahead itself. The morning's at-risk sweep has flagged building dry-in: the upper curtain wall needs submittal SD-087 approved by Friday to hold its fabrication slot, and the L6 embed plates wait on RFI-114, open six days. When the steel subcontractor asks what the structural engineer actually said, the project manager asks a Botlit assistant and reads out the cited response. The team escalates the RFI, and the owner's representative gets a dry-in date with its reasons.

    How this is solved: A three-week lookahead the whole job trusts
  5. Friday, 11:40 a.m.

    The dust monitor speaks first

    Wind picks up on Route 9 while the excavator loads trucks. The east boundary dust monitor crosses the action level in the site's environmental plan, and within minutes the supervisor and the environmental lead have the alert in their channel with a follow-up task. The supervisor pulls up the plan's response steps, cited from the contractor's own document, and the water truck is on the haul road before a neighbor has reason to call. The dust-control toolbox talk goes to all three crews, and each foreman signs off once it has been delivered.

    How this is solved: Dust and runoff caught before the complaint
  6. Last Friday of the month

    A report that starts itself

    Grace opens the portfolio console instead of fourteen spreadsheets. The Explain panel notes that Eastgate lost two days of float and that idle equipment fell after the telehandler transfer, each finding cited to its source. The county's request for embodied carbon on the culvert job is answered from the project carbon view, with concrete, precast, rebar and diesel each traced to a delivery ticket or to the fuel logged against a machine. She spends the afternoon on the two jobs that need her, not on the report.

    How this is solved: One portfolio view for the monthly report and the carbon question

None of this replaces the superintendent's judgment or the foreman's eye. It moves the gaps between crews, machines, deliveries and the schedule from the 6 a.m. gate to a screen where someone can still act on them, and it lets the week's work become the month's report without a second round of data entry.

Challenges and how they are solved

6 problems, several products, one connected answer

Each challenge shows the problem as it happens, how the products are designed to hand work to each other, and the concepts that illustrate it. Share any challenge on its own.

The problem

It is Monday at 6:10 a.m. and the superintendent on a mid-rise job is building Thursday's crew for the level-5 deck pour: a crane operator, two riggers, a signal person, a pump operator and a finishing crew. The names come from a foreman's group chat, the certifications sit in a binder in the site office and in each subcontractor's own files, and the pump operator is also penciled in for a ramp pour on another job. Nobody notices that one of the steel subcontractor's riggers has a card that expired last month until the rigger is standing at the gate on Thursday, with ready-mix already batched.

What it costs

The pour window slips, trucks wait or are turned away and a crew stands idle on day rates, and a worker without current evidence nearly starts lift-critical work because the record lived in three places.

How the products work together

PlanMagnet's lookahead lists Thursday's pour with the crew it needs, and through the PlanMagnet and CrewFoundry capacity integration the plan is weighed against real availability and skills. CrewFoundry is designed to keep one profile for every worker, employee or subcontractor, with trade, certifications and site orientation. Its crew readiness board is designed to show each site's roster for the day, flag expired or expiring cards and double-booked operators, and suggest a qualified replacement. FluidGrids runs a nightly workflow that is designed to send the subcontractor coordinator a renewal reminder before a card lapses and to alert the superintendent when a booked worker is blocked. The superintendent confirms the swap in CrewFoundry and the lookahead activity shows its crew constraint cleared.

The outcome it is designed for

Thursday's crew can be confirmed on Monday, gaps are filled from a qualified list instead of a phone tree, and every worker at the gate has current evidence on record.

The concepts behind it

CrewFoundry

Jobsite Crew Readiness Board

The daily roster by site and activity, with certification expiry and orientation status per worker, blocked and double-booked people flagged, and a suggested qualified replacement.

Works with PlanMagnet, AssetHandler, FluidGrids

The problem

Tuesday, 7:30 a.m., on a culvert replacement: a 30-ton excavator is halfway along a trench when a hydraulic hose lets go. Its 500-hour service was due last week, but the hour-meter reading only exists on a paper pre-shift inspection sheet in the cab. Across town an owned telehandler has been parked on the parking-structure job for nine days, while the mid-rise pays rent on an identical machine. The equipment manager hears about both through phone calls, and the yard has no truck lined up to move anything.

What it costs

Unplanned downtime stops a crew and an open trench, rental bills keep running on duplicate machines, and owned equipment depreciates while it waits for someone to notice it is free.

How the products work together

AssetHandler is designed to hold the equipment register, owned and rented, with hour-meter readings captured at each pre-shift inspection, and later from telematics, and preventive maintenance scheduled on operating hours as well as dates. A failed pre-shift inspection on the operator's phone is designed to tag the machine out and raise a work order. The equipment utilization board is designed to rank idle owned machines against rentals on other sites and propose a transfer; the transfer request is designed to hand off to MoveTheWheels, which assigns a lowboy and a driver from the contractor's own fleet. CrewFoundry is designed to supply a qualified operator for the receiving site, and diesel issued to each machine is designed to be logged against it in AssetHandler and carried by a FluidGrids workflow into EcoImpactHub as Scope 1 fuel entries in the project carbon ledger.

The outcome it is designed for

The equipment manager sees idle and overdue machines before the crews do, moves owned equipment before renting more, and services happen on the calendar rather than in the ditch.

The concepts behind it

The problem

Wednesday, 10:15 a.m.: rebar for the level-6 deck rolls up to the gate two hours early. The tower crane is booked for curtain-wall panels until 11, the laydown zone is already stacked with formwork, and the driver idles in a travel lane while the traffic marshal argues with the supplier's dispatcher by phone. Across town, precast stair flights for the parking structure are running two hours late with an erection crew on standby, and nobody on site knows until the foreman calls to ask where they are.

What it costs

Detention charges, double-handling, crane conflicts and neighbor complaints, while the L6 deck cycle, which needs its rebar placed and inspected before the pour, quietly loses its buffer.

How the products work together

MoveTheWheels is designed to treat each purchase-order delivery as a tracked order with a booked gate slot and, where it needs one, a crane window. Its delivery scheduler is designed to show inbound loads against gate, crane and laydown capacity and flag a load that arrives outside its slot. Supplier dispatch updates, sent by email or a supplier link and picked up by a FluidGrids connector, are designed to update each inbound order's ETA, so a load trending past its slot appears on the exceptions board, and FluidGrids is designed to route that exception to the superintendent and the matching activity in PlanMagnet's lookahead. At the gate the site receiver is designed to photograph the delivery ticket in the MoveTheWheels app and capture the driver's signature, and that proof of delivery is designed to clear the activity's material constraint in PlanMagnet.

The outcome it is designed for

Loads arrive into booked windows, late ones are known early enough to re-sequence the work, and the lookahead knows which materials are physically on site.

The concepts behind it

The problem

Thursday, 2:00 p.m., the weekly subcontractor coordination meeting. The project engineer rebuilt the three-week lookahead in a spreadsheet at 11 the night before. It does not show that RFI-114 on the level-6 embed plates has been open with the structural engineer for six days, or that the upper-floor curtain-wall shop drawings must be approved by Friday to hold the fabricator's slot. The drywall foreman planned his crew around a floor that is not yet dried in and framing that is only 80 percent complete. When the owner's representative asks whether building dry-in still holds, the project manager gives a hopeful answer he cannot back up.

What it costs

Trades stack on top of each other, float disappears without anyone deciding to spend it, rework creeps in, and the owner's confidence in the schedule erodes one meeting at a time.

How the products work together

PlanMagnet holds milestones, dependencies and the critical path, and its lookahead and constraint board are designed to show each activity's open constraints beside its bar: RFIs and submittals entered by the project team, crew readiness from CrewFoundry and deliveries from MoveTheWheels. A daily at-risk sweep is designed to flag activities that threaten a milestone and state why; a person decides whether to raise a risk. Each night a FluidGrids workflow is designed to copy RFI responses, submittal comments and meeting minutes filed against PlanMagnet activities into the Botlit project knowledge base. In the meeting, the project manager asks a Botlit assistant what the latest response on RFI-114 says; the answer is designed to come from that library with the passages cited, say so when nothing matches, and link back to the RFI in PlanMagnet. When the team escalates, the RFI constraint takes the new due date.

The outcome it is designed for

The coordination meeting works from one lookahead everyone can see, the design team sees which open RFIs hold which activities, constraints clear before the work starts, and the owner hears a date with its reasons.

The concepts behind it

The problem

Friday, 11:40 a.m., on the culvert job: the wind picks up while an excavator loads trucks, and the dust monitor on the east boundary climbs past the action level in the site's environmental plan. The readings go to a vendor portal nobody has open, so the first anyone hears of it is a call from the municipality after a neighbor complains. That afternoon it rains and turbidity at the sediment basin outlet rises, but the site engineer only sees it when she downloads the logger on Monday. Meanwhile the week's toolbox talk on dust control reached one of three crews.

What it costs

Complaints, the risk of a stop-work order and strained relationships with neighbors and the municipality, plus an evidence trail pieced together after the fact instead of as it happened.

How the products work together

EcoImpactHub is designed to hold each job as a monitored site with its sensors, with the action levels from the contractor's own environmental plan set as thresholds, and to check every dust, noise and turbidity reading as it arrives. A breach, with the triage view designed to separate it from a likely sensor fault, is designed to reach FluidGrids by webhook, and FluidGrids notifies the site supervisor and the environmental lead in their channel and opens a follow-up task. The supervisor asks a Botlit assistant what the plan says at that action level, and it is designed to return the relevant section of the contractor's own plan, cited. CrewFoundry posts the dust-control toolbox talk to every crew on the job, and each foreman is designed to record attendance after delivering it. The products surface readings and plans; decisions on site stay with the responsible people.

The outcome it is designed for

The site team hears about a breach from the monitor rather than the municipality, the response is logged as it happens, and every crew receives the same toolbox talk.

The concepts behind it

The problem

It is the last Friday of the month and the operations director is assembling the report for fourteen active jobs: schedule variance, cost-to-complete exposure, equipment utilization, open safety actions and crew overtime. The numbers live in scheduling files, the equipment manager's workbook, payroll exports and a drawer of delivery tickets. This month a county owner has added a question: how much embodied carbon is in the concrete, precast and rebar on their culvert job so far, and how much diesel has the site burned? Nobody can answer without a week of reconciliation.

What it costs

Leaders make portfolio calls on numbers that are already stale, project teams lose days to reporting, and requests for carbon data are answered with estimates nobody can trace.

How the products work together

FluidGrids pipelines are designed to pull the month's field records, from lookahead status and crew overtime to AssetHandler hour meters and idle days and MoveTheWheels delivered quantities, and end each run in a datasink that feeds BigConsole. BigConsole is designed to assemble a governed portfolio console by job and region, and its Explain panel, on the roadmap, is designed to state what changed this month with each finding cited to the data behind it. EcoImpactHub is designed to build each project's carbon view from the delivered quantities and the diesel logged against each machine in AssetHandler, applying sourced emission factors line by line, and a FluidGrids pipeline is designed to carry the project totals into a BigConsole datasink.

The outcome it is designed for

The monthly report starts from a live console, each number can be traced to its source, and the owner's carbon question gets an answer with the evidence attached.

The concepts behind it

How it fits together

How the jobsite workspace fits together

Follow one week of work from the lookahead to the owner report. Each step is one product doing one job and handing something concrete to the next: a crew list, a transfer request, a delivery ticket, an alert or a dataset.

  1. To CrewFoundry: Crew requirements per activity, weighed against real capacity and skills through the PlanMagnet and CrewFoundry integration.

  2. To AssetHandler: The qualified operator assigned to each machine booked for the activity.

  3. To MoveTheWheels: A lowboy transfer request for a machine moving between sites.

  4. To EcoImpactHub: Delivered quantities of concrete, precast, rebar and aggregates, designed to flow into the project's carbon view.

  5. To FluidGrids: Threshold breaches sent by webhook, plus project carbon totals for reporting.

  6. To BigConsole: Datasinks carrying lookahead, crew, equipment, delivery and site data.

  7. To Botlit: Console figures a Botlit agent can query on a project executive's behalf.

Step 1 of 8: Plan the lookahead

Products in this solution

What each product brings

  • PlanMagnet

    Lookahead, milestones and constraints

    Holds milestones, dependencies and critical path, weighs the plan against real crew capacity through its CrewFoundry integration, and is designed to carry a three-week lookahead with a daily at-risk sweep that states its reasons.

  • CrewFoundry

    Crews, certifications and resourcing

    One profile for employees, contractors and field crew with skills, learning certificates, timesheets and resourcing, built for project-driven and field organizations, with trade-card tracking and field-crew rosters on its roadmap.

  • AssetHandler

    Equipment register, maintenance and utilization

    Tracks equipment with custody, hour-meter and calendar maintenance, work orders, depreciation and repair-or-replace evidence, and is designed to cover rented machines and connected-sensor readings.

  • MoveTheWheels

    Deliveries and the contractor's own trucks

    Turns deliveries into tracked orders with exceptions, a mobile app designed for photo-and-signature proof of delivery at the gate, warehouse and stock records, and trucks and drivers in view for machine moves.

  • EcoImpactHub

    Site monitoring and project carbon

    Keeps each site's sensors against configurable thresholds, with a triage view designed to separate real breaches from sensor faults, and a Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon ledger with sourced emission factors for materials and diesel.

  • FluidGrids

    Automation between the products

    Routes alerts, reminders and exceptions between products on schedules and webhooks, and its datasinks feed BigConsole so portfolio reporting runs on live field data.

  • BigConsole

    Portfolio console and reporting

    Is designed to assemble governed consoles per job and region from FluidGrids datasinks, with threshold alerts and an Explain panel that cites the data behind each finding on its roadmap.

  • Botlit

    Grounded answers for field and office

    Is designed to answer from the project's own RFIs, specifications and plans with cited passages; its channel connectors cover Slack, Teams and WhatsApp, and its agents can query dashboards and trigger workflows.

    Visit BotlitAll concepts

One platform underneath: Burdenoff Workspaces

All eight products run on Burdenoff Workspaces: one sign-on for office and field staff, role-based access designed so a subcontractor can be limited to its own crews and deliveries, one audit trail across every change, and one bill for the products a contractor chooses.

Concept gallery

Every concept in this solution

15 concepts from 8 products. Each one links to its own page on the product's website, and every view has a link you can share.

Pitch kit

The Construction solution in one minute

Contractors lose days in the gaps between the schedule, the crews, the machines and the deliveries. Burdenoff brings PlanMagnet, CrewFoundry, AssetHandler, MoveTheWheels and EcoImpactHub onto one workspace, with FluidGrids routing the hand-offs, BigConsole reporting across the portfolio and Botlit answering from your own project documents. The three-week lookahead can see whether each activity really has its crew, machine and materials, while there is still time to act.

  • A crew readiness board that flags expired cards and double-booked operators days before the pour
  • Equipment by site with hour meters, idle days and service due, and transfers booked on your own trucks
  • Deliveries booked into gate and crane slots, with proof of delivery clearing lookahead constraints
  • Dust and turbidity readings checked against your plan's action levels and routed to the right people
  • A portfolio console and project carbon view built from field data, each figure traceable to its source
Email it

Questions

Frequently asked

Does this replace our scheduling software or our ERP?

It is designed to sit alongside them. PlanMagnet can hold the lookahead and constraints the field works from while the master schedule and accounting stay where they are, and FluidGrids connectors are designed to move data between those systems and the Burdenoff products so nobody re-keys it. Which systems stay and which consolidate is each contractor's decision.

Can subcontractors use it without seeing our other jobs?

Burdenoff Workspaces provides role-based access, and the products are designed so a subcontractor coordinator can be limited to their own crews' records, bookings and deliveries without seeing other trades, other jobs or financial data. Every change is recorded in one audit trail.

Does the platform decide whether a site is safe or compliant?

No. The products surface information: card expiry dates, failed pre-shift inspections, sensor readings against the action levels you set and the text of your own plans. Decisions about work on site stay with your competent and responsible people, and nothing here certifies compliance with any regulation or permit.

Do field crews need a laptop?

No. The gate check, the pre-shift inspection and the proof of delivery at the gate are designed for phones, and Botlit is designed to answer questions on the messaging channels crews already use. The office works from the web apps on the same records.

Where would embodied-carbon figures come from?

The project carbon view is designed to use the quantities on your delivery tickets and the diesel recorded against your equipment, multiplied by emission factors you choose and source, such as supplier product declarations or published averages. Each line keeps its source so a reviewer can trace it. It supports your reporting; it is not a certification.

Is all of this available today?

The products are early and pre-launch, and this page describes a solution concept: how they are designed to work together for contractors and engineering firms. Every surface on this page is a concept. Some build on capabilities already in development, and others, such as the crew readiness board, gate-slot booking and the project carbon view, are new. We are glad to walk through what exists now and what is planned.

Related domains

All domains

Want to explore this for your organization?

Tell us about your setup. We will walk you through the products involved and scope a pilot around the challenge that hurts most.

This is a solution concept: it shows how Burdenoff products are designed to work together in this industry. The images are illustrations of the concepts, not screenshots of the actual products, and every name and figure in them is sample data.