The Vienna-based company recently launched in the UK and has revealed that it plans to have around 30 people working in the country to support the industry.

PlanRadar offers a software-as-a-service solution for documentation and communication to help project managers, site managers and inspectors.

Speaking to Development Finance Today, Sander van de Rijdt, managing director at PlanRadar, claimed that around 60–70% of companies worldwide were still working pen-and-paper based.

He also stated that others were importing all of their information — including blueprints, voice recordings and pictures — into huge Excel files, which were then shared via email.

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“In this process, it’s very inefficient, so we put all of that into an application so our customers are just using any kind of tablet [or] smartphone.

“They walk the site [and] if they recognise [something] that they want to track — this can be a defect, a task, progress documentation, anything they [would] like to track — they can directly pin [it] on a digital plan, add all necessary information — like pictures, voice recordings, plan annotations — and then assign it to a certain person, [such as] who should resolve this defect or who should be informed.

“And then the whole collaboration [is] also inside of the system.”

He claimed that current, alternative software solutions were only used by big clients in big projects and involved high costs, whereas PlanRadar charged a monthly licence fee so that SMEs could use it as well.

The company is planning to open offices in up to 12 different countries by the end of the year.