There is a lot going on at a construction site. Foundations are being poured, pipes laid, beams sawn and adjusted, windows installed – from the shell to the interior fittings, a wide variety of trades are working simultaneously. The site manager is responsible for maintaining an overview. Among other things, it manages schedules, time recording, deliveries and communicates with the trades. All of this often involves a lot of paperwork. So how can this process be digitized? Three young founders from Potsdam and Berlin asked themselves this question and launched koppla, a new software for an old industry. The platform for tradespeople enables control between the office and construction site and brings important data directly to the site manager’s desk in real time.
koppla works across both companies and processes, so that the craftsman’s business next door can work with it just as easily as a large general contractor managing several large construction sites with dozens of subcontractors. Whereas similar software solutions were previously mostly company-internal and focused on sub-steps in the construction process, koppla enables cross-company collaboration throughout the entire construction process. The first step is to create the construction site in the software with all the information and then it’s off to work: the site manager can assign tasks, store plans, times and drawings, and the tradesmen carrying out the work report back work progress, reference photos or even defects via the app.
“The site manager has a digital construction site cockpit hanging in the office or construction container, which is always green at best. It shows the traffic light status of the various subcontractors on the construction site. If they fall behind schedule and the subsequent work steps are therefore delayed, this can be changed to yellow (delay) or even red (alarm). The site manager can then react immediately,” explains Jerome Lange, one of the three founders of koppla. Such an early warning system within the app not only speeds up communication, but can also sustainably improve entire processes on the construction site. An example: It’s Friday evening and the drywall installer is supposed to hang a ceiling. On site, he realizes that the ceiling has not been delivered. He writes his report and hands it in to the site container. But nothing is evaluated before the weekend. On Monday, a team of painters and electricians arrive at the construction site and realize that no ceiling has been installed, so they can neither lay the electrics nor paint the ceiling. With koopla, the app would have sent the drywall installer’s notification directly to the subsequent trades, who would have been able to reschedule their work.
The fact that everything on large construction sites is processed by hand and filed in paper form, numerous delivery bills have to be returned and things can easily get lost in the process gave the founders of koppla the idea in the first place. Co-founder Marco Trippler worked in a trade business himself and was looking for a time-saving and cost-effective way to support day-to-day work with digital communication options. Although 66% of trades businesses in Germany are generally open to digitalization, only around half of them use technologies such as cloud computing, tracking systems, virtual reality or smart software in their everyday work – according to a recent study by Bitkom and the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts.
He teamed up with his two old school friends Lasse Steffen and Jerome Lange, who were still studying at the time, and got started. A tool that initially mainly enabled the quick exchange of images between craftspeople quickly became a communication platform for Craft 4.0. After two months of development, they presented the product at trade fairs and immediately received positive feedback. “In the beginning, we spent a lot of time on implementation and coding. Then we realized that it was best to discuss the features directly with the tradespeople in advance so that they could tell us exactly what they needed and how,” says Jerome Lange. In order to optimize their software, they accompanied tradespeople on their tours: from order runs for locksmiths to the painting company that paints several apartments to the large general contractor that is pushing ahead with the simultaneous construction of 200 apartments. Support came from the Hasso Plattner Institute, the start-up service at the University of Potsdam and the Federal Ministry of Economics in the form of the EXIST grant.
It has only been a year and a half since the idea was born in spring 2019 and koppla was officially founded in April 2020.
More than 30 trade businesses are already represented on the platform across Germany – small family businesses with individual installations as well as large companies with 800 employees and large construction sites.
“In an industry such as the skilled trades, which has a good order situation and is not necessarily dependent on customer acquisition, the argument of saving time has not been very convincing, but the promise of ‘you have less stress’ has,” says Jerome Lange, describing his experience in discussions with customers.
Time recording, document management, reference photos, employee planning, checklists: koppla offers the basic framework for communication and organization, with features that are easy to use.
In future, additional providers will be brought in to make koppla usable for special applications.
Next year, it should also be possible to award contracts using the software.
This makes koppla the only provider in Germany that can map the entire process.
The young start-up team receives impetus and support in the start-up process from the MediaTech Hub Accelerator program, as well as through exchanges with other start-ups and insights into a wide range of media technologies.
After all, drone surveying and virtual reality have long since arrived in construction.
koppla’s vision is to become the digital operating system of the skilled trades sector.
More about the MTH Blog
The media technologies of the future are already being used today – not only in the entertainment sector but in a wide variety of industries. For our MediaTech Hub Potsdam blog, we talk to tech enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and researchers once a month and tell the stories behind their innovative business models, ideas, projects and collaborations.
