News, Tips and Insights from Riskcast Solutions

Construction Executive: Employee Empowerment Versus Happiness: How the Right Tools Can Help Contractors Succeed

The construction industry is known as being a field that inspires passion from those in it—and yet it is also known for its sometimes overly machismo resistance to sharing or acknowledging “feelings.” You’ll have a hard time finding a carpenter, welder or engineer that doesn’t have a few projects they’re proud to point out at any opportunity. At the same time, they’ll also have a laundry list of frustrations that accompany their jobs, including the paperwork they have to do, how they are managed by “the office” or how projects are viewed as either winners or losers while the daily challenges and victories go unappreciated.‍‍

Employee empowerment, construction industry, job satisfaction

Podcast: Constructed Futures: Capturing Real-time Job Costs With Riskcast

After years in construction jobsites, Alec Thomson and his partner Reggie Arichabala created Riskcast to make collecting an analyzing jobsite data easy and useful. Alec walks us through his team's relentless drive to make the software easier, more intuitive and more useful for project teams in the field, and in the office.

Job Costs, Real Time Data, Job Analytics

Riskcast Customer Spotlight: Bowen & Kron

For Riskcast’s April Customer highlight, we are excited to celebrate the team at Bowen & Kron Enterprises, Inc. Bowen & Kron is a site development contractor with specialties in mass earthwork, structural demolition and land clearing. They’ve been around for nearly 3 decades and primarily service the Baltimore-Washington metro area.

Women in Construction [Technology]: Meet the Women of Riskcast

Welcome to the final installment of the Riskcast #WomenInConstruction Week Blog Series! We simply couldn’t close out the week without acknowledging two of our own teammates who are regular contributors to our product, our clients, and our industry. If you are already working with us, you’ve undoubtedly already crossed paths with Chantel Columna, our Customer Success Lead, and Jennifer Brown, our Solutions Specialist. If not, let this be a formal invitation to get to know us, if for no other reason than because these two construction pros are worth knowing!

Women in Construction Week: In the Field or in the Office, Women Get It Done.

As Women in Construction Week continues, we wanted to dive a bit deeper with two more women who are on the ground and in the office helping teams get projects done! Janet Maiden, a Payroll Manager for Bjork Construction Company, Inc. shared with us how she came upon a career in construction (spanning over 2 decades) by accident after some time off as a stay-at-home mom. Gabrielle Robitaille shared how she worked her way up from administrative assistant, earning her A.A.S in Architectural and Engineering Drafting and getting experience in the field before landing as the Construction Technology Manager with Alberici.

Women in Construction: Spotlight on Jean Bjork

Happy Women in Construction Week! At Riskcast, we are proud to work with a ton of talented, smart, strong women in the construction industry, including several of our customers and team members. These are not just women in construction, but these are the women building your communities right in front of you! They are experts in architecture, design, engineering, project management, technology and so much more.

ABC Tech Alliance: Does Your Construction Technology Team have a Delivery Strategy

As part of the ABC Tech Alliance, we are proud to engage in educational content for ABC membership. If you are considering bringing on a construction technology solution, you should check out our latest piece on why you should choose a construction technology platform with a Delivery Strategy - and how it will help you create long term value for your team:

Riskcast Customer Spotlight: Transit Construction Corp

Back in August 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, Riskcast welcomed Transit Construction Corp. to our family of clients! They have deployed the Riskcast platform as they work to replace 2 precast concrete culverts for the Town of Yorktown in the State of New York.

Riskcast Customer Spotlight: Rockforce Construction

Next month Riskcast is celebrating our 2 year anniversary with our friends and partners at Rockforce Construction, an elite ground-down infrastructure company headquartered in Southern California.

Riskcast Solutions Joins Associated Builders and Contractors’ Inaugural Tech Alliance

Riskcast Solutions today announced it is an inaugural member of the Associated Builders and Contractors Tech Alliance—a consortium of firms that create construction technology and innovative digital solutions that can bring value to ABC contractor members, the majority of which are classified as small and mid-sized businesses and primarily perform work in the industrial and commercial sectors.

Year in Review

One year ago, Reggie and I stood on the Demo Day stage at the Audible Innovation Cathedral with our friends from NVP Labs (Newark Venture Partners’ accelerator program). We addressed an audience of approximately 400 people - investors, elected officials, potential clients, and the Newark community - and we told them Riskcast is the future of construction. “We are software for hardhats!”

Riskcast Solutions Now Available On Mobile

Riskcast’s suite of tools can now be accessed from your mobile phone - including both iPhone or Android.

Riskcast Solutions Launches Contact Tracing Tool

Riskcast Solutions today announced the launch of its new contact tracing tool. The tool uses data within the platform’s timecards to allow employers to identify an employee that might have been diagnosed or suspects illness, and visually capture which other crew members they have been in contact with each day. Employers can now ‘look’ back in time and see all the likely points of contact by work activity and on the project, as each connection leads to other possible webs of connections.

ENR: Riskcast Adds T&M Tracking, Coronavirus Contact Tracing

Construction apps for field data entry often find themselves competing with pens and clipboards. Looking to speed up another old-fashioned process, software maker Riskcast is expanding its time card management app with time and materials tracking—processes that can involve considerable manual paperwork.

Riskcast Solutions Launches T&M Module To Expedite Construction Jobs During and Post Coronavirus Pandemic

Riskcast Solutions today announced the launch of a new Time and Materials (T&M) module within its platform, to help subcontractors and general contractors get back to building quickly and efficiently under changing circumstances. With the coronavirus forcing many projects to pause, and pushing others to quick completion - such as temporary hospitals and medical facilities - Riskcast’s T&M module can digitally connect the crews of tradesmen and women with management to ensure fairness, efficiency and productivity.

Construction Junkie: 5 Steps to Developing a Good Data Strategy

With every brick, girder and slab your workers put into place, your firm is unwittingly generating data. Forward-thinking construction firms have realized that harnessing that data can yield an incredibly powerful tool for increasing productivity, raising profits, improving the accuracy of your bids, spotting trouble before it occurs and more. But gathering and using data to improve your business won’t happen on its own. You need to develop a good data strategy, one that ensures that the information is both available and usable. For the uninitiated, this process can seem overwhelming--“Where do I start?”--but in fact, it doesn’t have to be. By laying the groundwork properly, putting some key pieces in place and following a few simple steps you’ll be able to reap the benefits in a very measurable way.

ROI: Riskcast Solutions gets $600K pre-seed round, plans to call Newark home

Riskcast Solutions, a graduate of NVP Labs’ spring 2019 cohort, plans to stay in Newark for the long haul, Alec Thomson, co-founder and CEO, told NJTechWeekly.com in a recent interview. The startup, which specializes in eliminating paper-based processes for the construction industry, recently closed a $600,000 pre-seed convertible note investment round led by Newark Venture Partners. Scopus Ventures, an international early-stage venture capital firm that is headquartered in Los Angeles, also participated in the round, as did two individuals.

Construction Junkie: Riskcast Provides Simple Solution to Get Data from the Field to the Construction Office

There is a lot of data that is gathered by foremen throughout the length of a construction project. These jobsite leaders are on-site every day and can be responsible for many reporting tasks, including daily reports, time sheets collection, toolbox talks, among others. For a lot of companies, all that data gathered comes in many different forms, making it extremely difficult and time consuming to gain any real value from it.

Construction Junkie: Simple Solution to Get Data from the Field to the Construction Office - Video Feature

Specifically focused on trade contractors and self-performing GCs, Riskcast provides a simple, but effective, way for foremen to gather information in the field and communicate it back to the office. Riskcast then formats that data to visually highlight areas of opportunity to the Project Manager.

ROI: Latest NVP cohort shows global tech talent is coming to Newark

Newark’s goal of becoming a national — and international — destination for innovative tech companies may not be that far way. The latest Demo Day at Newark Venture Partners showed just how far the city’s reach has become.

ENR: New App Seeks to Reduce Jobsite Paperwork Headaches

General contractors and specialty trades often struggle to manage time cards and productivity logs. But a new productivity app called Riskcast seeks to track these and other jobsite metrics all in one place.