Ultimate list of LetsBuild QHSE 2020 product updates (APROPLAN)

After a challenging year, not only for construction but for the entire world, Christmas is finally just around the corner. But before we say goodbye to 2020, we want to tell you a story. It’s a two-part story that involves construction sites, lots of hard work, a fair share of coding and plenty of optimism for the future.

Yes, you’ve guessed it right! We have prepared for you a detailed roundup of our 2020 product highlights.

The first stop on our journey is APROPLAN, LetsBuild’s QHSE app. Over the last twelve months, we have done our best to improve it and provide you with new exciting features that allow you to digitise and automate your quality and safety processes. So that you can reduce downtime and finish your projects faster with compromising quality.

Without further ado, here is everything you need to know about LetsBuild’s APROPLAN application as we enter 2021:

APROPLAN – GenieBelt: Connected under the same colours

In the beginning of 2019, APROPLAN and GenieBelt merged into one company to form the construction software company of tomorrow and connect the industry by fully digitalising the construction phase.

Read also: Best of 2020 – Product highlights for LetsBuild’s progress and planning app (GenieBelt)

In these last two years, we have worked hard to create a strong link between our two applications and bring a unified experience to our users. This reflects on our new, joint colours but, more importantly, on the fact that APROPLAN forms can now be attached to GenieBelt tasks.

That’s extremely powerful, as you can now plan and enforce form-based quality controls on specific tasks, allowing you to resolve non conformities as you go and avoid costly surprises during handovers.

COVID-19 checklists and dashboards to restart your construction projects

The COVID-19 outbreak has forced many of you to temporarily shut down construction sites to guarantee everyone’s safety.

In an effort to support you during these difficult times, our customer success team provided LetsBuild users with certified COVID-19 checklists and dashboards so that QHSE and project managers can monitor remotely which sites reopen faster and safer.

You can learn more about our COVID-19 checklists just by clicking below:

New customisable reports at your fingertips

Reporting on-site activities and progress was never easier. Until recently, you could build your reports by relying only on LetsBuild’s library of pre-made construction report templates. Good as they are, they couldn’t give you the full flexibility that you sometimes want.

But that’s not the case anymore! You can now customise your reports as you wish and share them with your teams in just a few clicks. Free yourself from template limitations and tailor reports to the needs of your projects.

PowerBI and SharePoint integrations speed up your processes

Construction software solutions should help you complete tasks faster and more easily. But you probably know the struggles of working with multiple applications and manually copy-pasting, moving or updating information from one to another.

LetsBuild gives you now the opportunity to power up your daily work by connecting LetsBuild APROPLAN to your existing Microsoft 365 apps.

Our PowerBI and SharePoint integrations allow you to get rid of unnecessary admin burden, avoid data loss, and finish tasks faster. Using a data mart built only for your projects, you will now be able to:

• Automatically create a project in LetsBuild from Dynamics NAV
• Link SharePoint to LetsBuild
• Synchronise your documents with LetsBuild
• Create reports and dashboards with data stored in LetsBuild
• And more…

Spend less time moving information between different digital tools – and more time building!

You can now manage your forms faster and easier

Improving your experience with using forms on APROPLAN is another area where we have dedicated a lot of our attention this year. Thanks to our latest changes, you can now organise your forms much more efficiently and save valuable time.

More specifically, you can take advantage of the following benefits (available both on Desktop and Mobile):

• Tags in form templates: Create tags to categorise your forms in the way you want. Simply tag your forms and filter them according to your preferences. Like that, you can now access the right form at the push of a button and even link them to your dashboards.
• Prefilled answers in forms: Add predefined answers when you create your form template. In that way, you can help your teams save time when they’re working on repetitive task checks on site. Instead of checking 40 times N/A, they will now be able to pre-define a “Not controlled” option selected by default, so they can finalise the form with just filling the relevant questions.
• Localise points (tasks) at the same place as the form: When a user creates a point from a form located on a plan, this point will be automatically placed in the same location as the form. This facilitates the link between points and forms and allows you to save time and locate points on the plan much more effectively.
• Report of multiple forms: You can now create a report that includes the answers of several forms instead of printing the forms individually. Thanks to this new feature, as a project manager you can now give site teams a quick 1-2 page overview of what is going on across all forms selected in the report.
• Fill forms directly after creation: When producing a form, you can now easily fill it right after its creation. No need to browse through all the other already existing forms anymore. Save time and avoid getting lost when you have to create several forms in a row.
• See attachments on form details: Just like points, a form can be linked to one or more drawings, but can also contain pictures. It is, therefore, important that they are also visible on the form details screen! Locate more easily to which plans the forms are attached and your form details screen much more informative.
• Drawings attached to form: When creating points from a form question, you have now the option to select documents that are already attached to the form. This can save you from a lot of frustration and the need to search in documents for the plan in question.

Custom fields are finally here!

Just before the end of 2020, an exciting new feature was introduced on APROPLAN: Custom fields!

Custom fields are new and flexible metadata that you can assign to points and that can help you standardise your point filtering. Create multiple custom fields according to your needs, and see them becoming instantly available in all points across your project.

But that’s not all! Take full advantage of them by filtering tasks according to the content of one or more custom fields at the same time.

Before you go on and try custom fields yourself, here are some typical examples of how to use our new feature:

Priority or Importance

Thanks to custom fields, you can add a new dimension to your points: Priority. Let’s imagine that you want to assign a priority to certain points. You can create a “Priority” custom field with the following values: “Critical, High, Medium, Low”.

The on-site team then will be able to assign any of these values when creating points so that stakeholders can easily filter high and critical points to ensure that they are fixed as soon as possible.

Cost impact

Create a “Budget” or “Cost” custom field with the following values: “High, Medium, Low”, “€0-1k, €1-3k, €3k+” or simply “$$$, $$, $”; you decide! Have your team classify points in relation to their overall cost, and see at a glance which tasks require the most financial resources.

Project Phase

On large projects with many different stages, adding a “project phase” dimension allows a new segmentation according to the progress of the project.

By creating a “Project phase” custom field – you will be able to classify your points according to the phase your project is in. The example we often use is “Design, Planning, Execution, Handover, Facility Management…”

And, as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. We want to help you succeed!

Building a faster, safer and more scalable backend

Last but not least, the increasing number of LetsBuild customers and larger scope of deployments is leading our engineering teams to work continuously behind the scenes at fixing bugs and at bringing you an even safer, faster and more reliable service than before.

You are now also able to check and monitor service availability on status.letsbuild.com

Make your product feature wishes for 2021!

Despite all challenges, 2020 has been a year of great progress for LetsBuild, for our applications and for our customers who are accelerating their new way of work due to the global context.

But we can’t stop here! Before you go, make sure that you read the second part of our product story just by clicking here.

As this year is slowly coming to an end, we want to thank you for your valuable feedback all these years and invite you to send our product team your own feature improvement wishes and suggestions for 2021! We read each feedback, perhaps ask you for more details, and include them in our roadmap if they are aligned with our priorities.

You can do it just by clicking on the button below:

From the entire LetsBuild team, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! ‍♀️