Orbiseed

Construction Vertical

Problem

The core users of Orbiseed’s construction product are Mechanical Quotation Specialists (MQS). They are highly paid knowledge workers that inspect Mechanical, Plumbing, Electrical, and Fire Protection drawings, review project specifications, and addenda to generate quotations. MQSs are inundated with so much data & noise that it’s increasingly difficult to find important information and a lot of human effort is required to extract key information from very large PDF files that often exceed 1,000 pages. On average, it takes 3.5 hours for an MQS to produce 1 quotation making it very difficult to scale quotation generation in an industry where the first quote to market often wins the business.

Product & Solution

The product demo to the left showcases how Orbiseed automates the generation of quotes for Mechanical Quotation Specialists.

Using AI, Orbiseed is simplifying the quotation process & streamlining the specification process. We are a platform that ties together the complex spec selection, quote prep, and pricing, which provides better exposure to the market, easier pricing maintenance & and faster quote response.

Evolution of the Product

When I joined Orbiseed in January 2020 as a Senior Product Manager, I was tasked with taking Orbiseed’s technology from an idea through to Proof-of-Concept (PoC), development and integration, and commercial launch. Upon the successful PoC demonstration (over 75% AI output accuracy), we had a rough idea of what the product could be like, but I deployed a custom Human-Centered Design process to validate our assumptions, learn what a day in the life of MQS looked like and uncover unknown unknowns in our thinking. With my team, I facilitated over 50 hours of workshops with MQSs and their managers with the intent of creating an automation use case, user personas, a user journey map, and mid-to-hi-fi UI interactive mockups.

These 8 Slides are an example of some of the output that was generated from the 50 hours of workshops with Mechanical Quotation Specialists. The timestamps on the slides represent where this information could be found in our recorded sessions.

One of the key things we learned was about the importance of users needing to verify the AI output which meant we needed to have human-in-the-loop (HITL) interfaces. The success of this exercise allowed us to fully group think through all aspects of the platform. We were able to grow the original idea into a product that was capable of having regular engagement and even integration to core Cash-to-Quote platforms in the construction industry.

Achievements

  • Orbiseed has automated the quotation process & streamlining the specification process resulting in a 95% decrease in the time it takes to produce a quote from 3.5 hours to 10 minutes. Orbiseed’s customers are using these results to boost their quotation capacity without adding staff.

  • 20,000 construction drawings and specification documents are processed by Orbiseed’s AI annually for construction projects across North America.

  • The product has expanded from Mechanical and Plumbing construction drawings to include Electrical construction drawings as well.

Key Learnings

  • Empathy is important when designing solutions that actually work for people.

    • Put simply, it’s to avoid building solutions that no one wants. If you’re building a platform for mechanical quotation specialists, your first month should involve sitting down with mechanical quotation specialists and seeing how they spend their time and what their challenges are. A big part of empathy is the notion of immersing yourself with your customer and understanding their true pain points. When you understand those pains, then you can build solutions that create value.

  • This process taught me how to balance the creation of a complete "perfect world" product while understanding what features are required for a successful MVP in an AI product.

Additional Construction Projects

Orbiseed’s AI Assisted Takeoff

The video on the left is my talk on Emerging Construction Estimating Technology to over 1,000 people at CanBIM in August of 2021.

Orbiseed was advertising their Early Adopter Program for the AI Assisted Takeoff during this event and we secured north of 100 early adopters with this presentation and the accompanying Figma prototype which can be seen below.

Our AI assisted takeoff interactive prototype above was used to gather feedback from the 100+ Early Adopters of our product. Please note that you can expand to full screen by clicking the expand button in the top right corner and that you can use the left and right arrow keys to quickly scroll through the demo.