Product Spotlight: New Observations Experience

High-quality safety observations matter on construction sites more than ever. They act as a real-time indicator of site team engagement, compliance, safety performance, and overall work quality.

When the founders started HammerTech they had one goal in mind: partner with the construction industry to build a platform that would make HammerTech construction sites some of the safest in the world. Ten years on, more than 20,000 project teams worldwide count on HammerTech.

Our reputation as the safety platform of choice for the top EPC, general contractors, and specialty contractors is built on one thing - making safety and site operations easy for site teams, while improving consistency and compliance visibility required by management.

A critical part of any safety program is conducting site walks and recording observations which help both site teams and managers understand how well teams are working to the plan.

To date, many inspection tools and apps don’t make it easy to:

Raise observations quickly
Capture the level of detail needed to quickly resolve issues and to track issue trends
Pre-configure observation workflows by specific work types

HammerTech has just released the biggest overhaul of our Observation and Defect Creation workflows to date – paving the way for a higher-quality and more user-friendly experience designed to help field teams.

Just released:

The all-new Observation and Defect creation experience is here.

Building on the recent observations release, now raising observations and assigning tasks in HammerTech is even easier and faster with field locking, pre-configured priorities, shortcuts to ‘add another’ observation and much more.

Now available on both the web platform and the mobile app (make sure you're updated to the latest version).

Here's What's New with HammerTech Observations:

A whole new look and feel

The new Observation Create interface is faster and easier to use, so issues are flagged sooner.

Capture more Observations, faster

Quickly raise multiple observations without entering the same information over and over.

Resolved Observations

Close out your observations with confidence, and with higher resolution photos, you can guarantee the observation was managed correctly.

Add up to 10 photos with annotation

Empower site teams with the confidence they need to quickly find, capture and fix all issues.

Searchable drop-downs

Instead of endless scrolling, find what you need quickly.

Enhanced Description Field

You can talk faster than you can type. Quickly complete the description with seamless voice-to-text.

Configurable Priority

Ensure your site teams are assigning the correct priority to different observation types.

Reporting

Want to see how your teams are embracing the new create experience? You can now track it in the Observations Dashboard in Insights.

Mobile Support

Prefer to use the app? Need offline capability? Great news—these capabilities are already live in the HammerTech mobile app.

Previously Released Observations Fuctionality:

The new release builds on a foundation all pointing towards the ability to manage defecting within HammerTech. Here are some highlights:

Observation Type in Color

Assign a color for each Observation Type to quickly identify what has been raised and prioritize what is most important.

Shows a screen grab of HammerTech Observations that shows color options to help label and identify the type of observation.

Neutral Classification

Along with Negative and Positive, we've added a third classification, Neutral. This classification is intended for items that still need action but aren't necessarily good or bad, i.e. General Action.

Shows HammerTech's ability to list an observation type with category and classification (Negative, neutral, or positive).

Classification Settings

Select which Classification - Negative, Neutral, or Positive, is allowed against the Observation Type.

Shows part of HammerTech Observations with classification setting "Positive" or "Negative" or "Neutral"

Suggested Priority

Suggest a priority of Low, Medium, High, or Critical for each Observation Type. This will auto-select the priority when the Observation is being raised but allows the selection to be overridden if required.

Shows "Suggested priority" settings, including: Low, Medium, High, and Critical.

Forced Priority

Set a fixed a prioritylevel of Low, Medium, High or Critical for each Observation Type. This will not allow the priority to be changed when the Observation is being raised.

Shows suggested priorities with an optional box to "Force priority"

Reporting Templates

Insights Templates have been updated to support the new Classification type of Neutral

Shows reporting templates inside of HammerTech insights which have been updated to include the new classification type of neutral.

See Product Spotlights and release note for further details here.

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Georgia Bergers

I didn't think there was anything more dynamic than a construction project team until I was encouraged to consider a career in marketing. Following a brilliant 10 years in construction working on major infrastructure programs like the London 2012 Olympics, I'm now a proud marketer for one of the most dynamic companies in construction tech. Of the HammerTech values, authenticity is the most important to me. I'm motivated to create a more equitable industry and built environment that enables people to show up, challenge the status quo and share ideas. Connect with me on LinkedIn if you'd like to nerd out about mega projects, long-distance cycling, how to navigate career changes or marketing.