In any construction or civil engineering activity, before or during its execution, professionals like geologists, geotechnical engineers, builder engineers, architects, civil construction technicians, etc, have to take measures and perform different in situ tests and processes called field work. This activity it is necessary to address construction problems like slope stability, laying foundation, landslides, lining design of tunnels, design of retaining walls, etc. In addition, daily high technical and specific activities, as both, in situ and laboratory tests, are required to obtain physics and mechanical properties of soil and rocks, e.g. Plate Load (PLT), Standard Penetration Test (SPT), Rock Flat jack test, Rock Geotechnical stations and Explanatory Borings for identifying the types of soil at a site. Most of these measures and tests are normalized (Eurocode 7, British Standard, ISO standard, Technical recommendations and other international technical standards).
The process at work field is: first, to take measures in the field, second, at the office, to introduce the data in a computer for processing them and to obtain the needed values and, finally, to elaborate the proper geotechnical engineering assessment that will be collected in a report to be sent to the client. This process is high time consuming (e.g. 1 or 2 days from the end of the tests). Furthermore, geotechnics, has an unpredictable and variable behavior, and therefore, there is a high number of measures to be done in each construction. For example in the construction of a bridge, building large pipes, etc., SPT test will be needed each 2-5 m for designing the foundations. Consequently the time dedicated to these tasks is very high. These measures are important for taking important decisions in the construction, so, to obtain and process them easily and with high quality, will contribute to reduce time and to decrease costs during the construction.
Currently, there are physical tools that support work filed calculations like geotechnical compass, as well as more sophisticated and expensive tools for some specific measures, but it can be stated that at international level, there is not any cost effective solution that supports the technicians in their work field. Therefore, Terrasolum S.A (Terrasolum), proposes as business idea to increase the efficiency of the geologists, geotechnical engineers, builder engineers/technicians, architects, civil engineering technicians’ work field by developing a family of 20 apps (GEOAPPS family) for smartphones and tablets (android and iOS Apple), that automate field data acquisition, geotechnical calculations and generation of geotechnical reports.
GEOAPPs family will provide to their customers with an easy and inexpensive but – still - a high quality and knowledge intensive apps that enables relevant productivity gains while working in the field. With GEOAPPS applications, traditional work process that would normally take around 1 to 2 days (and around 12 working man hours) it can be run in just 1 hour. Some prototypes have been already tested. Four Apps prototypes belonging to the GEOAPPS family developed for Android system and provided in Google Play Store (
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=terrasolum&c=apps(si apre in una nuova finestra)) have demonstrated their feasibility and interest to the market. Some of them had more than 21,000 downloads.
The market need it is clear. In any construction, mining or civil engineering activity, before or during its execution, professionals have to evaluate the soil and rocks mass conditions, taking measures and perform different in situ tests and processes called field work, as well as elaborating geotechnical reports. If professionals could decrease the time for doing the same activities in a cost effective way, they could improve their productivity and obtain bigger profit in their sales. The market, therefore, is global in nature, because it covers the entire world geography, any place where a geotechnical and geoenviromental activity is carried out. Because of the crisis, the European market has decreased (specifically infrastructures, 6%), but still being an important market. For example, in Europe, the construction sector provides 20 million direct jobs, mainly in micro and small enterprises and has a volume of € 750bn. Infrastructures represented roughly around 44% of the construction turnover. Just because of the crisis, the sector is looking for new solutions that increase the productivity. By the other side, in emerging countries, the construction and civil engineering sectors are growing very fast. The Global Construction Perspectives and Oxford Economics released a report showing how the emerging markets will be responsible for 55% of the market share in the construction industry by 2020. At the moment, that percentage is on 46%. In 2012 the number of European enterprises in the construction sector was 3,166,000.
Terrasolum wants to face up this market need. With this aim they have defined a business model that they want to assess and specify in this project. Therefore during the project they will carry out: a deeper analyse of the market, definition of the GEOAPPs family and pricing and marketing strategy.
