I've started looking at software to help with residential construction tasks, i.e. the construction of a single-family house.
My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.
I currently work with a lot of residential construction and repair.
I feel like truss factories could use some help with quality control with machine vision probably. A problem is trusses are built by alcoholic meth heads making minimum wage rather than carpenters on site to save time and money, but then the truss factory has to send out an engineer to fix it on site, usually missing or wrong gang nails or its just out of alignment.
Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day.
Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused.
"Temp laborers could probably use some software to help with tracking hours etc. Typically all the hours are tracked with just the supervisor writing down on a carbon copy how long they worked and gives it to the laborers to take back to their office which is then manually input to the billing system to pay the laborers at the end of the day."
"Keep in mind there's a much larger population of non-smartphone users that only use flipphones in construction especially day labor so any sort of app meant for the workers or laborers to use would just go unused."
Right on the first point, wrong on the second. The app is used by a different crowd - mostly younger, and many newcomer professionals or working holiday visa holders. This crowd doesn't need the daily pay to buy a 12-pack after work, and a cash advance in the morning to get smokes and a bus ticket.
I've used both types of service regularly over the last couple of years to fill in the gaps while I work on my startup.
A friend of mine is a director of a company making equipment (tools and software) for truss manufacturing. He's been doing it for 15+ years, including a stint running their USA subsidiary.
If you'd like an introduction, my contact details are in my profile.
TheEconomist had an article a few years back on software in construction. It was at the time an obvious void but hard to fill. Found it ! https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/08/17/the-constructio... It was actually more about the general lack of productivity.
Having had renovated my 1970s flat, I can confirm it's not a productive industry and I doubt residential sector will suddenly get very productive for the reason you gave : small custom tasks
I wonder if there's a "JIRA" for house-building. One could have predefined tasks or even modules ("garage", "pool", "foundation laying", etc.) for each new house, and tracking issues and final checks would be a bit easier/more organized.
My impression so far is that there's so much variability in what they encounter, that most tasks are best handled ad hoc by experienced tradesmen. But I'm not certain; it's possible that that's just the status quo, not how it needs to be.