How Canvas is empowering drywall workers to build in bold new ways

Canvas is a construction robotics startup that brings together the expert skills of a journeyman with cutting-edge robotics technology to achieve higher quality work, make job sites safer, and improve the places in which we live, work, sleep, and play.

“If we can build in bold new ways, we get to live a better way”

Canvas is reimagining the future of the construction industry by putting better tools in the hands of skilled workers. Canvas, a signatory to its local union, empowers workers to be more productive and free from repetitive, physically taxing, and dangerous tasks — all of which have long been the norm in the drywall industry. It puts human intelligence and skill at the forefront, while gathering, augmenting, and enhancing data to drive continuous learning and precise reporting.

The challenge

Remain focused on core competencies, while building the best solution for the team.

Canvas was looking for an operation and management solution that could easily integrate with their robotic hardware and customized payload, while delivering the data required to track and monitor the efficiency and accuracy of their fleet — no easy task in a dynamic construction environment. Equally important was the ability to put the power in the hands of tradesmen to harness the robot just like any other tool in their kit — extending their expertise and reach (sometimes literally) to complete jobs faster, more consistently, and more safely. Specifically, they were looking for a solution that captures all job data, supports continous improvement, and provides detailed business reporting.

Capture and consolidate all the data

Canvas was looking for a simple way to monitor and manage a fleet of robots located across many different sites. Monitoring status was important — but having a complete view of the job was critical, because it informed how to improve the robot as a tool for workers. This required capturing and combining telemetry data, video data, and independent video capture into one complete view of the job.

Continuously improve quality and efficiency

Canvas wanted a way to investigate issues and review jobs for possible improvements. They needed ways for team members to note key moments for review and collaborate within the context of the data and event. Having a single, consolidated view of the data feeds, site cameras, and notes from the field was essential for enabling the team to resolve issues or enhance the application.

Dashboard with business metrics

Canvas needed a clear view of the work completed, uptime, and success against key benchmarks. This meant tailoring reports to match the critical metrics, KPIs, and SLAs and having them available at a moment’s notice. It was also important that Canvas be able to leverage the granular reporting to objectively establish the expectations of prospective customers and provide data-backed proof at job completion.

The solution

Rich data and insights are at the heart of Canvas’s transformation of the construction industry.

Formant’s data platform captures and enriches data to provide Canvas field workers, engineers, and stakeholders with situational awareness and business insights they require to consistently deliver the highest quality, ensure control over job schedules, and achieve sound unit economics.

Comprehensive view of a job and fleet

Robots produce a lot of data — but finding the right data and rationalizing it is key. Canvas uses Formant’s observability interface as the single-pane-of-glass view of real-time and historical data. The platform captures and joins up the robot telemetry, video, screen capture, and human notes and tags to provide an integrated view of operations. The event-based navigation allows individuals to navigate the data like they would a DVR, rewinding and jumping to an event while maintaining context. Formant makes it easy to augment the data in real-time or upon review, with job tags and notes that align job key phases, and power downstream performance and efficiency metrics.

We evaluated a number of competitive offerings, but Formant was the only one that understood the data insights we needed to help our machine empower our crews.

Regis Vincent— Director of Software at Canvas

Collaborate for continuous improvement

Canvas is always on the lookout for opportunities to improve — in many ways, it’s core to their mission of empowering workers with better tools. Formant’s context-based navigation and customizable tags and notes allow them to quickly review a job and note areas of interest to be reviewed collaboratively. Tagging each job with phrases and key data informs downstream analytics, which provides more granular efficiency and performance reporting. Noting areas of interest triggers a review by an engineer who can quickly see, in context, if there is an issue that needs further investigation or if there is an opportunity to enhance the application or process.

The Formant dashboard is up on the big board; it has been instrumental to exposing success and opportunities both internally and externally.

Maria Telleria, Cofounder and CTO at Canvas

Prove quality and performance

Aggregating and reporting on business metrics and KPIs for a fleet requires a sophisticated analytics platform. Formant’s ability to dynamically aggregate not only the machine but also the human-added tags and annotations provides Canvas with a rich view of key business metrics in real time. This gives the business a snapshot of the overall success based on a set of business metrics and KPIs. And customizing the dashboards provides clear and insightful snapshots into the metrics that mean the most to each organization. The dashboards have become the way that engineering, operations, and stakeholders can monitor the overall performance of a job or the whole fleet.

Being able to quickly review the data and video feeds together makes it easy to flag any interesting moments or events for engineering to investigate.

Maria Telleria, Cofounder and CTO at Canvas

The outcome

Combining machine and human insights to create better outcomes.

Canvas has supercharged its ability to provide better outcomes for workers and customers by collecting, consolidating, and rationalizing data based on key job and performance metrics. Through data aggregation Canvas is able to provide all their stakeholders, field workers, superintendents, engineers, and customers with customized, data-driven measures of success. Formant’s data-centric approach has given Canvas the visibility and insights to grow and delight customers without taking their eyes off performance.

See it in action

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