WeatherBuild: Decision Support Solutions for the Construction Industry and Built Environment

Adam Omansky, Co-Founder & CEO

Weather is one of the top three reasons for missed milestones in the construction industry and built environment, with negative impacts costing billions of dollars each year in the U.S. alone. To address this huge problem, WeatherBuild® (weatherbuild.co) offers a suite of decision support solutions that empower contractors, owners, and operators to improve situational awareness and make better-informed decisions about weather events, schedule impacts, and probable outcomes.

Leading contractors, owners, and operators leverage the WeatherBuild Solutions to increase productivity, enhance safety, and manage risk—across a broad spectrum of market sectors and project types, general building, heavy, civil, industrial, transportation, and energy, for example. Further, project and program stakeholders use WeatherBuild Solutions during the full lifecycle of the asset or facility, from construction and commissioning (Cx), to ongoing operations and maintenance (O&M), to shutdowns, turnarounds and outages (STOs), to retrofits and repairs.

WeatherBuild is Co-founded by Adam Omansky and Applied Invention, a multidisciplinary innovation company. Prior to WeatherBuild, Adam was the Co-founder and Vice President of Product Strategy at Vela Systems, the leading field management and field BIM (Building Information Modeling) software company for the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, acquired by Autodesk—now Autodesk BIM 360, Autodesk’s “fastest growing product.”

Applied Invention (AI) is a multidisciplinary innovation company that designs, builds, and develops technology solutions in partnership with leading companies and entrepreneurs. AI is an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists, and artists with skills in mathematics, physics, biology, electronics, mechanics, systems engineering, software development, and industrial design. AI’s projects range from computer vision, database software, data analytics, and high-performance computing to biotechnology, medical devices, robotics, and generally complex systems.

When the customers are on-board, what are features and tools available at their disposal?

WeatherBuild offers a suite of decision support solutions; WeatherBuild Notify, WeatherBuild History and WeatherBuild Enterprise, and the WeatherBuild API for developers to connect with WeatherBuild’s Application Programming Interface and enhance the functionality of partner solutions and internal applications. Given the breadth and depth of the USD 1.2 trillion construction industry, the single largest category of GDP in the US, construction stakeholders face a broad spectrum of challenges and problems when managing weather risks and mitigating schedule impacts.

One of our ENR top construction managers noted to us, “We can’t control the weather, but with WeatherBuild we can take control of its impacts—both threats and opportunities to our project delivery"

Accordingly, WeatherBuild’s suite of decision support solutions includes: WeatherBuild Notify, hyper-local weather risk reports with automated delivery to your project teams; WeatherBuild History, hyper-local weather history reports with claims management tools; and, WeatherBuild Enterprise, custom hyper-local weather risk solution with risk management tools.

Is there an assessment phase involved from WeatherBuild’s end to understand clients’ requirements to provide the best-customized solution?

Yes, the WeatherBuild Enterprise solution is a custom hyper-local weather risk solution with risk management tools, which includes: activities and impacts customizable based on your project-specific requirements; integration with your schedule to enable weather risk probability for each activity; compatibility with Oracle Primavera P6, MS Project and Excel, and many other formats; implementation and integration services with your enterprise solutions; and, 9×5 unlimited support with optional Service-Level Agreement (SLA).

How are the customers able to better optimize their approach to construction after implementing your solutions?

WeatherBuild’s suite of decision support solutions enables leading contractors, owners and operators to improve situational awareness and make better-informed decisions about weather events, schedule impacts and probable outcomes. In the field and on the worksite, project managers, general superintendents and field engineers are now able to evaluate the probability and intensity of numerous weather events, e.g. rain, low temperature, high wind, lightning, etc., hyper-local for each exact project location, and the respective schedule activities, equipment operations and work results at risk of being impacted. For example, a high-intensity wind event can endanger crane operations; a low-intensity rain event can jeopardize iron workers’ safety, a low-temperature event can impact cast-in-place concrete and lightning events can threaten outdoor life-safety.

The objectives of weather risk management are to increase the impact of positive weather events, and decrease the impact of negative weather events in the project. Further, project stakeholders can now identify the optimal “weather windows” during each work week and work shift, and opt to proceed ahead with operations or re-plan the activities, depending on the project team’s weather risk sensitivities and tolerances. When managing weather risk and evaluating both threats and opportunities, decisions are data-driven, based on substantiating data and no longer guesswork.

What does the workforce look like inside WeatherBuild?

WeatherBuild is a cohesive team of experienced technologists and industry experts with strong skills in complex systems that incorporate weather data, machine learning, predictive analytics cloud-web-mobile computing, distributed sensors, data visualization, user experience, business process, and many other areas.

What is the roadmap for WeatherBuild?

WeatherBuild is a market-driven company, synthesizing its strategic vision and product roadmap with market intelligence from real-world customers on real-world projects. Given its success to date in the construction industry and built environment, the company’s focus continues to be on leveraging weather data, machine learning and predictive analytics, enhancing its ground-breaking suite of decision support solutions for weather risk management, and unlocking new value for the leading contractors, owners, and operators.