How a Dallas construction company saves nearly $2 million a year by using hundreds of Apple's iPads
- The Apple iPad seems to making a rebound these days.
- Years ago, Apple began gearing up to sell more iPads to businesses.
- Business Insider talked to one construction company in Dallas that's been buying iPads by the hundreds and saving almost $2 million a year because of them.
- And iPads are just the beginning for this construction company, says the man running that project.
In Apple's earnings earlier this month, the company revealed a remarkable statistic: its fourth consecutive quarter of iPad sales growth. This after 13 consecutive quarters of declining sales stretching back since 2014.
Apple didn't crow and no one seemed to notice. In the quarterly earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned the iPad only a few times, mostly to call out the new models aimed at students. And analysts didn't even ask him a single question about the iPad business.
Back in 2014, the grand plan to save the iPad was to sell more of them to businesses. Apple announced a series of partnerships since then with tech companies like IBM Cisco, Accenture and others. But most of these partnerships focus on bringing iOS apps to enterprises, which could mean using iPhones as much, or more, as iPads.
In fact, the one big enterprise sale Cook highlighted from the quarter on that call was for iPhones: HCA Healthcare announced a plan to deploy 100,000 iPhones across their hospital sites within the next three years.
All of this makes the love of iPads at Rogers-O'Brien Construction unusual these days.
Rogers-O'Brien is a 340-employee construction company based in Dallas and it has reason to love its iPads. The tablets are saving the company an estimated $1.8 million a year, says Todd Wynne, Rogers-O'Brien's director of Applied Technology. Wynne is the person responsible for the iPad project.
"Everyone on the operations staff gets an iPad that comes to work at Rogers O'Brien," Wynne tells us. He's put iPads in the hands of 190 employees, more than half the company, anyone that isn't in the office full-time.
No more paper
Superintendents, project managers and other field workers use the iPads instead of paper. This includes eliminating old-fashioned printed blueprints. Building plans are now stored in the cloud and everyone works off the same always-updated version. So if an architect or engineer makes a change, that change is instantly available, via the iPad, in the field.
The iPad also replaces all sorts of other paper. "Imagine the quantity of documentation to [build] a building. Think about when you buy a TV. It comes with an owner's manual, product description, warranty - now imagine the same documentation for every component in a building," Wynne says.
Rogers-O'Brien has been using iPads in the field for about five years. Prior to using iPads, the company was spending $10,000 on average in printing costs on every project.
All that paper was costing the company money in other ways, too. Every time someone needed to reference something from a piece of paper, hey had to walk back to the trailer and look up the information.
All told, the iPad has saved the company nearly 55,000 hours of people's time, Wynne said.
Using iPads for five years
Wynne brought iPads into Rogers-O'Brien about five years ago.
Over the past five years, he's bought about 300 iPads, he said. In the early days, he was buying them from the local Apple store, 10 to 50 at a time, with no special discounts or support from Apple.
"What support we had, we were doing it all ourselves," he recalls. The Apple store manager took notice of Wynne's unusual appetite for iPads, asked him what he was up to and then asked him to come in and start teaching seminars at the Apple Store to other businesses about using iPads in their businesses, he says.
Today Apple does have a program for enterprises, called Apple for Business, which helps businesses get help in buying and managing large volumes of devices. Although Apple doesn't talk much about this program, Apple does employ some number of classic enterprise sales people, support engineers and the like. This wasn't a traditionally strong area for Apple, as the company has always been more focused on consumers as customers, rather than companies.
Why not Microsoft Surface?
Back when Wynne bought the first iPads, Windows tablets weren't really a thing yet and there was no Microsoft Surface.
Today the Surface is a popular tablet for businesses, and Rogers-O'Brien had given them a trial in the field.
In fact the company prefers Windows PCs for the folks that work at corporate desk jobs, he said. But the iPad remains its tool of choice for those in the field for one main reason: battery life.
"We love Microsoft," Wynne says. "But we are desk-less users in the field. An iPad can last a couple of days versus 8-10 hours [for PC tablets]." On top of that, an iPad with cellular connectivity costs about $300 versus a tough-screen PC with LTE that costs closer to $1,500.
Wynne also says that iPads and cloud computing are "just the beginning."
The company also owns a handful of drones, assigns one to each project, and is using them to take photos of construction sites to do real-time mapping and progress reports. Next up, Wynne and his team plan to use AI to analyze those photos to track everything from safety compliance (is everyone wearing their hard hat?) to logistics planning (how much material is on hand and where can be stored?).
"It's crazy to think, before we had the iPad we had paper on every job site, and we were walking back to the trailer to answer a question. Now we have on-demand everything," Wynne said.