Building contractors live with two clocks. Tendering, the drawing office and finance sit at fixed desks year after year, whereas each site springs up the week a tender is won and dismantled once the keys are handed over. The site manager in the welfare cabin wants the latest issued drawing on a tablet; the designer rotates a BIM model weighing several gigabytes; meanwhile the quantity surveyor works through the popis del (bill of quantities), the cost plan and each month's gradbena situacija (interim valuation); while subcontractor crews rotate with each phase of the build. Apply pulls this into one coherent IT environment and operates it remotely, end to end. None of our engineers will ever need site boots.
Five fronts, three of them back at head office and the drawing office, two out on the job. Hardware in the cabin takes a labourer or the site sparky a few minutes to plug in; the rest is configured remotely.
Using SharePoint or whichever project platform you already have, each job receives an identical folder template, version tracking and job-specific permissions for drawings, quantities and cost plans, monthly valuations, the gradbeni dnevnik (site diary), minutes, the programme and health and safety records. USB sticks crammed with drawings and private folders hastily shared late at night ahead of a submission disappear from your routine.
Revit, Archicad and Tekla models, or a combined IFC, simply weigh too much for a cellular connection. With a hosted desktop or a viewer in the browser, only the picture on screen is transmitted, and the master file never leaves its backed-up store. Those desktops also earn their keep on lengthy runs, like a structural or thermal model that must be rerun on three separate days in a single week after a glazing change.
Guest accounts in Microsoft 365, each confined to one job, protected by two-step login and timed to lapse at handover. The mechanics of automatic expiry depend on your licences, so we settle on whatever demonstrably works in your tenant. The communal password written in marker pen beside the cabin door is retired for good.
You order a 4G or 5G router through your mobile operator. Its configuration is loaded remotely before it ever leaves head office, so on arrival someone simply powers it up; in a poor coverage area the external aerial goes on the cabin roof. From our end we then activate an encrypted tunnel to head office, filtering of web content and monitoring of the line.
Tablets and laptops are enrolled in a management service, which is Intune where your Microsoft 365 plan includes it. Site managers log in with their company identity and immediately see drawings, mail and the programme. Laptops used for signing valuations and records with a qualified digital certificate come with smart card reader drivers installed. Leave a tablet on a scaffold board and we lock and wipe it the minute it finds a signal.
Jobs last anything from a season to several years. Site IT must be as quick to set up and strip out as the cabin itself.
Hours vanish when people open drawings straight across a flaky connection. Opening them takes ages, and losing the signal mid-save may leave the file damaged. Through a virtual desktop or online viewer only the image is transmitted, while the source stays intact in the job's project area, tagged with its revision and author. Picture a contractor from Murska Sobota with four jobs on the go: the site manager in a cabin beside the bypass views the model just as crisply as the designer back in town.
It ships preconfigured, so all that remains is power and, where necessary, mounting the aerial. A site manager or electrician manages that with a single-page instruction sheet, after which we enable the tunnel, filtering and monitoring. We make no site visits, but an engineer stays on video throughout so nobody is left guessing.
Producing the model or writing a BIM execution plan is not our role; the technical platform underneath is not. That means a common data environment where models and issued drawings stay organised, sufficiently powerful workstations or hosted desktops, and tidy access rights for external designers. Where handover must be in IFC, we also confirm the export reaches its destination with nothing lost.
Not automatically. If big renders crop up only a few times monthly, renting cloud graphics power per hour and keeping everyone on standard laptops may cost less. Before any purchase we model both routes on your team's real usage, for example at a six-person architecture studio in Kranj.
Use one project area where the current issue always heads the list. Older issues can still be found, though only by going into the version history on purpose. Habit matters as much as tooling here, so we agree a naming convention with you plus a sign-off and issue procedure for every new revision.
By consolidating them per job: one folder for each monthly valuation, approved versions locked, and an edit history naming who altered what. Where your estimating software relies on a database, we also take over the server it runs on and its backups. When the employer or supervising engineer queries an earlier month, the answer is two clicks away rather than buried in an inbox.
We switch them off on the date you set, automatically or during the next scheduled review of access, depending on licensing. Should snagging during the defects period require access again, reinstating it is quick. Every sign-in and file access is logged, and the retention of those records depends on your subscription. Asked who opened a given file, you can reply with an exported report rather than a guess.
Certainly. A ten-person firm with two concurrent jobs and one CAD seat is well served by the Start plan: from €450 per month plus VAT, for up to 10 users. Additional work is billed at €50 per hour plus VAT. Plenty of firms start small and sort out only their project documentation in phase one.
How many jobs run in parallel, which tools does your drawing office use for CAD and quantities, and how do drawings get to site today? Within one working day we will propose a set-up for head office and the sites.
Enquiry received
An engineer will write back no later than the following working day. Faults that leave your staff unable to work are always looked at first.
No town by that name here. Check the letters, or settle for the nearest larger place. Our engineers work only over the internet, so Kočevje and Koper get precisely the same treatment.
