When you concentrate on platforms within the building trade, likelihood is the concrete slabs designed to assist metal beams and tall pillars will come first to your thoughts. Munich-based startup Comstruct needs to design a special form of platform for the development trade — a software program platform.
At its core, Comstruct is a procurement platform for building supplies. For big-scale initiatives, processing supplies orders can take a variety of time, as supplies suppliers nonetheless print out supply notes and invoices. Orders are sometimes positioned over the telephone, and it may be troublesome to reconcile invoices and create complete knowledge experiences.
“Today, the procurement process of materials in construction is very analog. You could place a phone call to order 10 cubic meters next Thursday. Then you get a physical delivery note on the site that is then typed out into an Excel sheet,” Comstruct co-founder and CEO, Henric Meinhardt, advised TechCrunch. “And then they’d sometimes send it via post to the headquarters, where they then manually compare invoices to the receipts.”
Every supplies provider might construct its personal app to course of orders, however the issue is that contractors don’t need to cope with 100 completely different apps to get paperwork. That’s the place Comstruct is available in with its platform that may unify these processes.
Comstruct first contacts normal contractors to grasp how they get their supplies, as they often work with myriad suppliers relying on the placement of the development websites and different particular wants.
“We approach those material suppliers. We call them and ask them: how can you share the data? Do you have an EDI interface? Do you have an email where you can forward the information? Do you have a customer portal that we can scrape to find materials? And then we structure the information,” Meinhardt stated.
The startup then makes use of machine studying to combine every provider on its platform. “This technical improvement enabled us to integrate 800 material suppliers over the last two years, which is quite a significant amount already,” Meinhardt stated.
On prime of this knowledge layer, Comstruct has constructed 4 modules round ordering, digital supply receipts, bill reconciliation and ESG reporting. The startup runs on a usage-based pricing mannequin with a easy per-document pricing technique.
“With the [Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive] in Europe, [contractors] need to report how much material went into construction projects. Until now, they didn’t know how much concrete they used […] that’s a number they didn’t have,” Meinhardt stated.
Comstruct competes with Kojo within the U.S. and Qflow within the U.Ok, however every competitor has its personal positioning. In response to Meinhardt, Kojo “focuses a lot more on the procurement side,” whereas Qflow “focuses a lot on waste management.”
The corporate initially began working in Switzerland as a result of Meinhardt studied there. Comstruct claims that it already has good protection of the supplies trade in that nation, and it has 70% to 80% of requested suppliers on its platform already. The corporate is at present increasing to Germany, Austria and different European nations relying on building initiatives.
Some large-scale building websites have used Comstruct already to handle building supplies, together with a number of tunnel initiatives, a freeway undertaking in Stockholm and an enormous prepare undertaking in Munich. As an example, the Gotthard Tunnel undertaking in Switzerland (pictured under) depends on Comstruct to deal with all supply notes and hyperlink them to invoices.
