Binni
Fostering a Collaborative, Technology-Driven Approach to Concrete Pours

Concrete pours are undoubtedly one of the most crucial processes in the construction world. It is a task that requires qualified personnel with considerable focus and expertise, and tracking concrete pours is extremely time-consuming and tedious. Most construction teams spend ample time and energy recording, aggregating, and reporting concrete pours rather than investing their efforts in planning the work ahead, ensuring the people’s safety, and controlling quality.

“We are helping people reclaim their time in concrete construction projects,” Alejandro Gomez Rivera, CEO, Binni, proudly states. “Our solutions simplify how teams get up-to-date insights into their work (ahead, in-progress and completed) and offer a new way for those teams to communicate with the others involved in this process.”

Founded in 2019, Binni is a construction technology company that focuses on tracking the value chain of concrete pours. It provides a real-time collaboration platform for frontline construction teams to plan, track, and report their entire pipeline of concrete placements. Frontline construction teams (typically superintendents, field engineers, and QA/QC teams) interact using Binni’s platform to manage their pours (from the look ahead schedule to the last lab test result), ready mix deliveries, rebar, and sensors used in all pours. Within each pour, teams can share relevant work plans, and shop drawings; organize batch plant tickets and, rebar certificates; connect to their temperature sensors suppliers; and report field and lab-quality results. Teams can also, through the aggregated and normalized information, analyze pour rates, reconcile invoices with suppliers, support change orders, perform mix design optimization, and feed project and corporate-wide systems.

“We offer a depth of information on this critical construction activity. To up the ante, we help our clients integrate large amounts of data into their overall project and corporate information systems. Our user interfaces are so clean and simple, it takes users 20 minutes to learn how to perform their roles,” says Gomez Rivera.

“We’re not just about the concrete material, we’re about supporting the process of placing concrete (which includes the concrete material information), from the look-ahead schedule through the last QC test result, and beyond the aggregation of all data for performance analysis and reporting,” says Gomez Rivera. “We are a collaboration platform and we’re removing adoption friction; we don’t limit the number of users. We charge by consumption, by cubic yard of concrete processed through our platform.”

Binni ensures that clients have access to their data at all times—to be consumed wherever required through an API. They work with clients’ teams, the end consumers of the data within each project, to integrate data into their workflows. Also, as data integrators, the company brings its clients together with their different suppliers. They integrate with ready mix suppliers through QR codes to simplify the transfer of batch and order data. “Clients give us their requirements, and we work with them to create seamless integrations,” explains Gomez Rivera.

We are helping people reclaim their time in concrete construction projects

Binni also incorporates temperature sensors/maturity meters used in pours to provide visibility of this information combined with all other relevant data for the pour. The company then can link BIM model elements, and project management line items with each pour within its platform. Clients can go to their BIM model, select an element, click a button, and immediately get the full as-built history of that pour. “As construction evolves, we see telematics all over the place. We are using it as a part of our solution to add more value for our customers. For example, binni supports tunneling teams by handling thousands of data points per minute on tunnel boring machine projects,” says Gomez Rivera.

While there are project-wide tools (Primavera, Procore, etc., which provide an overview of the hundreds of activities in a project) and ready-mix concrete specific tools (which provide logistic information on the concrete material), Binni covers the white space between them. What makes Binni unique is its ability to provide depth on concrete pours. In the words of Gomez Rivera, “we don’t think of project wide tools as our competitors, we are a complement to them and allow concrete structures to have a fully traceable history. Today, our main competitors are the spreadsheets that companies have created and the legacy processes that they use to manage concrete works. But we’re showing our clients how they can continue using their existing tools with information fed by Binni.”

With such a unique approach, Binni has gained tremendous market traction in a very short span of time. In fact, the company is supporting the concrete and tunneling teams of the Northeast Boundary Tunnel—a ~$600 M tunnel in Washington, DC. In this project, the client manages thousands of cubic yards of concrete each month, consumed in nine different sites along the five miles of the tunnel. Every day, over 70 persons from different teams interact in one way or another with its platform—from notifications to data input to consumers of data. Working with Binni, the client has estimated a saving of 35 management man-hours per week for every ten users. Information is flowing in real-time from the field to the different consumers of data. And they’ve continued using their proprietary tools. There is improved communication between suppliers, subcontractors, owners, independent labs, and within the contractor team. They all have visibility of all the information in real-time.

“We see the need for collaboration amongst the different independent parties, as they do checks and balances. We’re working on a distributed system that allows all parties to share and own the information. The GOAL is to get rid of document control as we know it. We’ll continue working with our clients to help them consume and get the most out of their data,” concludes Gomez Rivera.