Touchplan

Innovation—the new constant that drives growth in today’s competitive world—moves rapidly, making it challenging for construction companies to keep up. As the number of construction activities surges around the globe, field teams, architects, planners, engineers, and stakeholders strive to explore new solutions to stay competent in this dynamic domain. Recognizing the need to navigate through this changing landscape was Michael Carr, the co-founder of MOCA Systems. Carr’s journey in the construction industry led him to the conclusion that construction teams, tools, and their project plans were stuck in the past. Carr leveraged his nearly two decades of construction management and project controls expertise to help construction teams cope with the pace of advancement, laying the foundation for Touchplan.

Touchplan is an affiliate of MOCA Systems guided by a mission to digitize the construction process, and serve field teams, planners, and stakeholders through an accessible-anywhere, user-friendly, web-based system. The award-winning software promotes construction collaboration through the Last Planner® System, a Lean construction methodology that helps project teams structure their processes to maximize efficiency. Touchplan’s construction software solution enables architects, engineers and project teams at trade partners and general contractors to plan better, build faster, and finish well ahead of their deadlines. “Touchplan enables project teams to work more collaboratively and foster better relationships with all stakeholders, leading to higher-quality work, a better project experience, and a higher chance of repeat business,” says Jen Nussinow, director of marketing, Touchplan.

Users leverage Touchplan to build a high-level milestone plan of a construction project together. The tool then takes those plans and instantly converts them into a weekly work plan and future look-ahead schedule. These plans allow teams to anticipate work coming up, optimize resources and identify opportunities for improvement. “By having the teams enter basic data together, like the manpower and time needed for task completion, you can increase clarity and collaboration across the entire construction project. This is supported by digital sticky notes of different colors that represent the actual teams in charge of each task,” explains Nussinow. By boosting efficiency, Touchplan helps users combat long-standing industry predicaments such as an increasing labor shortage, project complexity, tight timelines, and lack of ownership. Taking functionalities up a notch, Touchplan plans to introduce an interactive dashboard and a mobile version of the app soon so that project teams can update statuses in real time and share information even more flexibly.

Touchplan’s core strength is the simplicity of its solution, which draws upon a highly-skilled team of software engineers and construction professionals, including former project managers and superintendents. With a diverse background complemented by rich consulting experience in commercial construction, the team at Touchplan leverages its expertise and works collaboratively to shape the construction industry of tomorrow. The team maintains an experimental mindset and a thirst for continuous innovation. As Nussinow puts it, “We have small but mighty teams. From product and customer success to marketing and sales, we work together to better understand and articulate the industry pain points, and create and manage tools to solve them.”

The efficiency Touchplan enables makes a critical difference to project outcomes. One of Touchplan’s clients took on a healthcare project at one of metro Boston’s premier medical facilities to relocate its general internal medicine department through a fit-out of a nearby office building. There was a fixed deadline and the project had to be executed in the midst of a functioning hospital and an occupied office building while minimizing disturbance to both locations. After a delayed start and a sudden change to the design, the project was at risk of being completed late.

Instead, the project finished five weeks early. The savings totaled four percent of the budgeted cost, which was reallocated to other requests. In addition, the time saved offered the client more opportunities for training, getting supplies and equipment into place, and promotion of the site prior to seeing the first patients. The success of this project paid off in another way: the GC was awarded an additional project at the same facility.

With similar stories reflecting the company’s success, Touchplan continues to learn from its customers through direct feedback from project teams in order to innovate and challenge the industry’s status quo. Five years since its inception, Touchplan has been used on over $22B worth of construction, and has earned the trust of over 100 contractors, 800 global projects, and 15,000 users worldwide— adding more daily.