Batinfo: Could you introduce us to Procore?
Laurence Charon: Procore was created in 2002 in the United States, after Tooey Courtemanche, the founder and president, noticed while having his house built, that despite the omnipresence of technologies in all other sectors, the field of construction was still mainly based on manual processes. He then had the idea of Procore to help companies save time and therefore profitability and avoid generating immense amounts of waste throughout the industry.
The platform facilitates the collaboration of project teams by effectively connecting project owners, contractors, architects and engineers via a common interface. But it took a few years for technologies like smartphones, tablets and especially wifi to gain prominence on construction sites and allow Procore users to take full advantage of them. From then on, the growth was meteoric.
Building on this success, we began to develop other solutions for our customers and expanded internationally. Now Procore is the world's most widely used construction management software with over 12.000 customers participating in over one million projects in 150 countries.
After 20 years of experience in the United States, Canada, APAC, United Kingdom and MENA, Procore arrives in France as an all-in-one digital solution to support construction professionals in their digital transformation by connecting teams and data to offer them a simple and unique user experience on their project, from tender to delivery.
Batinfo: What are the features that made the Procore app so successful?
Laurence Charon: The Procore platform was created with the objective of being easy to use and intuitive. Every feature we add is developed to provide solutions to real-world problems faced by construction industry professionals on the job site. Our platform is therefore always rooted in the reality of the field to best suit the needs of professionals.
Using our knowledge of the construction industry, Procore helps minimize rework and therefore increase margins, visualizing project performance to quickly identify day-to-day tasks.
The application streamlines communications by connecting the site and the offices because teamwork and communication are essential components to save time and therefore productivity.
The use of Procore on mobile collaboration tools (smartphones, tablets, etc.) facilitates the filling of registers and access to the most recent documents directly on the construction site, even when offline.
To support users from start to finish of their projects, Procore supports tender management, project management functions, quality and safety checks, BIM, statistics generation to clearly visualize productivity construction sites but also the management of finances and invoices.
We also ensure that every user can have access to quality support in case of difficulty and is connected with a qualified person to help them effectively, rather than a robot with generic answers which is probably the last thing with you want to talk to in this kind of situation.
Batinfo: What are the next developments to come?
Laurence Charon: Our main current and future objective remains to improve the daily lives of construction actors by connecting them within our global platform and to continue to facilitate the collaboration of the main actors of a project.
We are also continuing to feed our marketplace, which remains the largest on the market today. We continue to integrate new applications and solutions to meet the future needs and challenges of our users with the help of our partners.