I have worked as an interior designer, and this profession is closest to my heart. As designers, we work with varied professional teams, product manufacturers, and sellers to build something out of nothing. Financial gains aside, the sheer desire of creating beautiful and functional spaces gives unexplainable joy to us.
While working as a designer, I often had to meet project timelines at the expense of creativity. I hated it when PMC teams chased my folks. We know creative people are often disorganised, hate schedules, and constantly think about designing something amazing. I always wondered how to manage my design practice so that my team could meet tight schedules and spend the maximum time thinking and quality time after work with family and friends. The pandemic made it clear that my team couldn’t be chained to my studio and that it was high time I found a way to manage projects remotely while keeping everyone in the loop.
I began searching for a magical project management tool to help me attain what I wanted. However, I couldn’t zero down to one tool. There were fantastic tools that could solve my problem, but they were expensive, and I needed a dedicated team member to implement and operate them. It was like having a bus that must be driven by a driver. My practice was not so large that it could afford a tool operator and the recurring high subscription cost.
Also, none of the tools could solve every problem my design studio faced. We designers work with our team and multiple engineers, contractors, and product sellers. Hence, I needed a project management tool to manage multiple diverse teams. Project owners don’t employ PMC firms unless a project is sufficiently large. Hence, we, the designers, are usually responsible for managing project timelines.
When I couldn’t find something that satisfied me, I decided to build it. While keeping my creative hat on, I also donned the cap of an innovative guy to create Arkchat.
Looking deeply at our daily activities, I realised that everyone involved in projects spends the most time conversing on the phone, writing, and reading emails and text messages. In essence, we work by communicating with others. That’s when I realised we didn’t need another task management tool; instead, we needed a messaging app to help us manage our day-to-day business operations and projects by sending and receiving messages.
When I delved deeper into the messaging industry, I found that market leaders like Slack are amazing but restricted to messaging. Users must integrate project management/task management tools with their Slack app to manage business operations/projects. While integration eliminates the need to toggle between multiple platforms, users must pay subscriptions for every tool and need tool operators/project managers to use the integrated app. Many of my peers in the design & construction industry use social messaging apps like WhatsApp for business messaging, which is not the best practice. There are many reasons why social messaging apps aren’t ideal for business messaging; we need to deliberate on these separately.
When we started research and development to make messaging more powerful, we realised we needed to find a way to assign, track, and manage tasks and approvals by sending and receiving messages. We concluded that nothing could be better than letting users convert day-to-day messages into tasks and approval requests at the click of a button and making Arkchat powerful enough to give real-time performance analytics. Furthermore, we knew that simply assigning tasks and approvals and tracking their status didn’t make much sense unless users could also view prior conversations about respective tasks and approvals. Since Arkchat converts messages to tasks and approvals, we could easily tag relevant conversations to respective tasks and approvals. This value addition differentiates Arkchat from the currently available project/task management tools. Now, design studios can easily track client approvals. Delays in client approvals are one of the biggest hurdles designers face everyday.
To make Arkchat useful for design and construction projects, I needed to find ways for my design team, different engineering teams, contractors, and the project owner to collaborate in one project chat group. This was necessary because varied teams involved in a project should be able to communicate with each other.
We could bring everyone involved in a project to one group only when group members could converse and share documents privately with collaborators. Finally, we achieved it.
Another challenge we faced in our design practice was that communication and project documents were scattered in emails, multiple chat groups, team members’ laptops, and shared workspaces like Google Drive or Dropbox. To overcome this challenge, we made it possible to organise messages topic-wise in project chat groups. Imagine how easy it would be to manage your projects when you could find conversations, 3D designs, drawings, designs, BOQs, snag lists, proposed and selected products, site-related videos, and other documents about the living room, bedroom, kitchen, home office, etc., duly organised space-wise in your home project group.
With further research and development initiatives, I included generative AI in chat workflows. Design teams can now use Arkchat Bot, just like ChatGPT. We haven’t stopped and are continuously innovating to find new ways to use generative AI to manage your projects more efficiently.
My FF&E team worked overtime to find and collaborate with new product sellers. I knew that our projects would look the same regardless of our creativity unless we used new products in every project.
We found an innovative solution to this problem by building a marketplace inside Arkchat. Product manufacturers and sellers can list their products, and FF&E teams can shortlist them. Once FF&E teams shortlist a product, Arkchat automatically creates a buyer/seller chat group. In this group, FF&E teams, manufacturer teams, and seller teams can collaborate. Since users can convert messages to tasks and approvals in buyer/seller groups, FF&E teams can request manufacturers and sellers to customise products, and sellers can seek approvals. This innovation eases the product selection process, builds relationships between design studios, manufacturers, and sellers, presents new business opportunities to sellers, and makes projects more creative. To solve cross-border communication issues, we innovated so that everyone can converse in their first language in chat groups. We automatically translate messages into everyone’s first language.
Initially, we conceived the marketplace as a way to connect product sellers with design studios. Later, we decided that service providers should also connect with design studios, PMC teams, and project owners. 3D designers, freelance
draftsman, architects, engineers, site supervisors, contractors, and other professionals can also post their services and connect with prospective clients. The system makes it possible for small studios to execute projects in other cities and countries by hiring local professionals for on-site services.
Arkchat was initially conceived for the AEC industry. Later, I realised that every organisation faces challenges in managing business operations and projects. Hence I redesigned Arkchat so that every industry could use it. When businesses in other industries use Arkchat, design studios can also find domestic and international clients using Arkchat.
Now you know why I built something different for the design and construction industry.
