At Saskatchewan’s Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital, the unfinished business came in thousands of pieces. Graham’s construction team tracked 15,000 punch items: the defects and details that stand between a nearly finished building and a completed job. Each needed an owner. Each needed checking. A spreadsheet could hold the list. Getting the right person to act on it was another matter.
- Plans, tasks and evidence travel together.
- Mobile crews can work offline, then sync.
- Paid subscriptions charge by user; Hilti owns the company.
Graham used Fieldwire to put those items on drawings, assign them to trades and follow their progress. Its published customer story reports $35,000 saved on printing. The telling detail is the work that disappeared between noticing a problem and telling somebody about it.
“I don’t know how we ever did it manually.”
Stefan Gonari · Quality control coordinator, Graham
A drawing with a to-do list
Fieldwire by Hilti is construction management software built around that interval. A foreman opens a drawing, drops a task at the relevant location, adds a photograph and assigns the work. The conversation stays attached to the task. Someone arriving later can see the instruction and its history together. This is useful wherever the sentence “Which one do you mean?” consumes part of the working day.
The software runs in browsers and on iOS and Android devices. Its expertise is the organization of field information: turning plans, observations and responsibilities into something a crew can use while moving. Short-term scheduling, inspections and reports extend that same arrangement. General contractors coordinate trades; specialty contractors organize their own work; owners and designers follow what is happening on site.
Version control tackles a related nuisance. Plans change, while yesterday’s printed sheet remains perfectly legible. Fieldwire extracts drawing numbers, manages versions and links drawing callouts to their detail sheets. Markups and photographs build an as-built record. The product’s attraction is easy to picture: fewer trips through folders, fewer guesses about which revision somebody is holding.
The binders were losing
Chicago electrical contractor ABCO supplies a useful account of what failed first. Its paper-and-email routine had become awkward, and Dropbox alone did not solve daily coordination. Moving the files was only part of the job. The crew still needed to know what to do with them.
In Fieldwire’s account, project manager Sam Carlson describes senior site staff changing their minds once they could consult plans on phones and tablets. The gain was immediate and familiar: finding information without paging through binders. That is a more persuasive introduction to software than a lecture about digital transformation.
The same logic travels beyond buildings. TOTE Services describes using Fieldwire for shipbuilding inspections, punch lists and warranty records, including offline access during sea trials. Its published account says a three-week trial helped bring people aboard. A useful trial lets the crew experience the troublesome handoff becoming easier.
Two founders. One familiar frustration.
Yves Frinault and Javed Singha founded Fieldwire in 2013 after working together at Ubisoft. Frinault had also studied construction engineering management at Stanford. Their early premise paired smartphones with a practical ambition: make information available to field workers and help them coordinate work at scale.
That premise explains the attention to offline use. A jobsite app that depends on continuous reception imposes an awkward condition on its customers. Fieldwire lets crews keep working with synchronized information and send updates when connectivity returns. Teams still need to prepare the content before heading offline; a phone cannot download a revised drawing through wishful thinking.
Hilti bought a route to the crew
Hilti invested in 2017 and acquired Fieldwire in 2021 for approximately $300 million. The industrial tools group had an established relationship with contractors and a direct sales force. Fieldwire had software those contractors could try for free. The pairing gave the application another route onto construction sites.
By late 2022, Fieldwire described rollouts through Hilti’s sales organization in the United States and Europe. Today its website reports use on more than four million projects worldwide. That is a measure of project reach, not four million paying customers. Its current leadership page lists Puneet Raj as CEO and general manager.
The price of fewer handoffs
The commercial model starts small. Basic supports five users, three projects and 100 sheets for free. Published US-dollar rates with annual billing are $39 per user monthly for Pro, $64 for Business and $89 for Business Plus. Paid plans remove project and sheet limits; richer workflows sit higher up the ladder.
Reports and exports enter at Pro. Business adds custom forms, integrations and a BIM viewer. Business Plus adds RFIs, submittals, change orders and budget tools. Custom contracts cover options such as training, API access and single sign-on. Buyers should price the people who need access and the workflows they actually need.
Procore and Autodesk are alternatives in construction software. Fieldwire’s particular argument is its emphasis on field execution, with the drawing serving as a shared reference. Its June 2026 addition of Primavera P6 XML task synchronization also acknowledges that office scheduling may already live elsewhere.
Start with the annoying thing
The newest direction is Field Intelligence: AI search across project records, voice-driven tasks and reporting assistance. Its current product page invites beta sign-ups. These are promises worth testing against real site information, rather than treating them as proven savings.
The lesson readers can copy is smaller: choose one recurring coordination problem, give it a clear owner and test the workflow with the people doing the work. Compare the time spent before and after. Customer-reported savings are useful clues, not a forecast for every contractor. If nobody maintains the plans or records completion, the shared record loses its authority. Fieldwire’s proposition depends on that ordinary discipline: leave the next person enough information to get on with the job.