Ninad Athavale, Senior Manager for Global Real Estate and Store Development at GAP, has piloted Avatour 360° Remote Presence within his team, resulting in improved productivity, less construction downtime, reduced costs and less business travel.
Ninad, Senior Manager at GAP, is part of the Global Real Estate and Store Development team – tasked with managing the construction, building, and development of 150-300 new stores a year in North America. Multiple sites are under construction at the same time, and GAP personnel, especially the 12 managers on the construction team need to be frequently on site to sign off on progress and share updates with stakeholders.
Ninad’s team is constantly traveling to multiple sites to approve and properly move projects along. Project Managers might be from San Francisco, the Engineer might be from Los Angeles and leadership can be on either East or West Coast. These site visits are costly, and not just in terms of money. Ninad estimates that two hours of productive time spent on site can cost an average of 8 hours of unproductive time spent away from the office.
After experiencing Avatour at a tradeshow in San Francisco, Ninad decided to pilot it amongst his team and on-site contractors. General contractor personnel on site were given a 360° camera, tripod and mobile device. Now, when Ninad and his team need to be on site — no matter where they are — they can create an Avatour session instead. With a VR headset they can see everything the General Contractor sees in real time, as if they were there.
“I would definitely recommend Avatour to anyone that has a construction site far away from where they are, or have people that need to share access to the site. Avatour should be able to reduce travel by 50%.” – Ninad Athavale, Senior Manager, GAP
Ninad’s team didn’t realize they had a problem that could be solved. They used the two options currently available to communicate & approve construction site progress. First, in-person travel to see a place, and second, videoconference platforms such as Zoom and Facetime. Each of these options has significant drawbacks: