Meet Sakari Maaranen – our VP of engineering!

Next in our introduction series comes Infrakit’s VP of engineering, Sakari Maaranen. He is a deep-rooted professional in software business; his experience ranges from being a freelancer to consultancy and managing a software company. At Infrakit he started in the spring of 2019 after hearing about its interesting story. “I definitely made the right choice, here at Infrakit we have an exceptionally good group full of driven people”, Maaranen states.

Maaranen’s area of responsibility contains developing Infrakit’s software together with his teammates. “In an activity like this, everything comes down to processes; the way we function and develop the software will show in the quality of all everything we do and accomplish”, he explains. Software developing is to a large extent describing and documenting processes and the product, which is done by the whole 10-person team with Maaranen on the lead. “I feel that I get to fully use my vast expertise and knowledge about software business in my current job at Infrakit”, he sums up. Maaranen finds it interesting how groundbreaking work Infrakit does: the digitalization of infra building is taking baby steps and Infrakit is in the front row introducing new ways of doing things – there really aren’t other companies taking the same approach.

Infrakit BIM Services? – Meet our BIM-team!

Photo: Infrakit BIM-team Visa Hokkanen, Ilkka Tieaho, Tero Maijala and Atte Kajander

We are happy to start our introduction series with our brand-new BIM-team, and in particularly with two true professionals in the field of BIM: VP of BIM services, Ilkka Tieaho (second on the left) and Senior BIM Specialist, Tero Maijala (third on the left). Even though both of them started their journey at Infrakit recently, working with Infrakit isn’t unfamiliar to them – in their previous careers both Tieaho and Maijala gained experience working in projects where Infakit was used. Together with the rest of the team one of their primary goals is to serve as a link between the clients and the remaining Infrakit staff. With their previous experience working on the customers’ side, they have gained valuable knowledge of the challenges and advantages that clients may face with Infrakit.

Tieaho, who started last August, says it has been a pleasure to notice how smoothly he was welcomed to his new work community. His working history contains a great deal of experience from designing and consulting, especially in the designing phase of construction projects. ”I see coming to work at Infrakit as a great opportunity to create something new. It has also been interesting to see how working with BIM looks like from a tech company’s point of view”, Tieaho reflects. One of the crucial strengths of Infrakit in his opinion is the company’s flexibility: ”We must continue to provide fast and close support to our clients.”

One of our most recent employees is Tero Maijala, who started his work last November. He says that moving over from working as a land surveying specialist at a worksite, to the other side of the table has felt like a natural choice. ” [before] I was building infra and now I’m beginning to build Infrakit – building things hasn’t stopped.” In his previous job Maijala has worked in close proximity with Infrakit almost daily since the beginning of the 2010s. In the period of the last six months he has seen a change in how the client’s viewpoint has become a stronger priority and wanted to be a part of the solution. ”The thing that me and Tero have in common is that we both believe Infrakit to be an excellent and functional solution in designing and construction projects”, Tieaho sums it up.

The mission of the recently created BIM-team is to help clients use Infrakit in their daily work. Vital in achieving this goal is organizing training sessions, providing consultancy and developing new and more functional customs so that our clients will gain added value with Infakit. Their first task has been contacting current clients and mapping out their needs, but Tieaho as well as Maijala both envision that in the future the BIM-team has also a lot to offer to the technical development.

Infrakit and year 2019 – it’s a wrap!

Year 2019 has been a big success for Infrakit. We opened offices in five new countries, including large markets like France, Germany and Australia, all while staying profitable. Our team grew to a total of 32 construction and SaaS professionals.

Overall, digitalization of the infrastructure construction industry is progressing worldwide, with many governments pushing for requirements and legislation to adopt of BIM, to improve infrastructure construction quality and efficiency.

Infrakit BIM cloud enables an efficient digital production process for construction companies, connecting heavy machinery and all construction project stakeholders with up to date designs and real time view to site progress. In year 2019 we were especially delighted to see our customers win more projects with the competitive advantage they gained by moving faster than their competition.

For year 2020, we are looking to further expand our operations to new countries and to solidify our position as the leading SaaS provider for the global infrastructure construction industry.

On behalf of the Infrakit team, a big thank you to all of our customers and partners for year 2019. I’m wishing you a happy and successful year 2020!

Teemu Kivimäki CEO and founder

New 3D view in Infrakit

Collaboration in 3D visualization of Infrakit

The 3D collaboration model of Infrakit allows the client, the designer and the builders to visualize design files and review them in design and site meetings. The cutting and measuring functions provide tools for verifying interoperability of multi-discipline design. With 3D collaboration model available in browser, the client can monitor progress of the work and lead the design and construction projects while keeping the entity well under control. How does the new 3D view differ from its predecessor?

Our 3D view has been completely redesigned, and the new version provides better performance, free zooming for different levels of detail, and viewing Pointscene point clouds and orthophotos in the same view together with design data. Everything purely in the browser without separate software installations.

Other new features include measuring the area and fitting the design to the screen. Progress does not stop here; other small improvements are coming, e.g. camera management improvements are now underway.

Highlights of the new release

Drone flight plan

Drones are used frequently on modern construction sites for providing enhanced situational awareness. Infrakit cannow be used to create flight plans for drones – simply draw an area and export in KML format as on the following video:

User configurable map tiles

As a new feature Infrakit allows the project admins to connect customized map tiles for projects.

Pointscene integration

Infrakit–Pointscene integration with orthophoto map tiles was initially introduced in spring 2019. Now theintegration supports also point clouds created by laser scanning or stereogrammetry. The source for the point cloudis entered to the dialog on new visualization page.

Model properties on visualization

Due to the new release, Infrakit is now able to visualize model properties. At the moment they are visible only on the legacy visualization page, but will be available on the new visualization page later as well. Right click on top of the model for object properties dialog:

Read full release notes here.