Construction professionals lose 14 hours a week to hunting information and fixing what it caused.

The same FMI and PlanGrid study of 599 construction leaders measured where the week goes. More than 14 hours of it, about 35 percent, is spent on conflict, rework and looking for information. Five and a half hours a week is just hunting for project data.

On a lighting takeoff the hunt looks like this. Read a type off the fixture schedule on E-001. Hold it in your head. Find it across six sheets of lighting plans. Count it. Come back. Check the legend for the variant you were not sure about. Start the next type. I have done this on sets with forty types, and the errors do not come from bad arithmetic. They come from switching context two hundred times.

What LumenTakeoff does about it

LumenTakeoff removes the hunt from the count. Each fixture family shows a large ringed crop of one real instance on the actual sheet, so the estimator is looking at the symbol on the page it came from, not at a thumbnail. Click a count and it jumps to the instance.

The set's own fixture schedule sits beside the plan. In the naming queue, one unnamed family is shown at a time, most frequent first, and the schedule codes complete as you type: A1, LED recessed troffer, straight from the set's schedule, with the description filled in. Enter confirms. Esc marks it not a fixture. Arrow keys skip or go back. A counter says how many are left.

Nothing to go and find. The information the estimator needs is already on the screen where the decision is made.

The machine counts. You decide.