Today, HP Inc. announced that HP SitePrint is now available in the UK and Ireland, extending the Early Access Programme initiated across North America last year. HP SitePrint is a robotic solution that prints the most complex construction site layouts with pinpoint accuracy, in a fraction of the time it takes manually. The expansion to UK customers follows over a hundred successful uses of HP SitePrint on pilots and projects around the world.
Image Credit: HP Inc.
“We’re thrilled to be making our innovative HP SitePrint solution available to customers in the UK,” said Xavi Juarez, Director, HP Construction Services. “We’ve successfully demonstrated the ability to radically improve productivity when it comes to the layout process. By digitising what has long been a manual and time-consuming task, SitePrint makes it faster and easier for construction professionals to bring an idea to life on site, while also providing layout accuracy and reducing costs.”
At $10.7 trillion, the construction sector represents 12.5 percent of the world’s GDP, meaning its performance has a sizeable impact on the global economy. However, the industry faces challenges in productivity and human resourcing. While labor productivity in manufacturing has grown an average 3.6 percent a year over the past two decades, the construction sector has lagged with only a 1 percent increase over the same time period, according to McKinsey. Slow adoption of digital technologies compared to other sectors is seen as a key reason for sluggish productivity in construction.
Transforming Construction Layouts
“We’ve deployed HP SitePrint at three different sites across the UK this year and seen dramatic improvements when it comes to productivity,” said Jordan Knight, Associate Director at Greenhatch Group. “SitePrint allows our team of surveyors to offer better service to our customers and to take on more projects.”
John Sisk & Son Ltd is using HP SitePrint for the NE02 and NE03 projects in Wembley, London.
“We are excited to be the first major contractor in the UK and Ireland using HP SitePrint. It’s ability to print a wide range of information on the floor with great detail and high accuracy helps to prevent errors and reduce the need for costly reworks,” said Shervin Deh Bozorgi, Head of Digital Project Delivery, John Sisk & Son Ltd. “Adding instructions or the use of colour-coded lines, for instance, has also improved collaboration between the various teams involved with the project. Automation will play a pivotal role in our digital transformation journey and HP SitePrint has huge potential to automate the laying out process across our projects.”
HP SitePrint is an end-to-end, easy-to-use suite of technologies designed to automate the site layout process, consisting of:
- A rugged and autonomous robotic device designed to operate in the conditions of the construction site. Light and compact, it is very transportable, including a hard case that fits all the solution components
- Cloud tools to submit and prepare jobs to be printed, manage the fleet and track usage
- A touch screen tablet for remote control and configuration
- A portfolio of inks for different surfaces, environmental conditions, and durability requirements
Designed for autonomous operation, including obstacle avoidance, HP SitePrint can improve the productivity of the site layout process. It can print lines and complex objects with pinpoint accuracy and consistent repeatability, while text printing capabilities bring additional data from the digital model to the construction site, improving communication between construction professionals.
Commercial Availability
HP SitePrint will be available to UK&I customers from May 3rd 2023, extending the Early Access Programme launched for customers in the US and Canada in September 2022. Full commercial availability in North America is expected later this summer.