- Industry baselines are brutal: FMI/Autodesk measured 14+ hours per person per week lost to information hunting, conflict resolution, and rework-related activity.
- Wearable ROI concentrates in three auditable lines: documentation time, rework avoided, and inspection/re-inspection cycles.
- The right way to evaluate any wearable — including Corevis — is to baseline your own numbers and pilot against them, not to trust a vendor slide.
- Adoption risk is the hidden variable: a wearable that lives in the safety gear you already mandate has a structurally different adoption curve than one more device to remember.
Start from the baseline, not the brochure
Every wearable vendor has an ROI slide. Skip them — including ours. The honest starting point is the industry baseline you're already paying: FMI and Autodesk's Construction Disconnected research measured field professionals spending over 14 hours a week per person on non-productive activity — hunting for project information, resolving conflicts, dealing with mistakes and rework — and pegged rework driven by bad data and miscommunication at $31.3 billion a year in the US.
You don't need to trust those numbers either. You need your own three: hours per week your supers spend producing documentation, your rework cost as a share of contract value, and your re-inspection rate. Every one of them is sitting in your job-cost reports.
The three lines where wearables pay
Heads-up wearables attack those exact lines, mechanically:
- Documentation time: when photos, voice notes, and issue logs are captured as a byproduct of walking the site — geo-tagged, transcribed, filed — the evening report-writing block shrinks toward zero. Hours per super per week, straight off the baseline you measured.
- Rework avoided: every deviation flagged at installation instead of inspection is bought at the cheapest possible price. You'll never get credit for the change order that didn't happen — which is why you track rework as a percentage of contract value, quarter over quarter.
- Inspection throughput: self-inspection against the code before calling the AHJ, with documentation attached, converts re-inspection cycles into first-time passes. Each avoided cycle is direct fees plus the schedule float you didn't burn.
The variable nobody prices: adoption
The graveyard of jobsite tech is full of tools that penciled out and then sat in the gang box. ROI times zero usage is zero. That's why form factor is an economic argument, not a design preference: Corevis ships as ANSI-rated safety glasses — the PPE your sites already mandate — so wearing the tool requires no new habit at all.
We're deliberate about what we claim here. Corevis is in early access, and per our own rules we don't publish invented case-study numbers. What we'll put our name on is the mechanism — detection at install time, documentation as a byproduct, evidence-first inspections — and the invitation: baseline your three numbers, run a pilot cohort, and let your own job-cost report render the verdict.
“ROI times zero usage is zero. Form factor is an economic argument.”