Successful American Construction companies have one thing in common. It is their ability to manage complexities in operations effectively and efficiently. A key driver of efficient operations is the use of documentation to align all parties involved. With the use of construction document management software, this has improved manifolds thereby powering faster growth, improved efficiency and transparency.
Here are some key advantages that the use of construction document management has helped American construction companies:
The key pillar of organizational effectiveness is collaboration. In large set ups, achieving this can get challenging. One of the ways to achieve this is ensuring high-quality, consistent and timely documentation. This paves the way for smooth handover of operations between each other and keeping the flow of tasks without hassles. With timely availability of contextual data, they can collaborate smoother, reducing back and forth communication minimizing discrepancies and inconsistencies.
In large-scale projects involving many vendors, service providers, contract laborers, there is a lot of room for ambiguity. Delayed communication, versioning, approvals etc. can add to the mix and set ambiguity in the process. This can lead to a lot of rework, wasted effort, delays and that is not ideal. This results in increased costs and poor client satisfaction. It also is not good for brand loyalty and the word gets around too quickly for the company’s reputation to go for a toss. Real-time documentation can help mitigate this and reduce errors arising out of ambiguity. It simplifies communication, real-time collaboration and seamless approval workflows thereby ensuring there’s clarity of vision amongst all stakeholders.
Approval delays can severely impair teams from timely execution. This is common in large setups where there are many stakeholders, tight processes and geographically separated teams. While it is important to maintain approval hierarchy to ensure quality and standards, to let it hamper speed of execution is an undesirable situation. In most cases, these delays are unintentional and due to practical reasons. With digital documentation, businesses have a chance to set SLAs for approval and also send real-time notifications to necessary stakeholders whenever there is a change in the approval status. This enables passing new information quickly to stakeholders and thus ensures approved plans are available for execution on-time.
In any project, change management can get a bit challenging. This is specially complex and holds consequences for construction projects. These changes can be client-initiated or due to market conditions or any other changes in the vendor ecosystem. Irrespective of the nature of change, this means that all stakeholders need to be aligned at the right time to handle the change. More importantly, this needs to be communicated in time to avoid projects going haywire. WIth construction document management software, teams can get a real-time view of the border picture and also specific parts of it thereby getting a chance to stay on top of the changes. Effective change management is a key differentiator that can set apart a business’s service levels and set up best-practices for the industry.
Optimization of cost and resources is a business goal for every construction company. In an asset-heavy, ops-heavy and investment-heavy business like construction, any step in the direction of optimization can help move the business by miles. This can be improving the performance of individual teams, increasing the speed and the pace at which field operations are run, the speed at which decisions are made, the effectiveness of vendor/contrator relationships. The bedrock of all this is clear documentation. Not just that, the availability, accessibility and ease-of-use. By using today’s commoditized IT and mobility, equipping teams with the latest construction document management software can steer a positive impact at all levels from boardrooms to the field thereby resulting in improved utilization of resources. Their bandwidth can be streamlined, faster decisions can be made and chaos and misunderstandings can be kept at bay which is often the root cause of productivity drain.
Here are some of the ways software can drive change in effective document management by document type:
Cloud-based document management software can play an effective role in providing contextual access to drawings at all times. Products now have the ability to redline on drawings to clearly indicate changes or updates that are available for all to see immediately after the changes are made.
By streamlining bidding documentation, businesses can have ready alternatives and keep costs under check. This facilitates easier access to data and allows comparison of different proposals to ensure that a cost-effective choice is made.
These are critical for operations management and finance teams. With centralized and easy availability through digital forms and documentation, a lot of wait times, discrepancies and conflicts can be reduced. This saves time for field crews who might otherwise have to come back to office to fill in daily reports after a whole day on the site.
In the construction industry, time is money. Hence, effective time tracking tools can be handy in making sure there are no productivity leaks and escalated costs. Weekly or monthly reports are available instantly from all project locations, saving accounting teams a lot of time and manual effort. This is also heavily leveraged to calculate billing and expenses with minimal errors.
This is crucial to mitigate delays and wait times due to lack of availability of materials. This can help teams stay proactive and preemptively place necessary orders to ensure timely availability of materials at the job site.
By streamlining these checklists with document management software, a lot of time can be saved at the time of audits and compliance checks. This typically takes a ton of emails and coordination to search and compile otherwise.
These are again key to ensuring compliance and effective use document management can help at the time of audits. The fact that these products are cloud-based ensures that important certificates and compliance documentation are never misplaced, and easily retrievable during the time of audits. This saves time on costly legal processes and project delays.
To mitigate disputes and ensure smooth vendor relationships, effective management of contract documents can be greatly helpful. This can steer long-standing and dependable vendor/contractor relations. In the long run, this would help strengthen a company’s brand and its relationship with clients and vendors.
To avoid rework and saving time, money and energy, businesses need to ensure change orders are available in-time for all stakeholders. This is a key factor to ensuring expectations are met and teams stay agile and dynamic to accommodate change requests.
As the schedule of values is a key keeper of costs, it is a key indicator of performance in terms of budgets and consumption at all points of time. By managing this using document management software, a business can ensure transparency and awareness of cost and budget utilization amongst all stakeholders. This can have a great impact in terms of how individual teams can contribute by effectively organizing themselves to contribute to cost optimization.
The pace at which construction projects are managed is changing and the use of technology is a key driver of this change. With effective document management practices and tools, businesses have a chance to unlock many benefits as seen above and can stay ahead of competition. To evaluate KYRO’s advanced document management capabilities for your organization, click here.
