How Collaboration Tools are Disrupting Construction Management
- Monday, 23 May 2016
Long are gone the days in which construction project management relied on endless meetings that highjacked productivity. Remember those days when you had to wait to hear back from suppliers or team members by next week's meeting? By then it would probably be too late to do anything at all, causing you more project cost overruns, and time discrepancies. Collaboration tools have made it possible to get real-time feedback and answers on pending issues. Endless meetings have been replaced by instant communication. Learn more about what collaboration tools can do for your construction project.
Cutting through the clutter
Construction team members need to share design plans, mock ups and other vital documents in order to understand each part of the construction site. Email came to the rescue when it came to instant sharing instead of having physical clutter in your truck, site, or office. But one way or the other, it's still digital clutter. Information systems are platforms that make sharing much easier. You don't have to search through an ocean of emails in order to find what you are looking for. Any team member can upload the plans and instantly share them with the rest of the team.
Sharing apps might do the trick, but don't settle, go a step further: true collaboration. It's not enough to upload and share the plans with everyone. What if there are complications or sections that need to be adapted according to whatever conditions construction workers have found on site? The platform needs to enable a conversation. A great information management system allows you to add comments. When the modifications are done, you can upload the new document, and start over.
Material procurement
How do you know how to manage your materials? Of course you want availability when materials are needed, but you don't want to stock up on materials that are not needed for another couple of months. Calculating your project's needs is one thing, unfortunately, real time situations arise, and ultimately push back dates.
Update your procurement list in real time. And if you have certain materials that just don't fit or are not cutting it, construction workers can upload a picture to the platform, explaining the situation and how certain materials need to be replaced with something else.
Keeping track of costs
Whether it's materials procurement, resource allocation, permits, or anything else that might add - or hopefully save - costs to your construction project, you can add them in real time to your platform. You can control costs in real time, rather than costs controlling you. Sometimes, if you stop paying attention to certain areas of your construction site, you might have dreadful cost overruns.
Instant feedback & coordination
Do you have multiple teams working on parallel tasks? Get them coordinated so they don't step on each other's feet. In other words, get field collaboration.
With this in mind, feel free to ask for a demo of our construction information management system. See what the right collaboration can do for you.