Cut the Waste – Let the System Optimize Your Workforce Productivity

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The construction industry has often been called out for its glacially slow adoption of technology. Technology, for example, improves productivity, lowers costs, and reduces project risks. According to McKinsey, “construction is among the least digitized sectors in the world”. This has had a very real impact on performance in construction, and leads to pervasive cost overruns, poor profitability, and a lack of investor confidence in the sector. Globally, McKinsey & Company argues, “Lagging construction productivity costs the global economy $1.6 Trillion per year.” This is A pretty staggering number. But put into context, construction is also one of the world’s largest economic sectors, adding over $11 Trillion annually.

Addressing this issue of productivity and risk is something we are all responsible for, and all the signs are indicating that more and more construction contractors & owners are adopting key technologies to cut wasteful activities and embrace more automation to achieve more optimal productivity.

Cut the Waste

Improving the efficiency of people’s time is a pretty clear and straightforward place to start when looking to cut wasteful and non-optimal activities. Whether the individuals are in the office or at the jobsite, issues such as insufficient project information, poor communication, and a lack of a common data sharing platform can cause workers to spend an extra 26% of their time performing unnecessary tasks, rework, or just wrestling with spreadsheets. This low-value work is a pervasive challenge across most major construction projects and accounts for a significant amount of the overall project budget.

High-Value versus Low-Value Work

Optimizing individual performance can be as simple as stripping away their need to perform low-value tasks; letting them focus rather on high-value tasks. Low-value tasks are the time-sucking grunt-work duties that should be automated or offloaded to a system, and can include anything from manually creating reports, rekeying data, searching for documents, and fixing spreadsheet errors; to fumbling around for a formula, using outdated data, waiting for a response from someone, etc. Higher-paid workers such as project managers, project controls, and site supervisors can burn through a third of their week performing these low-value tasks. The higher-value tasks are those that require the analytical and managerial skills that their experience has taught them. Those activities can’t be offloaded to even the most advanced AI machines. People’s time should be focused on those things they have been trained to do and are paid to do. By not optimizing their time, not only does the project suffer, but the people experience burnout and a strong dissatisfaction with their job.

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Automation and Collaboration

Cloud-based project management systems are all about automating these processes and providing a centralized, collaborative platform where project information is natively shared across the entire project team. The majority of that non-optimal work simply disappears by onboarding a system that allows the project team to offload much of the tedious, labor-intensive work to the system. The productivity enhancements that come with implementing a project management system boil down to achieving both automation and collaboration where they never existed before.

Automation

There are a tremendous number of areas where systems provide automation opportunities that streamline the effort of managing complex projects. Following are a few examples.

Data management. Construction projects produce an enormous amount of data that needs to be captured, validated, organized, reportable, shareable, etc. Systems automate the management of data, enabling teams to offload that responsibility.
Workforce Automation. Systems provide tools for the management of labor and equipment for assignments, certifications, rates, unions, and much more. This tackles the burden of manually managing the construction workforce.
Procurement Management. By offloading the multitude of details and workflows involved in construction procurement to a system that automates the process, project managers and supply chain save a vast amount of time and streamline the effort.
EVM. Earned value management is rich with many formulas and rules. Without a system that has these baked-in tested and integrated into the overall framework, it saves valuable time and avoids formula errors or uncertainty.
Reporting. Project controls and project managers can easily spend 20-30% of their week on producing reports if the system isn’t there to generate reports automatically in a single click.

Collaboration

With a collaborative system, the entire project workforce has a common platform where they all can communicate naturally, accessing the data, reports and documents they need at any time.

Centralized Platform. By having one secure, cloud-based location to share information drastically reduces the churn and wasted effort in hunting around emails and shared drives.
Integrate data between field and office. Having a real-time connection between field staff and office staff eliminates delays, errors and rekeying of data. This provides for a true One-Touch Data solution across the project.
Enterprise Integrations between systems. Not only is data integrated within the project, but data is also integrated across the enterprise with key information being shared between the operational solution and accounting, scheduling, payroll, etc.
Notifications. A key element of collaborative systems is being notified on key events that need your attention. Such as approvals, updates, assignments, status changes, and much more. This eliminates any uncertainty or delays in taking action on important, time-sensitive activities.

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With a wealth of project management features – 4castplus enables companies to leverage their data as an asset by delivering a powerful suite of reporting tools to visualize, report and pivot all your vital project information. There is no other software system on the market that provides such comprehensive suite of project management & procurement tools. Contact us today to learn more.