Which is it… LEM or a Daily Field Report?

Which is it... LEM or a Daily Field Report?

Construction contractors are increasingly adopting technology to track their daily costs and activities from the jobsite. Some will refer to this as tracking their daily LEM – which stands for Labor, Equipment and Materials – however others may call it Field Data Capture; and some may call it the Daily Field Report, or Site Superintendent Report. Although we’ve adopted an industry term, “Construction Cost Tracking” as a general name to describe the activity and process, we tend to use “LEM” as the term that describes the final document(s) that contain all the jobsite data that gets tracked.

If you’re familiar with 4castplus at all, you’ll know that the system enables contractors to track much more than labor, equipment and materials. There’s clearly much more going on than that – so a “LEM” is just a term used that encapsulates the broad variety of everything that gets tracked. Other data that gets captured in the LEM includes: labor expenses like subsistence and meals; along with 3rd party vendor expenses; material field receipts; daily log and the weather. Field personnel can also input production quantities as progressed items that are completed. It also allows field personnel to upload any number of documents into organized document repository categories. There’s additionally a very powerful Vendor LEM option to track the costs and expenses from subcontractors.

Reporting done right means cost savings for you

All this data that is input at the jobsite gets stored into a big fat relational database in the cloud – data that’s shared in real-time with the rest of the team back in the office or other parts of the world. And because that data is now in a powerful database, users can generate a great variety of reports in a single click. Reports such as a Daily LEM, or Daily Field Report, Daily Cost Report, Weekly Cost Report, etc. They can also produce billing backup reports, accruals reports, payroll reports and a zillion more reports and charts for multiple purposes.

So, whether you call it a LEM, construction cost tracking, a Daily Field Report or other, it’s clearly vital that the data gets tracked and stored efficiently, accurately and completely. Moving away from paper and spreadsheets, and into a dedicated project cost tracking solution, will deliver enormous cost savings and provide you with accurate and real-time visibility into all your projects and programs.

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