“Building Better” can mean different things to different people; from meeting deadlines and beating the budget, to providing an easy handover. But getting to that point is no easy task.
In an earlier post we discussed how rework can drive up costs, as much as 20%, and throw your schedule off track. Time management is another crucial area that, if not managed tightly, can easily slip away from you and affect your budget and your schedule.
There are many tools to make it easier to manage your time, and using construction document software is one of them. It can help keep your team organized, up to date and on track.
Here are five ways the right technology can help you and your team save time.
Get Everyone on the Same Page
How many hours have you spent waiting for someone to deliver the latest set to the team in the field, or worse, the hours wasted in mistakes and resulting rework that occur if someone thinks they are using the correct set, but aren’t?
Making sure your team members have the latest set of documents, complete with markups, RFIs, Punch lists and Submittals, is imperative. Ditching the stacks of paper for a professional, cloud-based construction document management app allows everyone to be in sync, receive critical information, proper project updates and important files in real time.
Find Information Quickly and Easily
Ok, you have your team on the same page. Now it’s crucial they don’t lose time searching for data, photos, and other critical information. If you’ve migrated to a capable technology solution, you may already have your documents in one place, but sometimes getting to them is another trick. Is it easy to navigate from one document to another? Are you wasting time going from document to directory and back again?
A robust construction management platform will be engineered with the advanced search capabilities that locate everything you need no matter where it is. Some current platforms even allow you tag documents (like favourites in social media) making searching for documents not only fast and easy, but familiar and intuitive. When you can find data inside title blocks, call outs, notes and more, information is at your fingertips and saving you time.
Reduced Paperwork
Tons of documents are generated during the life cycle of a project (sometimes literally!) Reducing paperwork not only eliminates an everyday hassle, but it saves an immense amount of time.
Of course with traditional paper there’s also the obvious waste of natural resources; trees. But what you probably didn’t realize is with your construction platform and its search capabilities, the average worker can save nearly eight hours a week in handling and digging through paper. Think of what your team members could accomplish with an extra workday!
Show & Tell
You know it’s easier to show your team an issue with a picture rather than describing it with words, but sometimes taking the photo and getting it to the right spot on a paper document can be time consuming. You don’t have time to mess around trying to match photos to documents; you need answers.
A good cloud app makes managing your construction project photos easy, really easy. Not only can you take and upload a photo from your phone, you can use tags and links to make search and navigation easy. Your team can find photos easily, even in RFIs and Punch Lists, and knows exactly where they need to focus. If your app has in-app markup capabilities, you can save time by writing descriptions and recording critical questions.
Ditch the extra apps
How many apps are you using? Are you using one for document storage and another for RFIs? Are your markups in the same place? Where are your photos and how are they linking to your projects? You may have found a technology solution, but you’re losing valuable time by switching back and forth between apps. Don’t let tech become too much of a good thing. Find one solid app with a feature set that supports your workflow, and forget about multiple upgrades, training everyone on a variety of tools, the costs associated with them, and of course…all that time!
Time management is one step to building better that you can control. Luckily, there are technology-driven tools, focused on construction document management, that allow you collaborate, manage, sync, and share documents so you can spend your time getting the job done.
