5 Ways Connected Construction Software Drives Efficiency & Boosts Your Bottom Line.
The technology landscape across the AEC/O continues to rapidly evolve. Today, design and build teams have access to an expanding portfolio of new and innovative tech solutions meant to resolve challenges regularly felt across different phases of a construction project’s lifecycle. While this is certainly a welcome shift in an industry that has generally been slower to embrace digital transformation, AEC/O professionals are now faced with a new challenge – getting all the different systems and software they use and that have made their lives easier to sync. This article will arm you with five ways connected construction software can drive efficiency across your project and empower you to deconstruct your own digital silos in favor of an integrated data environment.
Executing a typical construction project requires you to work with different companies across a variety of disciplines and specialties, and each team has preferred processes and tools to help their own team members work more effectively. So far, so good. The problems, however, arise when others on the team need greater visibility into what is taking place across all systems in order to manage the entire project more efficiently. This lack of visibility across design and build teams result in poor communication, increased mistakes, failure to make informed decisions in a timely manner, and a host of other headaches that could ultimately hinder your ability to complete the project on time and on budget.
Making Connections
There are some incredible products on the market tailor-made to address each job function and we certainly don’t want to deter anybody from using a tool that makes them more productive. That’s why we started looking at solutions to empower different teams on a construction project to work better together – regardless of the software. The first step was to consider the very real value that could result if different systems worked better together. Here’s what we came up with:
1. The Ability To Search Across Platforms
How much time does your team currently spend searching for content, tasks, and communications across your organization’s different systems? Sometimes just trying to figure out what system you or another team member saved a particular document in can be a huge drain on efficiency. But depending how you bring your systems together, you could essentially gain the ability to run a search in one location that would span your entire project. As a result, you spend less time fumbling through files and more time moving the project forward.
2. Access To Authoritative Content
When your systems, content, and workflows aren’t connected, your team is left to struggle with knowing whether the content they are working with is authoritative. This can result in major risks and liabilities when your design and build teams count on having the access to the most current documents and information at any given time. Without the most up-to-date information at your fingertips, you could be looking at costly mistakes – at your expense.
3. Simplified Project Administration
Depending on what you decide to use to bring your systems together could represent a huge efficiency gain when it comes to project administration. For example, ProjectReady provides users with the ability to setup and connect systems in just a few clicks and centrally manage the security of the different systems they work with every day – effectively a 95 percent reduction in IT administration costs.
4. Your Entire Project, A Single Pane of Glass
Instead of piecing information together to get a wholistic understanding of your project’s status, wouldn’t it be great to have a comprehensive dashboard that is capable of pulling in all of the necessary information on a single screen? The best connected construction software does this and more, giving you the ability to see bottlenecks, status of specific tasks across teams, outstanding requests for information, and more. Bringing project systems together literally makes your ability to manage a project effectively exponentially easier and truly puts you in control.
With clear visibility and built-in governance of all decisions, RFIs, submittals, and content related to your project, there is less opportunity for legal disputes to creep in. With everyone working with the same data and a clear understanding of where you are on any given decision process and transparent communication, issues and concerns that would have resulted in disputes in the past are virtually eliminated. As a result, the time and money you would generally spend even after the project has been completed are significantly minimized, which is directly reflected on your bottom line.
The Integrated Data Environment and ProjectReady
If you’re ready to take more control of your projects, consider the benefits of embracing connected construction software across an integrated data environment. ProjectReady is dedicated to driving the deconstruction of digital silos as a means to protect construction professionals at every phase of the project. Specifically, ProjectReady Central makes it easier than ever to introduce an integrated data environment into your organization by allowing you to easily and cost-effectively bring your systems, content and information together quickly (in a matter of minutes, not days) and easily. Then, when you’re ready to improve your project management and document control processes, you’ve already laid the foundation for unlocking ProjectReady’s advanced features, which have been proven to drive long-term growth, security, and sustainability among many of the biggest names in the AEC/O.
By Kelly Doyle, COO, ProjectReady
November 12, 2021
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