Your commercial construction business depends on the survey data coordinators collect while in the field. Accurate and expeditious collections must occur for you and your team to understand the parameters of the project. Previously, coordinators used paper documentation to complete these tasks. However, electronic systems are now slowly becoming the norm.
You'll find that many of these automated systems use touchpad or mouse controls on laptops and tablets to help reduce time and errors. In this guide, we're discussing ways to centralize survey data and remove wasted documentation. That way, you and your team aren't sifting through survey data that isn't necessary.
Determine the Project's Necessary Documentation
Removing wasted documentation involves understanding what's critical and what you don't need. There are specific pieces of documentation construction leaders, and their teams must use, and they include:
- cash flow
- chronological files containing project memorandum and correspondence
- construction schedules
- construction team field activity
- cost estimates
- design documentation
- inspection logs
- legal contracts
- preliminary analysis results procured during design and planning
- records for quality assurance and control
- regulatory documentation
If you're unsure how to manage these necessary documents, make sure you're following this criterion:
- Organization: Organize all your documents, everything from contracts, designs, punch lists, specifications, and so on.
- Storage: Once you develop a system of organization, manage the documents you have by storing them in an area where all team members and stakeholders involved can access them.
- Access: Ensure document access remains active following a project's completion, so management, operation, owners, and renovators can use them as necessary.
Using Form Builder to Organize Pertinent Data
According to a leading intelligent construction finance platform by the name of Rabbet, their survey finds that less than fifty percent of construction finance data is centralized. These results beg the question, how can construction managers make improvements to data centralization?
Here are some examples:
- Improved workflows: Increase your company's workflow by building digital forms as a means of getting rid of paper faster, streamlining the data collection process, and use interactive reporting tools
- Form development: Use the list above to develop forms appropriate to the data you want to capture.
- Centralization: Once you create forms, store them in a central location along with all other pertinent data and ensure everyone knows this is the primary location for all project files.
Reporting Strategies for Removing Wasted Documentation
In the commercial construction industry, documents are regularly changing. Everything from drawings to estimates experiences revisions, changes, and other pertinent updates. Despite our best efforts, when these changes occur, essential parties receive the wrong documents or don't have access to the right ones. That why using reporting strategies and tools is a critical part of getting rid of wasted documentation.
The use of reporting strategies allows you and all others involved with the project to see survey data collected by viewing all of it or gaining particular insights by focusing on specific elements within that collection. You and your team also have the opportunity to see this data as text and graphs by location while gaining access to high-quality audio, photo, and video.
Using these strategies allows essential parties to access the correct version instead of sifting through a backlog of revised documents. If parties have access to the wrong document, that could lead to costly errors. If team members are using the incorrect survey results, that can cost your business a significant amount of money in fixes and reworks.
Implementing Multiple Permissions to Improve Accuracy
When construction managers implement multiple permissions, that does a couple of things. First, you'll see an improvement in your company's data accuracy. Next, those permissions help prevent and remove wasted documentation.
Having multiple permissions is critical because, as a commercial construction manager, you must give members of your team the ability to edit and view specific reports. With that ability, that means there are more eyes on what's essential, communicate about what's important, and those with permission can remove all documentation that isn't.
When your company is making attempts toward centralizing survey data and removing wasted documentation, every employee and team member must feel a sense of empowerment regarding the documents they're accessing.
Assign someone as having the primary role in overseeing and making changes to what's happening with documents among those with permissions. In doing so, that helps all of your team members make eliminating wasted documentation a success.
Conclusion
Once you have a better understanding regarding why centralizing survey data and removing wasted documentation is essential, you'll have better success as taking steps toward achieving that goal. Array works proactively toward helping your company understand the four different ways to centralize survey data and remove wasted documentation to maximize company scalability to help your business flourish with a profit increase.
To learn more about how your construction company can centralize data and remove wasted documentation, schedule a 1-on-1 demo with one of our team's specialists now.
Array (formerly Launchcloud) helps construction operation professionals increase workflow and create synergy between team members and managers. Array's customizable forms and reports enable better construction workflows by replacing time-consuming analog data collection, reporting, and paperwork with digital forms that make information readily available, easy to gather and quick to send.
To see how your construction company can have a better workflow,