In an industry with razor-thin margins, labor shortages, rising prices, and increasing competition, it can feel as if the world is working against you. But if you take a step back and examine your business operations, you’ll likely find a few ways you can work smarter instead of harder to beat your competitors.
1. Improve Business Efficiency
In the long run, wasted time is wasted money, so fixing any inefficiencies in your workflow – whether in office or field – will go a long way toward making your business better. Optimizing your operations helps your team better manage their workload, stay organized, and reduce rework and unnecessary administrative tasks.
How STACK Can Help
Document Management
One of the major admin burdens construction teams face is document management and organization. Keeping track of changes to plans, as well as finding what you need in a large plan set, can be surprisingly time consuming and take your team away from more important tasks.
STACK’s field collaboration and construction management tools allow you to organize documents the way it makes sense for your team. Search, filter, and use hyperlinks in the field to access what you need faster (even without access to WiFi), and set up Kanban workflows for your office staff to track documents by their preferred categories.
Jobsite Photo Tracking
How many times have you had to do detective work to find out exactly where an issue is located onsite? STACK’s field collaboration tools allow you to attach a photo directly to the right location on plans, so photos are no longer buried in a crew member’s camera roll. Being able to pinpoint issues with visuals saves time and provides clear information to all your stakeholders.
Automated Daily Reports
Field crews and project management alike can streamline workflows with automated daily reports. Capture data quickly by pulling in issues, photos, attachments, any outstanding RFIs, and daily weather reports. Your foreman can also easily add tracked labor, site visitors, equipment, incidents, and deliveries.
Back in the office, project managers can analyze all daily report data within STACK’s construction management platform, or export to a branded PDF or spreadsheet to share with other stakeholders.
Workforce & Equipment Planner
Planning is crucial to keep projects running smoothly and manage budgets. Resources like workforce and equipment need to be planned and allocated for jobs in order to meet final schedules. So many aspects of a construction job depend on other tasks being completed first that the process of planning is typically difficult and complex.
With STACK’s construction management platform, planning is much simpler. You can lay all your resources out in one view to better understand where your assets are allocated and verify that you can deliver on your commitments.
2. Mitigate Risk
No one wants a lawsuit, but they are unfortunately common in construction. Shoring yourself up to protect against potential litigation can help you avoid legal fees as well as time lost to fighting accusations. Risk also includes getting behind schedule due to losses in manpower or materials, so finding ways to prevent unplanned stoppages is crucial.
How STACK Can Help
Jobsite Activity Audit Trail
Using your own construction software to track all jobsite activity, rather than relying solely on whatever tool the GC requires you to use, will ensure you have access to all your data even after the project wraps up. With no sheet limitations, STACK’s field collaboration tools allow you to store your data as long as you need it, so you are always able to pull up records in the event of a dispute. You’ll also avoid time spent searching for appropriate documents when you’ve got your files stored in an organized way.
Planning & Tracking
With proper planning, you can keep projects running on schedule and reduce the need for crews to rush and play catchup from falling behind, thus reducing safety risks as well. Use field collaboration tools to note where material deliveries should be deposited and to empower your crew to catch issues such as supplies that must be moved indoors before inclement weather, reducing waste and the need to wait for replacements.
3. Increase Profit
A major factor in remaining competitive is increasing profit margins. If you can keep your prices in line with your competitors while keeping more of your revenue, you’ll be far ahead of the game. Of course, once you develop a reputation for quality and timeliness, you might find you’re also able to increase your prices, which bumps up your profit as well.
How STACK Can Help
Dashboards and Planner Project Analysis
Thorough dashboards within STACK’s construction management platform allow company leaders to stay one step ahead. Easy-to-understand visuals provide at-a-glance details on project statuses and any issues that arise. Centralized data makes it easy to focus on the big picture without needing to dig into the weeds. You can make quick, informed decisions to maintain your positive brand reputation with clients.
Time Saved
The effort you put in to increase efficiency and to reduce risks results in freeing up time for your team to work smarter. They’ll be able to do more with less and focus more closely on quality and accuracy, leading to jobs completed more quickly while still adhering to company mandated excellence. More work leads to higher profits, and as your standing rises in general contractors’ eyes, they’ll be willing to pay more for your guaranteed quality work.
A Solution for Scale
As you increase efficiency, mitigate risk, and increase your profits, begin bidding more work and making more selective bid decisions during the preconstruction phase so your crew can spend their time working on projects you’ve identified as especially profitable for your company. Once you’ve mastered this pattern, the dominos will fall into place, and your business will see success and stay competitive in the markets you’ve chosen.
STACK will be there every step of the way as you scale. Talk to us today to get started.
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