7 signs disconnected processes are hurting your projects and your business
Learn from Trimble experts to identify the signs and see how you can address these underlying issues.
Duplicate work
Sign 1:
Duplicate Work
‘Duplicate work’ means the physical duplication of work, both on-site or in the office. Poor designs or incomplete designs, also known as "non-constructible designs," can be common causes for the duplication of work.
For example, ‘non-constructible' could mean that it's not ready for machine control. This occurs when designs haven't had the appropriate breaks added to them, which means contractors need to go back and redo those designs so that they can be fed into machine control.
‘Duplicate work’ means the physical duplication of work, both on-site or in the office. Poor designs or incomplete designs, also known as "non-constructible designs," can be common causes for the duplication of work.
For example, ‘non-constructible' could mean that it's not ready for machine control. This occurs when designs haven't had the appropriate breaks added to them, which means contractors need to go back and redo those designs so that they can be fed into machine control.
Here are two approaches to minimize duplicated work:
1.
Fix the problem before it starts
• Have the most up to date versions of different design data sets in one place to easily share information.
• Allow visibility of the design phase to all roles across a project, providing opportunity for identifying issues early on. This can lead to significant cost savings as problems are caught before they become major and more expensive.
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Account for everything throughout and after the project
2.
• Utilize a good job cost report to look for cost and quantity overruns in the field that will help identify errors, emissions and prevent rework in the future.
• Deal with and learn from any issues as the job is going on the ground and after it’s completed. Take time to understand what could have been done differently.
Errors and inefficiencies
Misalignment between labor, materials, equipment and schedules
Too much downtime
Lack of visibility
Slow payables
and receivables
Low margins
Often large numbers of errors and inefficiencies are caused by duplicate data entries through manual entry or frequent importing and exporting of data across different platforms. When issues aren’t identified early in the process, rework is required.
With so many stakeholders needing access to the same data across any given project, it can be difficult to identify errors early. Users of siloed point solutions often set up workarounds such as:
• Taking information from one system and typing into another, leading to data integrity issues.
• Giving another stakeholder access to their tool, which prevents stakeholders from being able to speak their own language in their own tool.
Everyone wants to see siloed data cross over to their tools so that the information is integrated, simple and removes the risk of data integrity issues. With a digital construction approach, users can work within the tool or workflow that was purpose built for them and seamlessly share it with others. The tool should be something that they're used to, that speaks their own language and that means they don't have to re-input data in order to share it with another stakeholder.
Tools like Trimble Business Center allow for ‘constructability reviews’, where users can bring models in for the technology to flag issues straight away, or at least identify areas where there may be issues to feed back to the design. It provides one version of the truth, giving visibility and utilizing workflow alerts to keep the whole team up to date.
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Sign 3:
Misalignment between labor, materials, equipment and schedules
Misalignment occurs when there isn’t enough communication between the field and the office. The key to overcoming this is through collaboration.
The best way to see how job progress is aligning or is matching up with job costs is to bring reconstruction data into your scheduling and project management systems.
Set up real-time connections between your takeoff, estimating, your job cost data, scheduling and project management systems.
Avoid relying on spreadsheets or on-prem software as this would lead to delays between information, making it a lot harder to know what's going on, on each side.
If you're focused on linear construction or civil construction, graphical scheduling or time location scheduling is a great way to align all these different aspects of the job and run, "what if," analyses. It's also easier to communicate to your teams what's going on rather than working in a typical P6 or on your Gantt Charts.
Leverage Trimble collaborative tools and ensure every stakeholder has been trained to be able to utilize the toolkit and make sure their people are able to get their critical data. Essentially, you want to eliminate any room for excuses such as, “didn't see it.”
Invite everybody, from subcontractors to architects to engineers, to the same place and work off the same set of plans. Whether it's graphical scheduling, pre-construction, integration, get the stakeholders to a place where everyone can all work together.
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Sign 4:
Too much downtime
Too much downtime leads to labor or equipment costing more to have than they are being utilized. Having equipment out of action can be caused by:
• Hoarding equipment in case it might be needed.
• Renting an asset or piece of equipment that’s already owned by the company and available to use. This can happen because of hoarding, poor communication or lack of awareness.
• Holding on to equipment that frequently breaks down.
Issues such as these can be minimized by using a construction-specific ERP system, like Trimble Construction One, to track service, equipment and labor to analyze how these impact the job cost.
The systems provide awareness of where each asset is, how it’s being used on a job and expected time of completion to figure out when the asset is ready to begin the next job. They feed information back to the office to increase understanding of job progress on a site and enable data-driven decision making. For example:
• Tracking the maintenance cost of breakdowns and repairs in the field to identify how frequently assets break down and give guidance as to whether they’re worth keeping.
• Complete forecasting to see how efficiently the work is tracking compared to estimations, providing projections that indicate whether there’s going to be a financial loss.
By having a centralized model and the ability to collaborate around that model, downtime is minimized. Assets can be properly charged to a job to keep making money and move jobs forward.
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Sign 5:
Lack of visibility
There is nothing more frustrating than having a lack of visibility across a job or project. From capital improvement program owners, to asset owners to contractors, all roles have areas where lack of visibility can cause problems.
Aligning construction management with reporting is so important and is arguably the number one reason to adopt construction management solutions. It’s about making sure there is a system in place that allows for visibility into processes and workflows. This could include tracking things like committed costs, including sub agreements and purchase orders, as well as change orders. Basically, all of the actions that have a unique approval flow within an organization.
It’s essential to have visibility of the stage of each workflow to identify any bottlenecks. If there isn’t a system in place that offers that availability, it's difficult to manage risk, assess change and make improvements.
Once the tracking is established, it’s about leveraging the system. For example, looking at all the projects and documents at once to drill in and compare one aspect across the portfolio.
Essentially, the goal is to have a system that tracks all aspects of a project, knows where everything is and has the ability to pull up an analysis in a construction-specific way.
Trimble has the technology to help with this and is always looking at new ways to connect technology into a process for it to be smarter and to move through faster, allowing everybody to do their jobs better.
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Sign 6:
Slow payables and receivables
Slow payables and receivables cause a trickle down effect—owners are slow to pay the contractors, general contractors are then slower to pay the subcontractors, so on and so forth. This creates frustration and animosity across the board. When people are paid on time (or sooner) they’re happier. They’re also more willing to do high quality work and likely to pick up future contracts with that company.
The goal is to pay people quickly, which is easier said than done. The challenge is to leverage connected hardware and software, and Trimble wants and needs to be able to work with other vendors to make this work for the customer.
By connecting the survey data from Trimble hardware, the model will simultaneously provide daily reports that can automatically feed into the ERP for processing payments. This avoids the problem of having duplicate data entry, which slows things down and creates places for errors that cause troubles with moving that project forward.
The system can provide a project manager with a notice two weeks before their insurance expires, then the controller could get it a week out. That way, everyone’s provided with timely reminders to figure out the needs of the contractors when it comes to payables and receivables. Think of Trimble Construction One as construction-specific layers of defense—a system that provides multiple layers of defense to help payables and receivables as you work with subs and owners.
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Sign 7:
Low margins
The beauty of construction-specific ERP means that all the data is in one spot. This means Trimble can track your original estimated margin, your current estimated margin with approved change orders, your projected margin, and the project team's opinion or the PM's opinion.
We also can compare that to what we might call the projection override, which would be more of the CFO or the team coming in and saying, "I normally work with this PM and they're an optimist," or, "This PM is a sandbagger. I know there's more coming." You can use the personal knowledge of the people to interact with our construction-specific ERP tools to then understand where your margin really is. It's both people and systems that are coming together to help you pinpoint, "What does the system say?"
For example, you can have an enterprise wide report that identifies the contracts where you’ve had a margin fade.
The best companies and the best practices are that information doesn’t get hoarded or that Project Managers feel like it's unsafe to share. The sooner they can expose what's going on and put reality on the ground, the sooner Trimble can figure out how to help and determine what additional courses of actions there are to take.
It's people helping people. Our systems are designed to give you that visibility, so you can have those great conversations.
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Sign 2:
Errors and inefficiencies