From schools to hospitals, intersections to bridges, public sector construction projects can’t afford to be delivered late, over-budget, or entail costly rework. Yet, too often, they do – and the reason is usually down to a lack of communication between stakeholders and teams on the jobsite. Outdated plans, version control errors, data silos, disconnected teams, and poor visibility into key project information, all combine to negatively impact quality in the field.
The disconnected jobsite
There are many stakeholders involved in any construction project: architects, designers, engineers, subcontractors, superintendents, city and state officials, and so on. In the trailer or at the office, the paper trail is immense. Any attempt to integrate the information and data is a struggle, and this leads to a disconnected, and highly manual, job site.
Here are just some of the challenges
- Documents rarely conform to a single naming convention, so each one must be inspected and renamed by a document manager.
- The document manager must also ensure that all parties on the site have the information that is most relevant to them – made complicated by the lack of access by teams to the file system.
- Superintendents need instant access to the latest models to mark up and direct work. Yet, 63% of construction professionals rely on manual paper-based processes or spreadsheets instead of digital models.
Digital processes are great, but come with their own challenges
Paper-based methods are a huge pain. Tracking becomes a challenge, knowing whether an issue has been resolved and which still needs to be addressed is complex. That’s why 49% of construction professionals say they are beginning to move away from paper to digital processes, but these bring their own challenges. Too often one stakeholder is using a certain software while others are using a different one, and rarely do these disparate tools integrate. This simply repeats the same old problem of version control, a lack of access to the latest information across teams, and even security and compliance issues. Without access to a single body of data, teams turn to cloud storage solutions to manage and share data.
The value of a common data platform
What if teams had a single source of information for a project? One that let them access, mark-up, and share up-to-date documents or add comments to plans and models – even if the originals weren’t in your organization’s native file formats. A secure, cloud-based shared workspace that lets stakeholders access all current documents, updated in real-time, without depending on a document manager.
It looks something like this:
But how does it come together and what essential capabilities must it check off? Read A Beginners Guide to Connecting Construction Data and Documents and learn how you can connect your jobsite to increase efficiencies, improve quality, and reduce risk.
