The return on investment for construction companies that deploy mobile computing technology is considerable. Visibility into projects and the processes that drive or derail them increases not only instantly but in most cases exponentially. This is followed by an ability to better manage costs, bid on future projects with a far greater degree of accuracy, and last but not least, reduce or eliminate employee theft which connects back to better cost management.
As mobile technology continues to become the default means of communicating, those not making the move to mobile may appear out of step with the rest of society. The Pew Research Center recently found that 87 percent of adults in the U.S. own a cell phone and research on the impact of visual networking applications conducted by Cisco shows that grew by 81 percent in 2012.
These statistics prove what we already know that mobile technology is an integral part of daily life, and it's becoming more so. People know how to use mobile devices and the apps that work with them. Not surprisingly, they take it for granted that the construction company they've hired will take an integrated, automated approach to conveying critical information about costs, scheduling, materials and other project-related issues. In fact, potential clients are bound to react with suspicion once they see that the company they're considering conducts business with clipboards.
Improving Visibility for Construction Project Management
When it comes to missing deadlines and exceeding budgets, lack of visibility is often the number one culprit. That's because it's almost impossible to make a decision about what something will cost and how long it will take without accurate information. One of the biggest benefits of mobile technology is that it enables a view of how specific things are trending before they become problematic.
By automating the tracking of how many work hours are being spent on what jobs, as well as the rates of pay for each person on the crew, it's easy to see, that an excavation that's only 30 percent complete has already consumed 53 percent of the budget allocated to it and then adjust accordingly.
Another benefit of improved visibility is that it helps better manage unit costs. A foreman can use a mobile device to log where employees are spending hours and therefore see where the problems are or, more importantly, where they are likely to occur. With unit costs fluctuating wildly based on the makeup of the crew, the ability to track onsite enables the foreman to substitute more expensive crew members with those whose hourly rate is lower on jobs that don't require the experience level of more senior employees.
Accounting Manager, Priscilla Gutierrez with AUI Contractors, noted an immediate benefit following the implementation of a mobile field to office solution stating:
"One thing that came as a nice surprise was a boost in productivity in regards to tracking and entering production units from the field. By entering production units, we can get information out to our supervisors easier. Within the application, there's a calculation section that can be filled out with production units. Those units back fill other fields and shows how many days and how many people a job might take. It projects what a job might look like if you kept the same number of people on a job and how many units you would produce at the end of the week. This has been really helpful from a productivity standpoint and the guys in the field love it because they can get real time information right up front."
Improved Bidding for Construction Project Management
Solid and dependable integration is key to a mobile solution. With solid integration in place, what happens on job sites is precisely reflected in the company's main system that information is extracted from for bidding. Examples of the kind of data that should be easily and quickly accessible range from a simple view of what materials were required for similar projects in the past to complete and accurate labor costs. That task is often the most complex part of bid creation for companies that still track hours and costs manually. That makes it relatively easy for costs to be attributed to the incorrect jobs or phases, either accidentally or as a way of reconciling disparate items within the overall budget. Of course, while shifting costs from an item that ran over budget to one that came in under its projection may solve a short-term problem by making the project as a whole appear to have been completed on budget, but in the long run the inaccuracy of data makes it even more difficult to accurately estimate what a similar project will cost a client. A properly integrated mobile solution all but eliminates that problem.
Improved Cost Management for Construction Project Management
A good mobile solution will contribute significantly to a construction company's ability to better manage its own costs and, at the same time, pass the value on to its clients. Cutting administrative costs is one of the areas where smart use of a good mobile solution can have a measurable impact.
For many construction companies, mobile computing occurs when a crew member scrawls his hours on the underside of a 2x4, snaps a picture of it with his cell phone and then e-mails it to the main office, where the time is entered into a spreadsheet. Time sheets are also transmitted to the main office via a manually drafted e-mail message or written out on paper and delivered by car, bike messenger or on foot. There are obvious costs associated with these methods of delivery, primarily the time the people involved are spending on it, but the repetition of manual processes presents yet another opportunity for often costly errors to occur.
Colleen Miller of River City Construction stated the following about streamlining crew time capture after their adoption of a mobile field solution:
"Our field supervisors would have to hand write on a time sheet each employee, and then break out the hours by cost code. This would sometimes cause them 2 hours a day just filling out time sheets on the larger projects with 30 to 40 field employees. Before switching to a mobile solution, it would take one employee 4 days to enter time for contract jobs and that has been reduced to 2 hours. The other employee that entered time and material hours, went from 3 days of entering time down to 6 hours."
Reducing equipment costs is another area where a quality mobile solution can earn its keep. Many construction companies complain about renting a piece of equipment only to learn later that what they needed was sitting idle at a job site less than five miles away. When all the equipment is accounted for in a system that's easy to update from job sites in real time, a project manager who needs a specific piece of equipment can run a report to quickly determine if it's available before renting one instead.
Theft Reduction
By providing a deep view of who is doing what, and when and where, construction companies that deploy mobile solutions are able to immediately eliminate the 3 to 5 percent of the payroll normally lost to theft. That's because a quality mobile solution identifies the crew member as part of the time keeping process. Identifying which crew member is entering time can happen in numerous ways. One popular option is the use of tablets with GPS stamping capabilities, which identify the geographic location where the time is being entered, eliminating the practice of crew members checking in for jobs from their own homes or coffee shops. Other options include swiping ID cards and fingerprint scans.
Summary
The bottom line is that gathering information from the field onsite using today's smartphones, tablets and laptops, and then sending that data to the back office for analysis, helps improve project management all around and the completion of construction projects on time and on budget.
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