Construction workers are durable, efficient, tough, and pragmatic – virtually everything paper isn’t. So it’s only right we give the workers who’ve literally built our society insight on the benefits of the paperless document management world. That said, these eight pointers on extracting insight from data via DMS in the construction industry will help construction company owners, managers, and workers earn the most return on investment for going paperless.
[layerslider id=”76″]Store and Retrieve Site Plans in a Timely, Secure Manner
Although many construction projects last for months and sometimes years on end, many of these projects are replicated in different places with similar streets and surrounding architectures, making the tracking and secure storage of site blueprint standards important. DMS can also help construction companies securely store algorithms for site-specific procedures and traffic routing methods while keeping these project plans retrievable from the cloud/on-site.
Simplifying Combinatorics-Based Workflows
Thanks to DMS, architects and drafters needn’t limit themselves to paper-based combinatorics any longer, for DMS helps create and track combinatorics-based workflows inherent to the construction industry. This digitizes the workflow process, increasing accountability for each task completed. After all, a blueprint for workflow is important given that moving a crane an extra inch over the span of many projects can impute to significant costs in short periods of time.
Make Visual Data Accessible from the Worksite
Visual data has redefined the construction industry in the past decade, helping construction companies bring planning-intensive projects to fruition. Visualizing big data makes extracting insight from this data a small task, particularly with the versioning, cloud capacity, and easy file retrieval that DMS provides construction companies.
Tracking and Sharing Risk Information
When it comes to mitigating risk in the construction industry, workers merely wearing hardhats won’t cut it. Cloud-based DMS breaks down the walls to the risk information insight which previously plagued the construction industry circa 20th century – when paper was still paramount. Furthermore, when paper was paramount, traditional filing for site risk information equaled forgetting it was there to begin with. DMS’s file retention and deletion features ensure that only necessary information is kept in the system, reducing clutter and making mission-critical files accessible.
Consolidated Reporting
In order to make data driven decisions, companies need automated information; otherwise, they will be looking in the rearview mirror at data irrelevant to their industry. This is especially important given the number of changes occurring within the construction industry on a daily basis. DMS’s file tracking, exporting, and importing features facilitate quick report generation for new sets of data.
Alerts and Notifications
Alerts and notifications tell construction/project managers when tasks are completed, unmet, or disrupted. Given DMS’s capacity to digitize workflow tasks, notifications regarding these workflows can keep managers privy to bottlenecks in workflow, including who, if anyone, is responsible for these bottlenecks – keeping workers accountable and processes efficient.
Analytics
Data is useless without structure, and unfortunately, 80 percent of information in the average organization is unstructured – the construction industry being no exception. But where there’s structure, there’s the capacity for accurate analytics, and DMS has already paved significant inroads to information analytics in many industries, helping organizations derive analytics from documents and content.
Accurate Budgeting for New Projects
DMS not only helps track budgeting efforts by making expenses information more accessible and easily retrievable, it provides greater room on the balance sheet’s bottom line to better allocate financial resources. However, the prior of these two is specific to the construction industry. Tracking expenses and analyzing these expenses in tandem with the workflow process can help construction managers identify unneeded steps in project completion, cutting costs and reducing time spent on-site for construction.