I spoke with a contractor management customer this week who discussed with me in detail a recent example of how one single report from the contractor management software saved tens of thousands of dollars on an ongoing construction project.
The project has hundreds of contractors on location daily, this means there are also dozens of companies on location every single day working around each other throughout the location. Reminds a lot of the Block and more recently the block sky high when I watch this addictive show with my kids.
It is obviously a massive job to manage dozens of contracting companies and hundreds of contractors daily, keeping an eye on everything that is going must be a real challenge when projects go into the tens of millions. The only way to manage such huge volumes of data is with systems, it is not possible today to manage such large volumes of data manually. We know many construction companies and many other types of companies still manage data manually as we talk to them every day, what is often quite surprising talking to these companies is the view that not much gets past the manual system.
Many have said well before me if you can’t measure you can’t manage. I can think of quite a few recent examples of why companies actually made contact with us in the first place and will detail just one of these below.
Recent example – 4 hours across 3 days to put together a manual report requested by management.
A construction company using manual systems had around 150 employees and contractors on site daily, a manager who made contact with me was given a task to report on how many hours a contracting company and the contractors working for the company had completed in the previous quarter. After 3 days of time, many interruptions, starting and stopping through the manual collection and calculations of the information required eventually he delivered to his boss….. but not before he virtually wasted 4 hours over three days bring the information together.
This manager called in looking for a better way for the future so he did not have to waste hours chasing information that he knew he could have at his fingertips.
Imagine if you could have this information at your fingertips in 2 minutes and not 4 hours over 3 days….that is what a contractor management system will deliver.
Back to our customer, when asked by management to check and report on some hours a contracting company and the contractors working for the company had invoiced 3 months earlier the manager had the information in his hands in minutes. When checked against invoices for a period of time 3 months earlier, massive discrepancies totaling tens of thousands of dollars were found and dealt with.
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