Construction Triad in the Information Age
Construction companies take the leap into the internet, adopting software solutions one project at a time.
Understanding that the construction industry exists as a triad is the first step in getting your arms around recognizing the key players in the development of a project. Owners hold one corner, engineers and architects another, and contractors are the third. All three play a critical role in tracking elements of a project differently and assessing data in the way they wish to receive it, and how they will assemble all the final information.
In the early 1990s, a host of handheld PCs (H/PCs), cellular phones (push-to-talk), onsite computers, the internet, and the blossoming generations of software solutions supporting data flow, cost estimating, and project management sparked the competitive nature of construction by further securing the singular, do-or-die goal of on-time completion.
Besides staying on budget, on time completion is undeniably one of the foremost goals of any construction or infrastructure project. Weather delays, supply chain disruptions, change orders, design alterations, and a myriad of potential obstacles typically stand between contractors and their ultimate deadlines and meeting projections.
What started out as The Information Age has evolved into the process of taming the unpredictable and managing the changes that naturally comes with any construction project and is now digital transformation. Today, design, estimating, scheduling, and project-management software has helped the industry implement a host
of preventative measures:
· Catching delays before they balloon into problems.
· Getting the right data to the right people in a timely fashion.
· Cutting the amount of time it takes to initiate, approve, and execute changes.
All the aforementioned automation has already become a major part of today's construction environment and from the start if your computer system wasn’t created to address these issues, it was guaranteed that project managers in the field would be screaming and complaining like a two-year-old having a tantrum.
Even the smallest of contractors in the early days were able to get into the Information Age and be competitive by leveraging computers. But to survive and thrive many were forced to move from paper to computers. Some even kicking and screaming. Despite all the fussing, this technology transition helped the industry slowly move into the Digital Age. Today, many of these very same companies are experimenting in the Era of Experiences with MR (mixed reality), AR (augmented reality), and VR (virtual reality).
Because of competitive demands throughout the 1990s and 2020s the construction industry continues to progress ever so slowly, and we saw how it forced many contractors and subs to automate or fold like yesterday’s news. As an example, government contractors shipped design plans on CDs. To read those plans, a computer was required. The larger GCs forced the smaller ones to survive.
Construction firms need to be more aware of the data and the tech tools if they want to be successful. In the early days, the technology frenzy was driving companies to fight to accept, manage, and act on information. As a result of early adoption, many of the software tools did not get fully adopted. And only pieces of the software did, while the remaining tools sat comfortably on the shelves in the back office.
As the pervasiveness of automation increased, and so did the demands for even more efficiency and greater understanding of the need for technology adoption and the tools to achieve these goals.
For instance, software products to this day are present in almost all aspects of business—accounting, project management, estimating, and creating proposals. Again, in the early days, construction companies had to push software companies to create common APIs (integration between the packages they used, pushing the challenge to software providers to make the information flow even tighter.)
Meeting Deadlines
When it comes to keeping deadlines, time is a commodity. In that respect, on-time completion means saving increments of time at every step of the process. Everything from core decision-making to transferring data from an estimate to a purchase order can fall under scrutiny.
The task of all players involved then becomes assessing the way they do business today, and how those processes can be improved.
For those in construction, the obstacles are abundant. But oddly enough, several of these problems are actually simple issues of ordering more supplies or having to wait out the rain. What complicates things is how these simple problems multiply, becoming layers of delays that can seriously impact completion deadlines and lead to costly overruns.
One of the most fundamental hurdles is the relationship between general contractors and subcontractors. General contractors are quick to blame delays on subcontractors. On the flipside subcontractors report needing more time. And with labor shortages today the problem has only intensified. Toss in the demands of the owners and no soup for you.
Issues arise in communication and developing a clear understanding of what's necessary to complete a task.
Every construction project reveals significant amounts of information and deadlines that must be met. This is where technology proves its value. As a subcontractor you can’t do the work because a change order hasn't been received. Being able to acknowledge that the change-order acceptance did or didn’t get back to you as a subcontractor or that it was scheduled is essential. Software that helps facilitate this exchange is critical.
Another big issue comes in the approval process for requesting a change order. Often, owners change their minds. Take for example, an industrial plant where the process-flow machinery from the owner needs to be changed. Then suddenly, you have to go back and reengineer the job.
Technical advances, it seems, are outpacing the human part of the equation. Hello AI (artificial intelligence). Though the nature of the construction business requires effective communication among all parties, the industry still harbors adversarial relationships. Despite working together there’s not a lot of opportunities to bridge these barriers. But strong communication and cooperation means creating those incremental time savings that can mean the difference between meeting or missing a deadline.
As another example, with change-order requests, all three parties are involved. The owner looks at the request and sends it to the architects and engineers to review for structural concerns. From there, the change order goes back to the owner for approval. Then it goes back to the contractor. That data flow is fraught with opportunities for conflict. The key is to document workflow process and information sharing.
The key to peace in the construction industry is moving toward a higher degree of on-time completion, efficiency, and on-budget. As software moves toward greater levels of integration, those minute savings of time could add up to a new era of efficiency.
The missing link of data transparency during the past decade has proved essential to improving project success in the information phases of construction when integrating general accounting and project estimations.
To this day, there are interfaces. But a plethora of construction companies still complain they can export information from that estimate and import it into an accounting tool, but it is not a clean transfer. Some information is lost or must be recreated. It’s a challenge since the start of the Information Age and it hasn’t been fully resolved in the Digital Age despite who owns the data. And the story continues.