Sometimes despite putting in the best of your efforts, achieving the desired improvement in profitability seems to be a challenge. This in a way implies that there are certain deceptions in the operational methods that are restricting your business from achieving its complete efficiency. A construction business functions through a distributed team.
Thus, in order to maintain efficiency and productivity within the team, it is necessary to remove the barriers that reduce the field visibility for the service manager. without having proper field visibility, the service manager won’t be able to regulate the team and their operations with accuracy. This can lead to problems like scheduling conflicts, service delays, miscommunication, overhead costs, and others.
Certainly, many things can be done to improve the situation, but at the current times, automation is one must solution that effectively helps in the managing of field services like a construction business. This article describes how construction management software facilitates automation in the construction business at various fronts and helps in overcoming various operational challenges, and also improves the profitability of the business.
How Automation Intensifies Profitability By Demoting Operational Challenges
Know Your Costs With Accuracy
The fundamental measure to profit-making is to accurately quote the cost of your service. For this, it is necessary to have a definite idea of the costs that will be incurred in the process of service delivery. There must be some process in place to track the costs like travel expenses, inventory procurement, and stocking charges, labor charges, employee benefits, tools & equipment depreciation, overhead costs, etc, but if the tracking is manual then it is not efficient enough, because that doesn’t guarantee accuracy. Construction software can adequately conduct cost analysis in an automated mode that helps you with accurate cost estimates. This allows you to rightly quote your services.
Schedule More Jobs Per Day
To lock more profits, your field members need to accomplish more jobs per day. Construction project management software facilitates smarter and automated job scheduling and maintains an organized workflow in the system. Automation-enabled smart job scheduling is necessary for maintaining the productivity of the field crew and minimizing downtimes.
Using the software, the service manager can schedule jobs among the field crew by taking into consideration aspects such as location proximity, travel time, field agent’s availability, inventory stock status, delivery priority, etc. This is possible because the construction scheduling software provides the service manager with real-time field visibility.
For his distributed team also he can maintain remote field visibility and track which agent is working at which location, when the job is likely to get wrapped up, if any field worker is traveling, then the manager can know in real-time is on-road activities like where he is stopping by and for how much time, etc. Field visibility and smart job scheduling ensure close monitoring of the field crew’s performances, timely completion of jobs, which means more jobs can be accomplished in one day.
Minimize Travel Time
Long travels mean high gas or fuel costs. Using the construction software, optimal route plans can be prepared for field agents. This ensures that they travel across multiple locations without taking detours, long routes, or getting caught in traffic jams. Also, the software enables the manager to real-time track the locations of each field worker. Thus, instead of randomly assigning a job to a field worker who is miles away from a specific job destination, the job can be assigned to the nearest available field worker. This lessens the travel time and saves on fuel/ gas costs.
Don’t Stock Inventory for Long
Inventory management is integral to the construction business. However, keeping unused inventory stocks in the warehouse is like blocking your capital money as it is a tied-up capital. So, it is important to maintain the inventory in a smart way ensuring that the inventory in the warehouse gets used at the shortest possible time. For this, it is important to rightly track the inventory requirement. Proper tracking is also required to secure that no service gets dawdled because of the unavailability of inventory stocks.
Theconstruction software is one vested solution that makes inventory keeping seamless by automating the inventory tracking process. The software can automate the tracking across the supply chain also. It provides the inventory manager real-time field visibility of what is the requirement for the confirmed projects, and what can be the requirement for upcoming projects. It helps the manager to track the in-transit progress.
The construction software is also a smart tool that helps in creating robust need-analysis reports using its inbuilt analytics that help in better understanding of inventory requirement trends, which is necessary for strategic buying of inventory stocks in the future.
Call To Action
Automation of construction operational processes is needed because that brings inaccuracy in the system, makes the processes much prompt, automatically maintains records of everything, reduces the scope of manual error or manipulation, brings in transparency in the system, and increases everyone’s accountability. All these factors improve the efficiency and productivity of the overall business.
