Every successful construction project requires the collaboration of a lot of people and an investment of a great deal of money. To optimize the ROI of any project, it is imperative that both communication and business processes run smoothly and efficiently, hand-in-hand.
Digitizing the flow of document, drawings, specifications and work orders between stakeholders on a construction project will provide several benefits including standardizing of process and record keeping, as well as saving time, reducing costs, increasing processing speed and eliminate frustrating and tedious steps in the process.
Every phase of a construction project requires a solid foundation of communication so that the various stakeholders in that project are not operating at cross purposes or with out-of-date information.
Just think about how disastrous it could be if a change in plans is made on a project, but the contractors on the jobsite don’t get the update before they start digging the foundation or pouring the concrete because the new plans got lost?
And what happens if the right permits and approvals are not in place according to a project’s timeline? If the wrong people are out of the loop on that information, your company could get in real legal hot water for beginning construction while out of compliance with local laws and ordinances.
To be fair, these are fringe cases. But smaller problems can stack up and be just as costly as these hypothetical large issues. And every work stoppage because your crew needs to wait for approvals or contracts to go through cuts into your potential profit margin.
The key to protecting your organization’s profits from this kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts is instituting a comprehensive construction document management system. This is a system that can handle and facilitate access to everything from blueprints to contracts to payroll and beyond.
So, how can you implement a system for construction document control that will increase efficiency and effective communication between all parts of your business, including between your staff and your subcontractors? And what specific benefits make the effort worthwhile?
What is Meant by Document Management?
Before getting into the specifics of document management for construction, we need to look at what document management and systems for document management are. Understanding the basics will help make the specific benefits more clear.
A document management system is the latticework of processes and organizational steps you put in place to generate, store, and track all of the important documents that are a company’s lifeblood.
In the past, the only option for managing documents was physical. Contracts, approvals, permits, and on and on were sorted and stored in filing cabinets. Any change in plans could result in big delays because the forms had to be created, sent to the relevant stakeholder, and physically signed and returned.
Even with faxes or scans of physical copies, the wait times on these systems could cause a ripple of delays that could throw off a project’s timeline beyond any planned wiggle room. And if there was changeover in office staff, they might change the entire storage system without telling anyone, making it practically impossible to track down important documents quickly.
With digital document management in construction, that wait time and the inefficiencies that build up around it are mitigated. With the right choice of software and optimized usage of that software, you can trim more fat off of your processes and workflows than you would ever expect.
Challenges Faced by Construction in Document Management
The construction industry faces some unique document management needs in comparison to other industries. The necessary collaboration between company staff with outside contractors, subcontractors, architects, suppliers, and regulatory bodies along with the sheer amount of capitol that goes into a construction project means there are a lot of documents that need management.
Construction project documentation includes many different types of content. Each step from choosing the designer whose plans will be at the heart of the project to establishing the budget and timeline to accepting bids from general contractors and subcontractors to getting all necessary approvals—it all requires documentation.
And it’s important that your documentation can be tracked in case of an audit. With the amount of money involved and the regulatory hoops through which one must jump to get a building built, it’s important that you be able to show auditors that everything is in compliance.
Keeping track of your history with outside contractors is also a challenge that can be handled by your document management system. You can quickly research past bids from potential contractors to see how you have rated them in the past and how well you have worked together in the past.
A good document management system will also help track progress on a project through progress reports that can include checklists based on timeline goals as well as pictures and video of the jobsite.
Between bids, plans, contracts, budget approvals, permit approvals, payroll, administrative work, and inspection forms, the documentation that needs to be accurately completed and stored for a construction project is voluminous.
That’s why a system for document management in construction is so important.
Benefits of Document Management
It’s clear that any construction project requires a great deal of documentation—including many different kinds of documents. So how can upgrading to a high quality document management software platform benefit a construction firm?
The first major benefit is speed. It is so much faster to find the documents you are looking for when they are stored digitally and made discoverable via metadata. Being able to type in a few key words and pull up all the relevant documents you need in seconds is, obviously, faster and more efficient than rummaging through file drawers.
Augmenting your system with eSignature functionality also keeps your business moving quickly. Something like Dropbox Sign allows stakeholders to send and sign documents from anywhere, including directly from the jobsite.
A quality system for document management in construction will also allow for the storage of document templates and can facilitate the automated generation of key documents. These functions help reduce the risk of human error in document generation while still improving efficiency over more analog methods of document creation.
Another benefit of document management for construction businesses is the creation of a single source of truth across all vectors of a construction project. Your document management system takes every document related to a construction project and makes it searchable and accessible to every key stakeholder—depending on the permissions they have been granted.
Not every stakeholder on a project should have access to every document. Some things must be kept confidential. Your document management software will allow you to set permissions to ensure that everyone has access to the information they need without seeing materials that are not meant for their eyes.
With document management in construction, your company can track progress on approvals and important milestones in real time. Automated notifications can be established to alert stakeholders to completed signature requests, confirmation of approvals, and on and on.
Essentially, by embracing document management software, you create an environment in which all stakeholders in a construction project can keep up-to-date on all aspects of the project that are relevant to them from a single source of truth while eliminating costly wait times and inefficiencies that crop up in obsolete processes.
Implementing Your Document Management System
Once you have decided to streamline your processes with document management technology, you have to actually put it in place. What do you need to know in order to optimize your use of document management in construction?
First, it is important to remember that you don’t need to handle everything on your own. TEAM IM has experts with decades of experience in implementing and upgrading content management systems—and we have (along with our partners) developed platforms specifically geared to the construction industry.
In order to create an effective document management system, you will need to migrate your existing documents into the cloud. This way, you can pull up relevant records going back into your company’s history with the same speed and efficiency that you will be able to search documents created in your new management system.
TEAM IM has a great track record of facilitating content migration, so while that is happening, you can focus on outlining your company’s processes across the lifespan of a project. You’ll want to be very detailed.
This is because the more detailed and clearly you establish your existing processes, the easier it will be to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies that can be improved or even eliminated through automation.
This effort of detailing your processes also helps establish how to identify what documents are required for which parts of a construction project and who needs what permissions to access which documents.
By identifying who has access to what, you are able to establish a single source of truth for everyone involved in your construction project as well as establishing a secure environment for your confidential documents.
You can then incorporate your eSignature solution. This is key to optimizing your document management. A Dropbox Sign approval request can be sent out and returned in a fraction of the time that a hard copy of an approval request could be sent around, signed, and returned—even if that approval form is faxed or scanned into a PDF to be emailed around, an eSignature is still faster.
By migrating your content, detailing your processes, incorporating document approval software that includes an eSignature solution, and working with experts who can help optimize your utilization of your new management system, you can begin to reap the benefits of your document management in construction system.
Choosing Your Document Management System
You may recognize the value of a system that can handle construction management document approval and keep your various teams on the same page thanks to a unified, single source of truth, but how do you select the right system for your company?
There are several enterprise document management systems out there. To find the right one for you, the first step is to do a sort of inventory of your needs as a business. This system is going to affect every aspect of your company, so you need to be sure you understand the needs you want to address in the short-term and in the long-term.
To put it another way, you want your document management solution to not only streamline and improve your current processes, you want it to be scalable. It doesn’t do you much good if your system falls apart as your business grows.
When looking for your document control system, it is important that you work with someone who has enough experience to recognize needs that you may not recognize. Again, this system will touch every corner of your organization so you want to make the right call the first time to avoid pitfalls during your transition.
Leveraging the experience TEAM IM provides can ensure that your new document management system will meet your needs and be primed to scale with your business as it grows.
And TEAM IM’s expertise is not limited to general software recommendations. We have dug deep into the ins and outs of the construction industry to identify the challenges unique to that industry and ensure that any document management system we help you with will address those challenges.
We can help you recognize what system for document management in construction will be right for you based on the current size of your organization, the number of people that will need to access your platform both internally and externally, potential for scalability, security, and more.
You Have Nothing to Lose but Inefficiency
Every construction project requires a hefty monetary investment and the profit margins can be pretty slim. By investing in the right document management system, you can streamline your processes to eliminate those little things that cut into your profits bit by bit.
The cost of printing, mailing, copying, and storing paper copies of the myriad documents required in any project takes a hefty chunk out of your bottom line over time. Those costs are all but eliminated by transitioning away from analog document management.
Finding a system for document management in construction that meets your short-term and long-term needs allows you to keep every stakeholder in your project on the same page because you will have a single source of truth. That all but eliminates the problems that can arise from miscommunications.
Leveraging the power of an eSignature solution such as Dropbox Sign as part of your document management system drastically reduces wait times that arise when stakeholders need approvals to advance your construction project.
Document management in construction allows you to mitigate or eliminate the little things that build up to hurt your profits. And by working with TEAM IM, you can rest assured that you will get the right solution for your current needs and future success.
Don’t waste anymore time with inefficient practices that are vulnerable to human error. Let the excerpts at TEAM IM show you how the right document management system can transform your bottom line.
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