Construction management software offers an entirely new approach to operating in the building industry. With a comprehensive range of tools, you can implement technology into every stage of your project and reap the benefits of construction management software.
No matter the size or scope of your business, building software is available to help improve efficiency, increase productivity and make your business more profitable. There is a reason why it has found such widespread use in recent years, building software benefits all project stakeholders – delivering better work in a shorter time frame, and saving you money.
So what are all these benefits of construction management software?
Project Management
Keeping track of everything in a construction project is no easy feat. Project management specialists require expertise in a range of skills, including problem-solving, team management, communication, and organisation, to name just a few. Thankfully there is now dedicated construction management software to help out.
One of the most significant benefits of construction management software is the ability to streamline the project management process. Using it allows you to keep track of the whole project from a single platform, with tools to:
- Delegate specific tasks,
- Track budgets,
- Create bids,
- Change orders,
- Schedule and log work,
- Track resources/equipment,
- Produce reports,
- And much more.
With project management software for the construction industry, you also get tools specific to the industry. Whether it is for Building Information Modelling (BIM), technical and contract details particular to construction, or specialist building regulation tools, the benefits of construction management software can meet your requirements.
With construction software’s help, you can reduce the stress of all involved and give your team more time to focus on the actual task of building. It’ll be right there keeping track and showing you the whole picture when it comes to your project.
Communication
As in every industry, communication is key to success. A study by the Project Management Institute (PMI) found poor communication was the primary cause of project failure one-third of the time.
Within construction, a significant proportion of the problems that arise are due to simple miscommunication. It makes sense, construction projects require a lot of people, and every one of them has to have a clear understanding of their job.
What are they being asked to do? How are they going to do it? And when does it have to be completed? Communicating this to all parties involved is challenging, and any ambiguity leads to problems.
Construction software provides simple real-time communication to produce greater collaboration in the office and on-site. There are various strategies you can implement to improve your communication depending on your companies preference. Whether you just want to install clear communication channels for different teams or are looking for something more involved, like a team dashboard or shared calendar.
The advantage of construction software to team communication become self-evident once implemented. Greater communication means an increase in efficiency, accountability, and transparency, helping to ensure a successful project completed on time.
Document Control / Information Access
Construction projects require a whole host of time-consuming paperwork. However, you can remove the paper and utilise digital document control that works for you with construction management software.
The days of managing physical documents and storing them in file cabinets are long gone. The industry is turning to cloud-based document management systems that make it easy to securely store and access all the information for your project wherever you are. Critical project documents are never lost, and audit trails identify who created or made changes to each document.
You may have already gone paperless. You created your own system of spreadsheets and text documents; why do you need to change to construction management software?
With your own system, you risk turning yourself into a data silo and becoming a single point of failure for the project. Collaborating with others and sharing documentation is more complex and time-consuming; documentation is stored on the project managers local hard drive or dispersed throughout the company network.
The benefits of construction management software for document control mean all information is stored in a single place easily accessible to all of the project’s stakeholders.
Budgeting
Budgeting for a construction project can be a long and drawn-out process. But it’s essential that before you begin a new project, you make sure you come out the other side with a profit.
Efficiently managing a construction project in the 21st century means using budgeting tools. Construction management software offers a range of functionality designed to improve every aspect of a project’s finances. Estimating, bid proposals, forecasting, expenses, accounting, invoicing, and more, construction management software can help you simplify how you handle it all.
- Improve the accuracy and consistency of your estimating
- Receive real-time actual vs budget costs throughout the project
- Track how jobs are being completed to ensure costs don’t overrun
- Analyse your data from historical projects to help you in the present
The budgeting benefits of construction management software simplify how you oversee your project’s financial side, providing you with better cost estimates and reducing the chances of any monetary mishaps.
Building software benefits can be measured in practice. Research by Capterra found that the time frame for estimating is more than twice the time without using construction management software.
Save Money
At the end of the day, the decision about whether or not to integrate construction management software into your business will likely come down to money. Does the cost of the software get recouped by increasing profit?
A report from FMI found that respondents in the construction industry spent on average 35% of their time on non-productive activities. Things like searching for information, resolving conflicts, and dealing with mistakes. These are all things which are helped considerably with the use of construction management software.
Improving your project management, communication, and information access, minimises issues that arise due to human error and a lack of data. Construction management software allows your team to complete tasks faster and more accurately. This leads to increased productivity and efficiency, meaning you get better work completed in a shorter amount of time.
Some More Benefits of Construction Management Software
- Risk Assessment – A building site is a hazardous place. Construction management software can help assess and report risks, maintain and update an organised safety documentation system, and implement safety regulations.
- Resource Management – Whether it is your workers or materials and equipment, construction projects require good resource management to be effective. Using building software allows you to track, analyse, and organise your resources to determine the optimum approach for a given project.
- Flexibility – With construction management software, you can adapt to different projects and quickly react to any surprises that occur during the project. Effectively and rapidly changing plans to fit the new realities of your project.
- Process Standardisation – With technology to help, you can produce standardised methods for each process of your project. Streamline how you execute and simplify the learning curve for new employees.
- Project Analytics – One final advantage of construction software is the ability to record every single detail of the project to learn from in the future. Analysing past data helps improve future practices.
A good construction software makes use of good project management functionality, estimate and financial/accounting tool functionality, job management, scheduling and planning and support functionalities and more. WunderBuild is a construction management software that aims to provide all of these functionalities and more to bring out the best outcomes for a project.
It is currently offering a free trial, visit here to try WunderBuild for free.
