Leverage your information

As the economy takes it bumps in the residential sector, commercial construction continues strong, at least for the near term. Contractors I have talked with report strong business on the books, but have been through economic downturns in the past. Although they aren’t certain we’re in for a sharp downfall in commercial construction in the next 12 months, the savvy contractors and project managers are looking for ways to remain competitive in good times and bad.

My dad always said that revenue can cover for a whole lot of sins and inefficiencies. With the boom in commercial construction the last few years, most contractors have been far too busy working on projects and meeting delivery dates to think about looking for ways to make their operations run more smoothly and profitably.

There’s a coming revolution in commercial construction, and it has to do with data capture and leverage.

Current in-house systems for contractors make the Tower of Babel look like an easy job. The programs – accounting, estimating, engineering, scheduling, coordination with outside vendors and subcontractors – were pretty much built in a vacuum, creating silos of information. It’s hard to quickly move information from one phase or department to another and back again without extensive importing and exporting data, if it’s possible at all.

That’s slowly changing. At a recent national trade show, the information management companies comprised a much larger portion of the trade show than I have ever seen. Many of them have interfaces with other programs so information sharing is getting easier. No matter what the economy is doing or going to do, contractors who embrace this revolution will win in more ways than one.

For example, the Building Information Modeling story shares how one contractor is building projects virtually first, ironing out almost all the challenges before the problems rear their expensive and ugly heads.

Contractors who find ways to push more of this data to the field in a real-time fashion will reap benefits in fewer change orders, faster build time and hopefully more to the bottom line.