The amount of data handling required in a construction project is enormous. Failing to manage this data easily will have its negative impact on the company and on the project. For that, top construction companies worldwide started to invest in their digital transformation because it has become too risky not to go digital.
Did you Know: Construction is one of the least digitized domain as less than 15% of the industry is using digital technologies in their day to day operations.
McKinsey
The competition in the construction industry specially in the middle east and the economic crisis most of the countries are passing through is forcing the companies to be more agile, lower their operational costs, and be more efficient. Having a proper implementation of a modern ECM solution in a construction company will have the key below related benefits.
Going Paperless
Converting paper based documents into electronic ones in a construction project is vital. Dealing with millions of paper based documents in each project is costly thus the shift to electronic based documents is going to save a lot of time for knowledge workers to search for documents, distribute documents based on a distribution matrix (type of documents vs recipients), and managing security.
Managing Transmittals Seamlessly
In the construction world, a transmittal is a package having set of documents and a cover sheet (summary report) with some signatures.
Some ECM available in the market are giving the ability to electronically send/receive an incoming, outgoing and internal transmittal with notifications to the concerned recipients which proves to be a time saver. In addition to automatically generate the corresponding cover sheet.
Handling the Creation of Batch Documents
Before the mobilization phase starts up until the ECM solution is up and running for a construction projects, a lot of documents are generated.
ECM solutions provide a way to import a lot of documents (in certain cases up to 1000 documents) in one shot with their proper metadata and file attachments. This alone will save money and increase employees productivity.
Process Efficiency
Most companies interested in going digital are searching for ways to lower the cost of their daily operations and be more efficient. We hear a lot about process efficiency, and for good reason. Organizations that work at “the speed of paper” are increasingly being rendered non-competitive and irrelevant. As a result, going paperless to boost process efficiency represent a vital return on investment.
According to AIIM’s new industry watch study, Over 68% of respondents said their organization has saved money and improved process efficiency by digitizing core activities.
As an example, an HR department in a multinational company responsible for over 40.000 employees couldn’t effectively manage their employees government related formalities (residencies, passports validity, ect.) manually and they used to pay millions of dollars on related fines. They invested in an ECM solution having a powerful BPM module which allowed them to automate all their internal processes starting from recruitment by creating workflows, alerts (sms, email notification), and reminders which in total reduced their fines to almost nothing.
Archiving
One of the most important feature to have in ECM for construction companies is archiving.
A modern ECM solution should offer you all the pre-requisites you need for a revision proof archiving of you documents.
Having access to a project related data after its completion is vital and ECM solution can help in this.
OCR – Optical Character Recognition
Wikipedia
Optical character recognition or optical character reader is the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene-photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image
A lot of documents in the construction industry, specially drawings in PDF format, are not OCRed meaning engineers can’t search inside the PDF. Many ECM solution provide the ability to OCR the document automatically when imported to the system for ease of accessibility.
Finally, there is no reason for any company specially in the construction industry to still rely on papers to do their business. It is the right time now to start investing in ECM solution to boost your organization’s performance.
