Is Your Construction Firm Using Modern Software?

Of course you are! MS Office and the internet! How could you possibly cope without Word, Outlook, Excel and Project? Bet most of your staff that are on site even have these modern smart phones that take photos so they don’t need a camera as well!Oh, come off it! That software came out 40 years-ago and phones that took photos at least 20 years ago! If your firm is that “with it” I’ll bet you are also using very old versions of MS Windows and Office, too!

To go along with that you’ll still have mountains of paperwork to deal with every day on all you sites as well as in Head Office. The cost of that is horrendous! I reckon that, in my site management days, I spent two hours a day just sorting out the incoming paperwork and getting it distributed and/or filed away. Site offices have to be larger, or one each for S.M. and QS, just to make space for the filing cabinets, shelves and lever arch files to stick it in. Similarly in Head Office, but there you also have to find somewhere to use as archive space to store it for 6 years to keep the Tax Man happy! How much does an additional square meter of office space for this set you back every month?

Then, just to make things even more expensive with the paperwork, it often doesn’t get filed away in the right place or doesn’t even get filed at all! On one wonderfully profitable job – (for me on £650 a day) – I spent three days before managed to find the response giving the information asked for in an RFI. Nearly £2,000 looking for one piece of paper!

So what is this “modern software”? Well, Microsoft Office although very good, is a “one size fits all” software. In construction we wouldn’t like to be without it. These days, though, there is “modern” software written specifically for the construction industry. This is written to allow things like a Build Program, compiled using MS Project, to simply be imported into it. Once it is that Build Program is available to everyone involved in a specific project. Everyone, these days has a PC, tablet or smart phone immediately to hand, and they can all put the appropriate App on them. Then everyone knows where the project has got to and what they should be doing next. Subbies turn up on site when they are needed and the QS can bang out invoices and pay bills just like that.

But “modern” construction software goes a lot further than just that! It allows for every piece of documentation relating to a project to be held in the Cloud so that absolutely everyone involved in the project has instant access to everything they need to know. Paperwork goes out of the window and time and space are saved – along with money! Profits go up; build time comes down; your firm’s reputation goes up, too! Commercially confidential stuff can still be kept in paper form.

I’ll conclude with a question – and I’m guessing you know the answer becauseyouare reading this here – Which “modern software” is best for your construction firm? Well there is only one which does absolutely everything for you: – GenieBelt Go get it and enjoy the benefits!