Reducing the admin burden for foremen: How construction apps can help save time

How much time do you and your crew lose each day because you’re stuck working on time-consuming administrative tasks?

If you’re like most foremen and site managers, it’s more than you’d like to admit—construction professionals spend over one-third of their time on non-productive activities.

As a result, on-site activities get delayed, causing you to miss deadlines and go over budget trying to make up for that wasted time.

One of the best ways to save time wasted by administrative burdens is to use a construction foreman app.

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5 admin burdens foremen face and how a foreman app can help

Your duties as a foreman go far beyond simply supervising what happens on your construction sites. You’re responsible for coordinating and delegating tasks between contractors and subs, developing and managing budgets, resolving miscommunications and conflicts, and much more.

All of these take up a large portion of your time each day. But what if there were a way to significantly reduce the time you spend on these tasks?

Enter construction management software for foremen. Here are a few key ways a foreman app can help reduce your administrative burden:

1. Preparing the project site

Your list of responsibilities as a construction foreman is a long one—and it only seems to grow as your projects progress.

The top priorities on your list likely relate to site preparation, which involves a whole slew of administrative tasks that take away your focus from more important things.

There’s nothing that wastes quite as much of your time as interruptions of on-site activities. If you want to get that time back, you’ll want to look into a foreman app that helps you work lean.

Software can help you skip the admin work by optimising your schedules from the get-go, filling in gaps on delayed activities easily, and moving resources around to where they’re needed most.

2. Tracking project progress

Many construction companies and foremen still use manual processes to track project progress, even with a number of technologies available to make it easier and more efficient.

Are you still tracking on-site progress with analogue tools that silo data in separate systems?

Are you tired of wasting time creating long reports in the office only to find that they’re outdated by the time you get back to the jobsite?

As a foreman, utilising construction management software to track the progress of a construction project can greatly improve efficiency and organisation. With real-time updates, you can easily monitor the status of tasks and make informed decisions. This can also help you identify potential delays and take corrective actions before they impact the project timeline. Overall, incorporating construction management software into your workflow can streamline project management and lead to successful project completion.

The solution is to use a foreman app like LB Aproplan to manage defects easily on your mobile, establish a single source of truth and start tracking everything on the go from any device.

3. Keeping everyone in sync

If you’ve ever run a project where teams couldn’t seem to stay in sync with each other, you know that bringing everyone together is more than challenging—and staying on spec, on time, and on budget becomes almost impossible.

So instead of chasing subs and turning what should be quick reports into long daily chores, use a foreman app to sync your teams on the cloud: Stay on top of potential constraints and delays before they happen.

Construction apps for foremen, like LB Geniebelt, act as a real-time planning companion, allowing you to broadcast any changes in planning to every contractor and sub immediately.

4. Creating and sharing reports

We like to think we can remember all of the important things that happen on our construction sites—documenting everything is a huge administrative burden that we can ignore by keeping everything in our heads, right?

Wrong.

But there is another way to get rid of that burden: using a foreman app like all LetsBuild construction management apps to create and share reports from anywhere with a single click.

Mobile field reporting saves you time on administrative tasks by keeping everyone in the loop, ensuring you can respond to claims quickly and enabling you to submit updates or questions to key stakeholders instantly. Having a centralised database of project information can make it easier to review progress, analsze data, and report to stakeholders, without having to go back to the office to fill in information reports.

You might also like: Daily progress reports in construction: Cutting down on the admin work

5. Maintaining seamless communication

You might’ve noticed that every way a foreman app helps save time on administrative tasks has something in common: Each one improves different facets of communication.

Miscommunication is the single biggest time waste and the most common cause of cost overruns and missed deadlines for construction foremen, and the solution is simple: implementing construction-specific software to record, store, and share all of your project information in a single place.

With a construction management app for foremen, you can eliminate the confusion that comes from sending and receiving mass emails and WhatsApp messages and streamline communication between stakeholders.

The result is less time spent on administrative duties and more time spent on site.

Reduce your admin burdens with the app designed for foremen

Many foremen use general-purpose software like WhatsApp and Excel for tracking progress, sharing reports, communicating with teams and stakeholders, etc. And while these apps can be valuable tools for certain tasks, they aren’t enough to replace construction-specific solutions or reduce the time you spend on administrative burdens.

Construction management software does what those solutions can’t—it provides a real-time view of your projects, a way to track progress and create reports from anywhere, a single source of truth for your data, and more. All of which can significantly cut down on your time spent on admin tasks.

So stop wasting time; see how we can speed up your administrative tasks, or try our app for free today.

Written by LetsBuild

Last updated April 04, 2024