The Great Wall of China, one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, is one of the most remarkable structures on our planet and is arguably one of the largest construction projects in history. Built to fortify China’s northern border, it’s between 5,500 and 13,170 miles long—for perspective, the United States is 2,800 miles wide. Work on the wall began in the 7th century BC and continued for 2,000 years!
Sometimes, the journey to automate your construction organization with modern technology feels about as daunting as building an insanely long wall to keep the Mongols out of your country. The “status quo” feels less painless, making it easy to put it off a bit longer and continue to “get by” with current processes. Unfortunately, like China's armies, your employees are spread too thin, doing too many time-intensive tasks and missing opportunities to work more strategically to move your organization forward.
If you find yourself in that scenario, I strongly encourage you to begin thinking about your automation journey as a series of steps or, if you prefer, a series of bricks. After all, if the Great Wall of China was built one brick at a time, why not think of your automation journey in the same way (albeit with a MUCH shorter timeline for completion)?
9 Ideas to Help Begin Your Automation Journey
Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by the goal of “digital transformation.” Rather, with that as your ultimate goal, build out a series of bricks you can lay one at a time. Here are nine ideas to get you started on your automation journey!
1. Simplify Your IT Solutions
Simplifying your IT by leveraging cloud technology to provide your employees access to your data from anywhere at any time. A cloud-based solution not only streamlines your IT infrastructure but also offers enhanced flexibility, scalability, and security. By moving your data and applications to the cloud, you eliminate the need for cumbersome on-premise servers and reduce the burden on your IT team, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives.
2. Boost Collaboration Between the field and back office
Construction companies have various departments and teams, such as estimating, bidding, accounting, field operations, payroll, etc. Because a construction project has constant moving parts, it's important that these teams are in constant communication to be as successful as possible.
Using a construction management solution that can handle any preconstruction activities, such as estimating and bidding, your project management activities, such as change orders, RFI requests, documentation, and project and financial reporting activities, give your internal team and external stakeholders real-time insights on the progress of your projects.
3. provide online access to Owners and Subcontractors
In any given project, there can be a lot of back-and-forth between your organization and various stakeholders, customers, vendors, and subcontractors. An integrated construction automation solution allows your organization to become a central hub for all stakeholders, providing instant access to critical documents, such as invoices and correspondence, from anywhere at any time on any device.
4. Outsource Your Payroll / HR
As we like to say, "Payroll is the secret sauce for keeping hard hats happy and the accountants even happier." We see payroll and HR as a strategic way to attract, retain, and empower your employees, not a necessary expense. Your employees are your most important asset, so it's important to outsource your payroll and pick a solution that can retain and develop top talent and never get payroll wrong.
"Payroll is something that you just can't get wrong. When you bear that burden internally, the potential to get it wrong increases significantly."
- Ben Hofferman, Chief Construction Officer
5. Reduce Your Paper As Much As Possible
With how important documentation is in the construction industry, organizations are getting buried under mountains made of paper. So here's a friendly PSA from us to you:
STOP needlessly copying paper, moving it from desk to desk, stapling it to other pieces of paper, saving it in filing cabinets, searching for it and enduring painful paper cuts, taking those papers out of said filing cabinets once they reach a certain date, moving them into cardboard boxes, paying a facility to store them in another location...
Besides being environmentally friendly, reducing your reliance on paper can also help streamline your employee expense management, reduce your AP invoice processing time, increase efficiency with any change order requests, and more!
6. Automate Your AP Process
The amount of invoices that are moved through a construction company is astounding. It's a lot of tedious manual work for your employees, yet it can be one of the smaller lifts to automate compared to other steps along your automation journey. AP automation can have one of the biggest impacts on an organization's culture regarding efficiency, employee satisfaction, and retention.
Plus, as we've all heard, it's great for cutting costs and boosting invoice processing times. So, if you're not gonna take our word for it, take it from the experts who live, breathe, and study it! According to The American Productivity and Quality Center, it's twenty times more expensive to manually process an invoice. It can cost as much as $30 to process an invoice, but automation can drop that cost to as low as $3.50, according to the Aberdeen Group. Arden Partners conducted a survey where they discovered that companies who haven't automated their process take 8.3 days to process a typical manual invoice, while companies who have leveraged automation have reduced that time to 2.9 days.
7. Boost Your Insights with Dashboards
Let's be real, having to constantly update your financial and WIP reports using Excel spreadsheets is a horrific nightmare that no one should be subjected to. Financial dashboards are a game-changer for finance executives, controllers and project managers by giving them specific role-based views of a project at a glance. Instead of spending hours sifting through mountains of data, financial dashboards offer a quick synopsis of key performance metrics, allowing finance professionals to focus on strategic decision-making.
8. Streamline Your Employee Expenses
Streamlining employee expense management is another way to reduce your reliance on paper. Rather than dealing with paper receipts, stapled receipts, and hard-copy spreadsheets, give your employees an application on their phone that allows them to take pictures and code their receipts. The virtual copies can then be approved electronically and automatically reimbursed.
9. Consider Using Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The use of artificial intelligence has streamlined accounting and admin processes especially. If you're manually tracking invoices and filing physical documents, things can get messy. With a paperless solution that has built-in AI, you're able to scrape those documents and use the valuable time that was spent on data entry to improve your accounts payable processes. Plus, AI can apply logic to send documents to the right person for approvals, manage overdue tasks, and generate reports based on predefined terms, all without the need for user initiation.
Sage has a built-in AI-powered productivity assistance called Sage Copilot that tackles your to-do list, automates tasks, and recommends ways to help you make savings and drive improvements.
If you’d like more information or could use some assistance on how to prioritize these items and which solutions to consider, don’t hesitate to contact RKL. We love to assist growing construction companies in taking important steps on their digital automation journey.
