The construction industry is changing fast. As technology advances at lightning speed, many construction companies find themselves at a crossroads. Companies can either get on board or get buried fast. Companies that gather accurate data on every jobsite and use that data wisely are flourishing. Those companies that aren’t collecting accurate data are getting left behind. We’ve all heard of smartphones, smart cars & smart homes, but have you heard of smart jobsites?
Smart construction companies have smart jobsites. Smart jobsites use jobsite intelligence or data. What makes a smart jobsite? It’s simple. The more data points, or jobsite intelligence, you gather, the smarter your jobsite. But what really matters is the vision or visibility you gain from collecting this data. It gives everyone on your team from the field to the office the ability to see everything.
The Importance of Job-Site Visibility
Recently, a comedy group in the UK played a public prank on the locals looking for a taxi ride. They cast a “blind man” as the driver of the taxi. He wasn’t blind of course, but he played the part of it by wearing sunglasses and using a visually impaired walking stick when he’d pull over to pick up passengers. He’d then ask passengers a series of questions when they entered the cab and let them know he was blind. Their reactions were interesting. Some immediately got back out of the cab and tried to hail another cab, but some actually stayed in the cab and went along with it. He would ask the passengers to guide him while driving and then drive extremely erratically; as if he couldn’t see. The passenger’s stress levels and reactions were palatable. It made for a funny comedy prank.
However, it wouldn’t make sense running a successful construction business that way. Yet how many managers, supervisors, estimators, and owners are literally running their companies without jobsite visibility to know where your employees are, what jobs they’re finishing, and where they’re losing time & money.
The only way to see everything is to measure and track everything. This is where busybusy steps in to help.
How busybusy Can Help
Tracking and measuring labor hours, cost codes, equipment usage, idle time, productivity, materials, and more on the jobsite is key. We’ve watched companies look at the data busybusy gives them and be taken back by things they didn’t know were happening. Is your team spending 30-50% of their team “waiting” on things? Is your overtime pay twice what it should be? Does your team take 2-hour lunches, or not take breaks when the law dictates they should? Do you have equipment that’s costing you more than the benefit it provides? Do you have tools that are never being used? Do you have teams or groups that are more effective when they work together? Do you know your labor burden on an hourly basis? Do you know which project managers always come in under budget and why? Have you learned what types of projects are your most profitable and which ones you should let go of? Busybusy mobile time tracking app can answer all those questions to help managers gain new levels of jobsite productivity.
Smart Jobsite Starts with Smart Data
Depending on the size of a project, you should be tracking and monitoring at a minimum 50 JPIs (jobsite performance indicators). These can range from employee overtime hours to equipment usage, to job costs, and even company-wide daily operating costs. Knowing which employees checked in late, what equipment is idle, and how each phase or sub-project is going is critical to profitability and will help you start to predict better performance metrics.
But where this data really comes in handy is after the project is finished and during the evaluation phase. The data from every jobsite should be evaluated very carefully by supervisors, managers, admins, and owners. This is where companies can really thrive. The evaluation process is key to a successful business. Whether you want to grow or not, gathering and evaluating the right data from smart jobsites can drastically improve the ? for you and your employees.
Not only does busybusy help companies gather more smart jobsite data than any company out there, we’ve also recently launched a smart jobsite online assessment that shows companies how they’re doing. It’s a simple 5-10 minute assessment to help you see how smart your jobsites are and how to improve them.
Go to www.jobsitereportcard.com today to find out if you’re on the right track and get busy building.
