Simplify Project Data in Construction

4 Ways to Turn Project Data Chaos to Clarity in Construction Businesses 

Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

Getting your arms around project data in your construction business can be a daunting task when you consider the volume of data pouring in from so many different sources. Everything is in constant motion on construction projects because your employees, tools, and equipment are moving between projects each day. Getting the project data in your construction business to the office can be a bit chaotic. Although labor costs are a top data point to manage your projects to profitability, there are additional project data points in your construction business that you need to keep your eye on to keep your projects on budget and schedule. As you’re winning new bids and adding new projects, your financial project data in your construction business needs to be constantly updated so that your field employees are accurately capturing the project data you need to keep your construction projects profitable. The most important project data in the construction industry are Project Performance Data (Schedule and Cost), Payroll and Manhours, Productivity Data, Safety Data, and Equipment Tracking Data based on the Dodge Analytics SmartMarket Report, Improving Performance with Project Data.¹

The best way to streamline all your project data in your construction business is to have employees or supervisors work from a mobile app that connects to all of your business applications. WorkMax makes it simple to collect, organize, and share project data across multiple projects with or without service and gives global visibility to the project data in your construction business all from one mobile app. WorkMax collects project data in your construction business the way that fits your business. We all know employees want to get paid, right? So we made WorkMax an integrated platform to prompt them to collect the project data you need in your construction business in ONE app that integrates with the top HR, accounting, and ERP systems in real time. We also made sure that you could collect the field documentation you need with powerful mobile forms to provide you with the safety and daily log reports you need. Here are four ways WorkMax can simplify your project data in your construction business to turn it into actionable insights:

1.  Do you struggle with getting safety reports, maintenance forms, and daily log reports completed promptly? Are your reports inconsistent, hard to read, and lacking the necessary details? With WorkMax, you can prompt employees to complete their safety checklists, injury reports, maintenance forms, and daily log reports as part of their clock IN/OUT process. If there’s anything we know about employees, we know they will clock IN/OUT to make sure they get paid, right? Employees can add photos with markup, video, and audio notes to the mobile forms to know what’s going on without being there. Based on their answers on the mobile forms, you can also prompt employees with follow-up forms to get all the project data you need.

2. Never know who has your tools and equipment? Is your asset inventory out-of-date? With WorkMax, your asset inventory is always up-to-date when employees check IN/OUT equipment as they clock IN/OUT each day. Do we see a pattern emerging when you collect all your project data for labor hours and asset management in one app? With WorkMax, they don’t have to check in a piece of inventory back into the equipment manager before anyone can check it back out. With WorkMax, employees can transfer tools and equipment from their mobile devices without involving the equipment manager at all.

3. Tired of employees allocating their labor hours to archived projects or the wrong tasks? The project data in your construction business will be more accurate than ever before with WorkMax. WorkMax syncs the data from your accounting or ERP system to make sure only active projects and tasks appear on their mobile app. You can even make sure that field employees only chose the right tasks based on the project cost structure from your accounting system for the ultimate job cost accuracy.

4.  Never sure how much work has been completed on your projects? Are the units of measure not in sync between your different business systems? When you prompt your employees to enter how much work was completed with the right unit of measure as they change tasks throughout the day and at the end of the day before they clock out, you’ll easily be able to see how much work was completed that day on that project. Collecting just labor hours isn’t enough for your construction business. That’s why we made sure WorkMax didn’t just collect labor hours. WorkMax tracks tasks that align to cost codes in your accounting system and every time your employees switch tasks, they’re prompted to enter their production. The production and job costing data syncs with your accounting system to provide you with real-time production and job costs. With WorkMax, you’ll know as soon as your employees switch tasks how much work has been completed on a project. Here’s just another example of how we created WorkMax to work the way you work all in one app to make it simple for your field employees.

To learn more about WorkMax, schedule a demo now.

¹ – Dodge Data and Analytics SmartMarket Report, Improving Performance with Project Data; How Improved Collection and Analysis Is Leading the Digital Transformation of the Construction Industry.

Data Collection for Construction
4 Reasons to Change Data Collection for Your Construction Business

96% of engineering and construction firms don’t use the project data they collect.¹ Yikes! That’s a pretty startling statistic. What’s even more shocking is how much potential predictive intelligence is hiding in the volumes of data you’re collecting. 

The first step in simplifying the project data in your construction business is that you have to understand how you’re collecting data for your construction business. Once you understand how the data is being collected, you can look for ways to automate and improve the data collection process for your construction business so you can spend more time analyzing the data instead of merely collecting it. There’s no point in collecting project data in your construction business if you’re not going to use it, right? So, let’s take a look at how you’re collecting the project data in your construction business. 

According to the Dodge Analytics report on Improving Performance with Project Data in Construction, the project data collection in the construction industry is typically done in these four ways:

1. Paper
2. Spreadsheets
3. Custom-Designed Software
4. Commercial Software

There are several reasons why you should consider changing your project data collection in your construction business. You may be thinking if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Your current projects are profitable and you’re meeting your scheduling deadlines. But what if I told you that you could increase your profit margins and do it by simply making a few small changes in how you collect the project data in your construction business? Would you want to know more? You should. In a recent report, when data collection was improved for construction projects like yours, contractors found that they were better able to complete their projects at or under budget.² Contractors that improved data collection for their construction projects also saw increases in productivity, profitability, safety, and the ability to win new work.²

Two of the biggest issues with data collection for construction projects are the use of both paper and spreadsheets. In a 2019 study, 42% of respondents were still using paper or spreadsheets for data collection for their construction projects.² Project data collection in construction is plagued with paper making it difficult to analyze project data in your construction business. A piece of paper is only useful to the one person that has access to it at that time. To make the project data in your construction projects useful, you have to manually enter it into either a spreadsheet or software, which inevitably leads to data entry errors. It also doesn’t help that 88% of spreadsheets contain data errors, based on research from multiple studies. In a recent report, paper also ranks lowest for timeliness.² It makes sense because your field supervisors have to collect the paper forms for time cards, safety reports, daily logs, and asset tracking from their employees and drive them to the office when they’re working at remote job sites.² It may only be once a week that supervisors can get to the office to drop off forms. 

Contractors were also least satisfied with the accuracy of the paper forms compared to spreadsheets, custom-designed software, and commercial software.² The project data in your construction business that’s gathered on paper is certainly going to be much less accurate for several reasons, which explains why improving your data collection for your construction business will improve your project performance. Illegible handwriting tops the list of reasons your paper forms are inaccurate, with calculation errors coming in a close second. This doesn’t even take into account the 5-6 minutes it takes for your payroll employee to manually audit the time card for any computational errors. Also, when you’re using paper timesheets, your employees are just estimating the hours they worked, and typically fill out their time card at the end of the week. They may have forgotten that they arrived late one day or left early another, which certainly explains why contractors are least satisfied with collecting project data in construction on paper.

To find out how easy it can be to collect real-time project data in your construction business with an all in one app for time tracking, asset tracking and mobile forms that also integrate with your accounting, payroll, or ERP system, schedule a demo now.

¹ – Hill, Brian L. “Digging for the Big Data Gold in Today’s Construction Projects.” Xpera Group. 2017
² – Dodge Data and Analytics SmartMarket Report, Improving Performance with Project Data; How Improved Collection and Analysis Is Leading the Digital Transformation of the Construction Industry.

3 Ways Job Costing Accuracy Is Improved with Better Time Tracking 

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR TO THE FOUNDATION SOFTWARE BLOG: SHANNON CORGAN, ABOUTTIME TECHNOLOGIES 

How can controllers and financial managers be confident in choosing the right time tracking solution for field employees that will also achieve accurate job costing? It’s a challenge to balance the needs of field employees and the accuracy of job costing reports. Job costing reports typically require considerable manual intervention with countless reallocations, which affects accuracy and delays job costing and Work-In-Progress reporting. Here are three ways that a time tracking solution can help your business achieve the most accurate job costing reports faster than ever before:

1. REAL-TIME ACCOUNTING SYSTEM AND TIME TRACKING INTEGRATION

To improve accuracy and save time on job costing and Work-In-Progress reporting, businesses should select a time tracking solution that integrates with their accounting system in real time. With real-time integrations, every time a new employee, project, task, or cost code is added to the accounting system, the data automatically updates in the time tracking solution to drive job costing accuracy. All of the project cost data in the accounting system and the employee time tracking system stay in sync, making it easy for field employees to track job costs to only active projects or cost codes/task since closed-out projects or archived cost codes/tasks will already be removed. When the accounting system and time tracking system are integrated, the accuracy of job costing is significantly increased and businesses can get real-time job costs to confidently know where each project stands. 

2. GET THE RIGHT JOB COSTING DATA TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE WITH AUTOMATION

Businesses often can’t get accurate job costs from the field because it’s too difficult and takes too much time for field employees to enter or allocate labor hours or production units to the right projects, cost codes, or tasks. To overcome this issue, picklist options need to be limited in the mobile time tracking solution and should only show pertinent projects, tasks/cost codes, and production units. Unfortunately, most companies have hundreds or thousands of current cost codes or projects and don’t have an automated way to filter job costing data to display only picklist options that are applicable to a certain department or an individual employee. If they set up automated permission profiles, only the relevant concrete jobs, as an example, would show for an employee working on the concrete crew — along with the associated cost codes and tasks assigned to that specific concrete project. Automated permission profiles get the right job costing data to the right employees automatically for the most accurate job costs.

3. MULTIPLE WORKFLOWS TO ACCURATELY ENTER AND ALLOCATE TIME FOR JOB COSTING

A flexible mobile time tracking solution with multiple workflows will help businesses achieve job costing based on the level of accuracy they prefer. Multiple workflow options also allow businesses to select the timeliness of their data. For the most precision, businesses should use a real-time workflow, where employees enter time and allocate data in real-time. When it’s done this way, labor hours aren’t estimated and businesses don’t have to rely on an employee’s memory to estimate the hours they worked or what they worked on at the end of the day or week. The second most accurate workflow is time entry in real time with cost code allocation after-the-fact. Under this workflow, businesses achieve the most accurate labor hours by entering them in real time, but the job costing allocation of those hours is still an estimate. Lastly, the third most accurate workflow is using a digital timesheet where time entry and cost code allocation are completed after-the-fact. When the digital timesheet integrates with the accounting system, manual data entry errors are nearly eliminated, and there’s no misinterpretation of handwriting. Because of this, digital timesheets significantly improve accuracy over paper.

To learn more about WorkMax’s integrations with the top accounting and ERP solutions, click here. 

World of Concrete 2020 Had The Most Celebrity Sightings 
Biometric Time Card App Identifies Celebrity Matches 
By Jonathan Salas

World of Concrete 2020 may be officially over, but the impact certainly is not. From great new products to amazing demos, it was a week full of excitement, change, and new possibility. This year was different, however, because of all the amazing celebrity appearances! Were you able to meet your favorite star at World of Concrete 2020?

Okay, you probably didn’t, because there weren’t any actual celebrities at World of Concrete 2020, unfortunately. However, to show off our new facial recognition solution in WorkMax at World of Concrete 2020, we held a competition to see who looked the most like your favorite stars. The result was a fun time that showcased amazing solutions to solve a major problem in construction, buddy punching.

Buddy punching is not nearly as fun as it sounds. This occurs when an employee clocks time for their buddy, usually because their buddy is either running later or leaving early. This not only causes a company to overpay an employee, but also means that jobs are getting done less efficiently, and labor is being tracked incorrectly. All of this can be completely eliminated with WorkMax TIME’s facial recognition, because each record with a discrepancy will be flagged, allowing you to easily catch it and put a stop to this time theft.

We wanted to show attendees at World of Concrete 2020 that WorkMax TIME’s facial recognition was easy-to-use and wouldn’t interfere with the clock in/out process. Employees simply take a selfie and it’s compared to their profile image. Advanced metrics like eyes distance, cheek gauntness, and facial structure are then used to give you a match percentage indicating how closely the two images match. This saves you time and money while also preventing buddy punching.

Most employee time tracking solutions only use a face capture method, which is simply taking a picture that must be manually compared to what the employee looks like. It doesn’t provide you any facial analysis or return a photo comparison match percentage. It also can’t alert you of photo mismatches because there’s no photo comparison analysis performed. This is process is not only tedious and repetitive for an employee to manually compare every photo, but it’s also tedious and repetitive. See how frustrating that is?
We decided to hold a competition at World of Concrete 2020 to see who could match closely enough, percentage-wise, to some of the most well-known celebrities. Here are the three winners:

1st Place for Celebrity Photo Match at World of Concrete 2020:
Coming in at first place was Ruben, who matched just over 41% with George Lopez! Congratulations to Reuben for winning our contest, and maybe he can use his prize to kick off his own comedy career.

2nd Place for Celebrity Photo Match at World of Concrete 2020:

We hit it off immediately with Kristina, becoming instant “Friends”. We weren’t able to immediately get her the prize for second place, though, because we were on a break, but she matched a stunning 39% Jennifer Anniston.

3rd Place for Celebrity Photo Match at World of Concrete 2020:

Someone call the Police, because Paul won third place, matching at 34% with the legendary artist Sting. We sent the prize to Paul, so hopefully, he gets our Message in A Bottle.

The winners of the World of Concrete 2020 Celebrity Photo Match will be contacted to earn their prizes, and we hope that everyone had as much fun as we did!

To learn more about WorkMax TIME’s face recognition, click here or schedule a demo now.