Part of Newforma’s Essential Strategies to Protect Your Construction Profit Margins series, this section focuses on effective tactics to avoid profit erosion and manage costs via document control
In the bustling world of construction project management, keeping track of project documents is essential for architects, engineers, and contractors, but this task often presents challenges that can impact project outcomes and construction profit margins. Firms juggle multiple projects, each generating a mountain of documents and models.
Many still rely on outdated methods for managing these documents. Users, confused by numerous versions and revisions, often end up with the wrong information. Your colleagues, who, in trying to help, might move the latest documents into special folders for easy access.
While this approach is meant to simplify things, it’s often highly inefficient. You’ll then have to spend countless hours re-organizing folders or looking for an email from two years ago, causing delays and occasional errors.
A recent report from McKinsey found that 28% of a professional’s workday is spent looking for emails, but, when it comes to keeping track of sensitive information, like drawing or document revisions, that number is usually much higher.
Despite your best efforts, users struggle to find the right documents or drawings in a timely fashion, risking quality and timeliness. This inefficiency wastes time and money and can lead to significant financial losses.
Without the right document control software, teams are at risk of working with outdated revisions, which can result in costly mistakes, project delays, and even legal disputes.
Putting the ‘P’ in construction profit margins
Throughout a project’s lifecycle, documents and models undergo numerous changes, reflecting design updates, regulatory revisions, and stakeholder feedback. Manually managing these changes is not only time-consuming but also leaves too much room for error. That’s why more firms are turning to document control platforms that significantly reduce manual tasks through features like bulk uploads and advanced data management. This approach ensures that every change is properly tracked, and your team is always working with the most current documents.
Investing in robust document control software can notably improve construction profit margins:
Accuracy and Consistency: By minimizing human error, you ensure that every change to documents and drawings is accurately recorded, reducing the need for rework and the costs associated with it.
Time Savings: Features like bulk uploads and advanced data management reduce the manual workload, freeing up your team to focus on more strategic tasks and cutting down labor costs.
Uniformity and Traceability: Revisions with pre-established metadata ensure compliance with regulations by maintaining detailed change records, preventing costly legal issues.
Enhanced Collaboration: With everyone accessing the latest information, teamwork improves, reducing project delays and leading to better outcomes.
By streamlining these processes, you’re not just mitigating risks—you’re actively enhancing the efficiency of your projects and, by proxy, your construction profit margin.
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Transforming document management in construction- and making real-world impact
Document control and document management systems make a big difference. No more navigating a maze of folders to find the latest documents. The system houses and tracks all revisions for a specific drawing, so everyone works with the most up-to-date information. This reduces errors and rework, improving project timelines and outcomes.
For architects, engineers, and contractors, the challenges of manual document control are significant. Outdated or incorrect documents often lead to mistakes and delays. Document control solves these problems by providing a single source of truth for all project documents. This ensures that everyone, whether on-site or in the office, has access to the latest and most accurate information, reducing costly mistakes and improving overall project efficiency.
With the latest information available, you’ve saved yourself countless hours of searching for that random email with the latest version of the drawing. Instead of having you or your staff waste all that cost on labour money, and your time, can now be put to better use; focusing on more strategic tasks; improving your construction profit margins in the process.
Leveraging document management systems that provide detailed audit trails, allowing you to see when a revision was issued, by whom and who has seen it. The improved collaboration also brings teams closer together. Engineers, project managers, and external stakeholders can share and review documents more easily, leading to better decision-making and smoother project execution.
It’s a win-win for all involved.
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Document control and revision management with Newforma
Managing different revisions of documents and ensuring that the latest revisions are always accessible is a soul-sucking and time-consuming task. This is where advanced document control systems, such as Newforma’s, come into play. Newforma’s robust platform offers comprehensive document management features that include seamless revision control, which is essential for maintaining accuracy and efficiency throughout your projects.
By implementing Newforma’s solutions, you gain access to tools that streamline your workflow and enhance collaboration among your team. Newforma’s platform is designed to handle the intricacies of managing revisions ensuring that every document is properly tracked and updated. This capability not only reduces the risk of errors and miscommunication but also contributes to significant time and cost savings.
Managing documents effectively is crucial in construction, architecture, and engineering, especially when it comes to keeping track of drawing revisions. Revision management ensures that the latest revisions are always in use and that all stakeholders have access to the most current documents. This capability not only reduces errors and rework but also enhances overall project efficiency.
Without robust revision control, you risk working with outdated or incorrect revisions of documents, leading to mistakes, delays, and increased costs; reducing your potential construction profit margins. Effective version management allows you to track changes, avoid conflicts, and ensure everyone is on the same page. This is where advanced document control systems, like Newforma’s, come into play.
HorganLynch, a prominent engineering consultancy, was grappling with many of the same common issues; the complexities of managing vast amounts of project data across multiple teams. The manual processes of searching for documents and managing revisions were not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, which led to inefficiencies and higher costs.
By integrating Newforma’s project information management platform, HorganLynch was able to streamline these processes. Newforma provided a centralized location for all project documents, ensuring that team members could easily access the most up-to-date information with just a few clicks. This reduced the likelihood of errors, minimized the need for rework, and saved them hours of inbox raiding.
As a result, HorganLynch experienced a noticeable boost in productivity and construction project margins, making Newforma an essential tool in their project management toolkit.
Embrace the future of document control in construction
The experiences of many firms show how centralized revision control in document management can transform operations. By tackling the challenges of manual document handling, you can unlock new levels of efficiency, accuracy, and collaboration. Newforma’s leadership in this field has been pivotal, providing solutions that save time, boost construction profit margins, and reduce risk.
If you’re dealing with similar struggles, consider exploring advanced document control solutions. They offer substantial benefits, from ensuring uniform meta-data and enhancing collaboration to cutting down time spent on administrative tasks.
It doesn’t seem like much at first, but, if you begin to add up the hours lost searching for information that should be instantly available to you, that number can get real big, real fast.
Ready to see how Newforma’s document control can impact your bottom line in a notable way? Then book a demo now and discover how Newforma can help reduce your manual workloads and give you back precious time to work on more profitable endeavors. Let’s take your document control and your construction profit margins to the next level!
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