From Silent but Deadly Silos to Connected Construction
Connected Construction for Improved Collaboration and Project Success
When your employees and departments don’t share information due to lack of tools or processes, organizational silos occur. Organizational silos impede essential processes like communication and collaboration that provide smooth customer experiences. When a team is siloed, they end up working in isolation which leads to internal and external problems for employees, sub-contractors, and customers.
You need to access accurate business information in a timely manner so that you can make decisions that will move your projects and business forward. When you have disconnected project teams, you face delayed project updates, duplicate data entry, greater risk of errors, and unnecessary costs.
Why Silos are Dangerous
The typical construction firm uses six to 10 software applications in addition to their main accounting software. When these applications are legacy systems, they can’t integrate well—if they integrate at all. Because of this, your entire staff must jump between systems to perform their everyday tasks. Each one of these processes may be well suited for each individual task your employees have to perform, but they create silos of data that are difficult for other employees to access.
Departmental silos become a problem because it can cause your team to develop tunnel vision and stay focused only on their functional areas. This causes them to lose sight on the big picture; team members do not consider how their work will affect the work of other departments. Communication and transparency are dysfunctional in these circumstances which leads to dysfunction throughout the company.
When your information lives in multiple locations that are disjointed from one another, it is impossible for construction firms to provide a seamless customer experience. Single customer view and real time insights are critical for any busy construction professional but, most customer experience teams have do not have a way to arrive at a single customer view. This leads to difficulty understanding each customer and providing them with an experience tailored to their needs.
Say bye to Silos and Hello to the Connected Cloud
Isolated systems make business processes complex. Cloud technology gives you an end-to-end solution in which everyone in your company is connected and has complete visibility into your business and customers.
A connected cloud application streamlines the exchange of information between your team in the office and your teams on job sites. When you use the mobile app to make changes, the system will automatically update and sync the data in the cloud construction accounting application. Everyone in your workforce will have access to the same information at the same time so you can be positive that important issues are addressed immediately.
In the cloud, your project managers will have the information to produce fast, accurate cost projections that lead to more profitable jobs. Seamless integration will enable you to automatically update Accounting and Job Cost with project subcontracts, PO’s, contracts, and change orders approved in Project Management. You’ll save time, become more proactive about changes in scope, assess impact to costs immediately, and automatically send change orders to subcontractors or owners for review and approval—significantly reducing your profit fade.
Always Put Your Customer at the Center of your Business
With access of all the capabilities a connected cloud solution provides, you will have visibility into your financials and a single consolidated view of all customer contacts. With dashboards and reports that provide real-time data, you are able to learn which customers are profitable and which are not. When your team has access to the proper information from all your departments, you’ll be able to reduce response times, improve customer satisfaction, lower support cost, and enhance billing accuracy.
Take the Next Step Towards Connected Construction
Connected construction can help you eliminate silos, improve collaboration, and increase the success of every project. However, you can only truly have connected construction with connected cloud technology.
Acumatica Construction Edition is a connected cloud solution that ensures that all your teams are on the same page. It is a secure Saas Solution that makes reporting, dashboards, and data analytics available wherever you are on your phone, tablet, or PC.
To learn more about Acumatica Construction Edition—request a demo today.