Mastering Your Construction Risk Management with a Cloud ERP System

The Importance of a Construction Specific ERP Strategy

Every construction business knows that assessing, managing, and monitoring the many risks associated with construction projects is a necessity. The essential nature of construction risk management requires a strategy, and a construction-specific ERP strategy is the way to go. With a construction cloud ERP solution, you and your business operate from a single platform that provides a 360-degree-view of your entire organization, streamlining workflows, increasing company-wide communication, and improving overall efficiency.

Because the construction industry is volatile and faces disruptions (the pandemic being a perfect example), construction companies, like yours, must have a cohesive business management solution that can help you pivot as interruptions occur. You can utilize the same cohesive ERP solution to identify challenges and risks before they happen, thus making it possible to eliminate, mitigate, or handle whatever comes your way.

Identifying Challenges and Major Risks

With your IT and strategy teams in place and aligned, their first step in making a construction risk management plan and ERP strategy is to identify challenges and risks. There are different types of risks, including project, safety, financial, legal, environmental, and industry risks.

An example of a project risk is experiencing an unexpected lack of resources, such as what happened with the pandemic. The pandemic brought a number of global supply chain issues, resulting in limited supplies (among many other things).

Benjamin Rouger, Partner Enablement Manager at Acumatica Cloud ERP, recently addressed this and other supply chain concerns in a recent article. He writes, “Few of us have had to deal with inflation and disruptions on this scale before. The old playbook doesn’t apply anymore, and companies still relying on legacy technology won’t have the tools to address these challenges.”

The answer? “To build a resilient supply chain and to become a resilient business, Bain recommends the following architecture: a light-core cloud ERP that is agile, data-centric, and ecosystem rich.”

Acumatica’s cloud ERP software is all these things and provides the construction industry with the construction risk management functionality they need.

Measuring ERP Project Successes

It’s important that you use metrics and data to ensure that your construction cloud ERP solution is actually beneficial in terms of construction risk management.

The ERP solution you choose should provide business intelligence (BI) and analytic capabilities that allow you to gather data from multiple sources, organize the data for you, and help you analyze the data. From that data, you should be able to track whether the risks you planned for actually occurred, how the risk compared to your prediction, how you and your team were able to control the risk, and what costs were associated with managing the risks (in comparison the forecasted cost).

The overall benefits of utilizing a construction cloud ERP solution should include streamlined operations, opened communication channels, and increased profits, which are hallmarks of success. And, importantly, you should have confidence that the myriad of risks associated with each project can be identified and accounted for.

Risk management is an ongoing task. As situations evolve, so must the plan, but the right industry-specific cloud ERP solution can help.

What to Watch Out For

The challenges confronting the construction industry are nothing new. Jobsite accidents, cost increases, labor shortages, contract disputes, unhappy customers, and natural disasters will always be construction risks, but how you address these risks will determine whether your project succeeds or fails.

You need to choose your cloud ERP solution wisely. Be on the lookout for (and avoid) solutions that:

• Don’t rest on an open, future-proofed platform
• Don’t provide seamless integrations with critical third-party applications
• Don’t allow users to access the solution from anywhere and at any time
• Don’t provide a “single source of truth”

Operating successfully (which requires a strong construction risk management plan) in today’s digital economy requires a modern, true cloud solution.

How Acumatica Can Help

Acumatica Cloud ERP is the born-in-the-cloud solution for construction professionals. Acumatica’s new eBook, reveals that many in the construction industry are already benefitting from the complete, streamlined cloud-based ERP solution that provides “powerful project management, comprehensive financials, business intelligence, role-based dashboards, and robust reporting.”

From a single dashboard (which any user can access from a web-enabled device regardless of location), gather critical field, project budget, overage, commitment, schedule, compliance, contract (and more) data, which you can analyze and use for better, business-growing decisions and construction risk management. And Acumatica is an affordable solution, charging for resources used vs. the number of users.

If you’re interested in learning more about Acumatica Cloud ERP, contact our experts at Strategies Group. We help small and medium-sized businesses increase efficiency, streamline activities, refine key business processes, increase sales, and improve customer satisfaction through the best business software solutions.