How to Improve Heavy Highway Construction Reporting to Save Time & Money

Have you ever questioned the importance of heavy highway construction reporting? Think about this - each day, project superintendents for heavy highway projects come in and prepare for a typical day. It’s their job to have a constant pulse on what’s happening. Daily, the superintendent and project managers work with different people to attain the right information to inform their decisions - daily field reports, budget expenditures, safety protocol, etc. It takes only one mistake or mishap in reporting or communication to throw off the entire operation. Without streamlined jobsite reporting, project managers and superintendents put themselves at risk for costly consequences.

The Ripple Effect

For a heavy highway construction project, an unplanned breakdown or maintenance can influence all of the tasks that follow. For example, let’s say the project manager comes in and realizes that his 35,000 lb Rubber Tire Paver is out of commission. This single breakdown impacts the budget, schedule, and even safety protocols.

In most cases, the onsite project manager does what he or she can to ameliorate the problem and verbally redirect everyone to a different task to keep the job moving. This isn’t a rare case, either. Projects all over the United States deal with daily issues, making it more difficult to keep projects moving. Even in Atlanta, where Strategies Group is based, roadwork delays are causing already slow traffic to grind to a halt. That pressure is stressful enough without throwing new problems and delays into a project.

So What’s the Issue?

Project Managers are accustomed to dealing with machinery breakdowns and other unexpected roadblocks in projects. They typically can come up with a game plan pretty quickly on how to solve the issue at hand. Where things get muddled up is when that game plan gets distributed to the team on-site. Everyone hears something different, or not everyone is in the loop. Someone still sends a daily materials report even though we’ve now switched up the material schedule. The lack of transparency in communication is where many projects spiral out of control.

New Heavy Highway Construction Reporting Software, Better Communication

Updating your construction operating software will make a huge difference. There’s no way to avoid it anymore, the risks are too great. The good news is that once you learn the new software, you will have access to tools that improve speed and transparency of information across all of your channels. This opens an entire world where unexpected roadblocks don’t have a huge negative impact on your project but are handled with efficiency to keep the project moving forward.

Spectrum Reporting

Today, construction project managers and superintendents have real-time access to heavy highway construction reporting systems that helps them make speedy decisions for a project. Haven’t seen this? Well, you’re missing out.

Construction reporting software allows for mobility and cloud-based project management as well as real-time reporting. Instead of throwing a wrench in a project, an unexpected breakdown can be dealt with in real-time through a smartphone or tablet. The entire team is immediately updated on what’s going on and what the action plan is. It gives everyone the visibility into historic and current data so that they can make the decisions from a bigger picture for the project.

Spectrum Reporting allows for various types of reporting in real time, including:

• Daily field reports
• Inspection reports
• Resource updates
• Safety reports

Learn More about Spectrum Construction Reporting