As a business owner, you should always be looking for ways to become more efficient. Here are some tips to help increase productivity for your residential construction businesses.
Streamline your operation.
According to a report by The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), the construction industry lags in productivity compared to other prominent American industries. Much of the blame is owed to a variety of factors, including overly stringent regulations, industry fragmentation and over-dependence on public-sector demand.
While residential construction businesses wield little control over these issues, there are some things they can do to create a more streamlined business process. These include:
Optimize your planning process.
A large portion of efficiency issues occur during the planning stages of construction. When they don’t do their homework, builders can set themselves up for considerable delays. If you don’t know exactly how much of each material you will need for a project, you could find yourself sitting idle as you wait for deliveries. Avoid this by devoting ample time to determining the equipment, materials and people you will need to complete a project, so you can sidestep delays and increased costs.
Look for repeatable design elements.
Builders can drastically increase productivity by incorporating repeatable design elements and value engineering. According to the report from MGI, however, only half of all construction outfits maintain a standard design library. If you’re looking for ways to prioritize productivity, consider shifting your mindset from custom designs for every project toward more standardization and repeatability.
Optimize on-site execution.
Many builders have productivity issues because they fail to use best practices across all projects, sites and staff. Many also fail to invest in talented project managers, who understand how to work within tight timelines. Still others rely on simple anecdotes about project issues, instead of utilizing hard data to baseline each project. To enhance productivity, builders should adopt comprehensive changes to technical systems, management systems and their individual mind-sets. Instead of looking for a new tool or trick to streamline performance, you need to optimize every operational aspect, from top to bottom.
Use construction management software.
These days, there are all sorts of innovative tools that help construction companies do their work more effectively. A high-performing construction management software program can help you handle contractors, invoicing, billing, bid management, document management, leads, incident reporting, timesheets and job scheduling. This will free you up to focus on jobsite issues that might result in delays and needless waste.
Utilize Building Information Modeling (BIM).
This growing technology allows builders to create digital representations of projects long before they start pouring cement. With BIM, you can easily visualize a structure before you invest money or time to a schedule that may end up being unrealistic. If you are working under an unforgiving budget, there are numerous no-cost, open source BIM tools you can try out before you decide to purchase your own software.
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