4 Construction Business Tips to Increase Efficiency
According to experts, construction time on a new home shouldn’t take more than a year. If your builds regularly go over that timeframe, these construction business tips can help you create a better, more efficient building process.
Try to side-step change orders. To preserve your timetables and budgets, it’s important to minimize changes whenever possible. While you can’t always avoid change orders, you can minimize them by planning pre-construction meetings with your trades. You should also precisely illustrate everything in your construction documents, so you won’t leave things open to interpretation. Consider involving your client during the design process, so you can tackle issues before you begin construction. Again, while some changes are inevitable, unambiguous construction documents and client involvement can go a long way toward helping you avoid lost time and money related to change orders.
Develop a process. While many builders accept them as part of normal business, redos, backtracking and duplication of effort shouldn’t be the norm. You can eliminate costly, time-consuming issues by adhering to a regimented process. This should include an orderly schematic design process involving numerous meetings between the interior designer, architect, builder and purchasing agent.
Before your very first meeting, you need to make sure everyone clearly understands the client expectations and vision. During your first meeting, you should go over ideas about interior and exterior design features that will help you meet the client’s needs and desires. You should then have a follow-up meeting involving more refined floor plans. By the third meeting, you should have a marketable design in place, along with enough details for the client to assess construction costs. All of this should take at least a month to help you minimize any backtracking and duplication.
You shouldn’t begin work until you are sure you have designed a project that meets your client’s needs and cost expectations. To mitigate potential construction issues down the road, it’s generally best to schedule a final meeting with your trades and consultants to harmonize systems and structural requirements before you begin building.
Engage your trade workers. It’s almost always best to make your custom builders and subcontractors a part of the process right from the outset. If a person will play a role in executing your vision, make sure they have a seat at the table as early as possible. This will give them a chance to provide feedback while enhancing collaboration as you move from schematic designs to actual construction.
Use Building Information Modeling (BIM). BIM allows you to create a digital representation of a structure long before you start pouring cement. This is a great way to conceptualize a plan and visualize the final result before you commit to a budget or schedule that might prove unrealistic. Commonly used in commercial construction, BIM isn’t as widespread in residential building. According to Pro Builder Magazine, however, BIM can provide builders with critically needed cost-saving capabilities if they leverage them correctly.
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