December 17th, 2008
A slowdown in the economy typically has a ripple affect across the construction industry. Owners are pressured to tighten their belts and to reduce store construction costs. All aspects of the construction process are examined, including both hard and soft costs. One soft cost item for which we continually receive feedback from our general contractors on, is the delayed notification of a project’s bid due date or construction start date. Owners who communicate more efficiently with their general contractors receive better pricing because the contractor knows that scheduling his superintendent and project manager will be easier and that they will be alerted quickly to changes so that they can assign their team to a new or different project thereby saving them valuable overhead costs.
General contractors and owner vendors tend to be the last to know. This is not done on purpose but is a direct effect of the limitations of the format used internally by owners to manage their store construction dates. Typically these store construction dates contain confidential information that should not be shared, so it is not easy for an owner project manager to simply forward the documents to his or her general contractors or vendors without a lot of time consuming editing.
Report Hawk’s Project Date tab makes this communication process as simple as 1-2-3.
1. Click the tab
2. Change the date
3. Click update
Your general contractors and vendors are automatically notified via email. Want to make it even easier? Sign up for our project coordinator service and we will update your projects for you on weekly basis.
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November 4th, 2008
Reducing a Project Manager’s number of site visits has long been a simple and quick method for a management team to reduce per project construction costs. Cutting one site visit from a project’s budget saves on travel, lodging, rental car and meal expenses. We have seen historical figures and estimates from one thousand dollars to just over four hundred dollars in savings per project by eliminating just one visit per project. If your company is building sixty projects a year that is a potential savings of $60,000.00 dollars on the high end to $29,220.00 dollars on the low end. A great savings to show to your boss, management team or investors!
However, talk to just about any Project Manager and they will tell you that reducing the number of site visits to a project can actually increase the project construction cost. How can this be? Easy, a site visit from the owner’s project manager provides valuable feedback to the contractor. The owner project manager can identify problems or mistakes, so that the contractor can correct them prior to the punch or turnover date. Eliminating a preconstruction or mid-point site visit reduces this feedback and the problems are then discovered during the end of the project which result in higher repair or coreection costs and can affect the opening date.
So the question is; can you have the best of both worlds? Can you reduce the number of site visits and yet still give valuable feedback and indentify problems and mistakes remotely? We like to think this is possible with the many features we give you to oversee and manage your projects.
Our Daily Job Reports, Weekly Status Report are designed to easily communicate the progress and quality of a project so that your Project Managers can quickly identify projects running ahead of schedule and identify projects that may need more of their attention to insure that their turnover date is met. In addition, if pictures are not enough to communicate the progress on your projects contact us about streaming videos from your job site!
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