April 8th, 2009
Our newest release is the completion of our Warranty stage and Warranty feature for Owners. In the past, we have broken down a project’s lifecycle into three stages: Preconstruction, Bidding and Construction. With the release of our newest feature we have added Warranty as our fourth stage.
“The new Warranty stage and feature is truly a value-added service that we are happy to offer to our owners”, said Brian Gunnoe, Report Hawk President. “The ability to track a project’s warranty expiration date and ensure warranty items are corrected by the Contractor or Owner-supplied vendors is a simple method for reducing maintenance costs.”
Upon the passing of a project’s turnover date or the setting of a project’s Certificate of Occupancy date via the last weekly report, your project will now transfer into the Warranty stage. Your project will be located in the Warranty stage for 365 days. During this time the project can be accessed through the use of our Warranty feature.
The Warranty feature allows an Owner to submit warranty items to the project’s General Contractor and if applicable, the Owner vendors.
When a warranty item is created, the warranty item and its related issue are e-mailed to the responsible party notifying them of the warranty issue and recording the it in our warranty history table.
The responsible party can then take action on the warranty issue and once corrected, can send updates back to the Owner, detailing the corrective actions taken to resolve the issue. In addition, photos of the corrective measures taken can be uploaded with the response to better clarify the work completed.
The owner, when satisfied with the corrective measures can close the Warranty Item.
To learn more or to schedule an on-line demo of our product please visit us at: www.reporthawk.com/contact/
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March 18th, 2009
REDMOND, Wash. — March 18, 2009 — Today Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, the new Web browser that offers the best solution for how people use the Web today. It can be downloaded in 25 languages at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 starting at noon EDT on March 19. Internet Explorer 8 is easier to use, faster and offers leading-edge security features in direct response to people’s increasing concerns about online safety. A new study commissioned by Microsoft and the National Cyber Security Alliance and conducted by Harris Interactive Inc. shows that 91 percent of adults in the U.S. are concerned about online threats in the current economic climate, and 78 percent are more likely to choose a Web browser with built-in security than they were two years ago. Read More.
We have seen a few issues with how Report Hawk displays in the new browser. The following article from details the issues we face. http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4304825.cms
If you are a Report Hawk user and you have installed Internet Explorer 8, please check the Compatibility View button when accessing Report Hawk. To learn more about setting the Compatibility View click here.
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March 11th, 2009
Late again!
Late for dinner. Late for a date. Late for the soccer game. Late picking up the kids. Why does it seem we are always playing catch-up no matter how many “time savings” books we read?
The answer:
Communication!
Within the construction industry, individuals face a daily barrage of communication devices and methods: e-mail, office phone, cell phone, office fax, e-fax, text, instant messaging, voicemail, and so on and so forth.
A study, conducted by SIS International Research, involved 513 respondents in Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. The respondents were “knowledge workers” employed by companies of up to 400 employees in the fields of communications, finance, health care, insurance, manufacturing, “professional,” real estate and wholesale or retail trade. The survey asked respondents how much time they wasted in overcoming various obstacles to communication. Their answer was an astounding average of 17.5 hours per week, or more than 40 percent of their time.
The wasted time took several forms. Inefficient coordination among team members was experienced by 68 percent of respondents and resulted in spending an average of 3.7 hours per week to address this issue. Another big problem was waiting for information from others, which wasted 3.5 hours per week. Other top time-wasters included: dealing with unwanted communications (2 to 3 hours per week); coping with customer complaints about employees’ being unreachable (3.3 hours); and the inaccessibility of, or inability to collaborate with, other employees (3.3 hours).
As Part of our WLB (Work-Life-Balance) methodology, we continue to find areas where we can save you and your team time.
Our newest feature is a simple, but often overlooked, process that occurs on every project sent out for bid. The answering of bid questions submitted by contractors.
No matter how detailed you are in your bid documents, invariably a question will arise during the bid process. This will require you to respond to the question and as well, communicate the question and response to all of the contractors bidding on the project.
Report Hawk’s latest feature continues our focus on increasing time savings, reducing communication errors and redundancy, and ensuring apples-to-apples bid comparisons.
Our new Bid Questions Feature allows bidding contractors, during the ITB stage, to submit bid questions to the owner’s project team. All questions submitted are kept anonymous, thus keeping private the number and names of the contractors bidding on a project.
When a bid question is submitted, the question is e-mailed to the owner’s project team and all bidding contractors. Once a response is provided, it is e-mailed to all bidding contractors. This simplifies the communication process while keeping all bidding contractors in the loop.
To access the bid question feature, login to Report Hawk, select your project and click on the Bid Question Icon to open the feature. To learn more or to schedule and on-line demo of our product please visit us at www.reporthawk.com/contact/ and complete the contact us form.
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February 24th, 2009
By popular demand we have upgraded our Project Subcontractors to include specific detailed trade names
Included in this new upgrade we now import the subcontractor’s contact information into the Project Directory.
If you have a new subcontractor trade name you would like added, please email us at support@reporthawk.com
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January 26th, 2009
Being a Tech company we are always on the lookout for great new tech tools that save us time and we like to share these new finds with our clients. This year we discovered www.xobni.com. Yep, that is Inbox spelled backwards. This Microsoft Outlook plug-in helps you manage your flooded Inbox.
Xobni is the San Francisco startup that is revolutionizing the way people manage email relationships. Xobni makes a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that helps you organize your flooded inbox. Xobni was founded by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina in the spring of 2006.
Xobni extends Outlook by offering fast search, conversation threading, a social networking platform, and many other features designed to make email better:
- Lightning fast email search
- Email analytics
- Threaded conversation
- Quick attachment discovery
- Web service integration with linkedin
We have been using xobni this month and have found it to be an incredible time saving tool! No more looking at your sent folder for attachments and wasting your time! Check it out today and start saving time.
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December 22nd, 2008
Report Hawk would like to welcome Salon Lofts as our newest client. Salon Lofts, www.salonlofts.com based in Columbus, Ohio rents work stations it dubs “lofts” in its shops to hair stylists, nail technicians and masseuses. Salon Lofts’ shops typically range from 2,600 to 6,000 square feet and hold 14 to 40 work spaces for rent. The company has more than 275 hair stylists, nail technicians and masseuses renting space in its shops.
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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.
Posted in Reduce Project Cost | No Comments »
November 17th, 2008
Congratulations to Gallant Construction Co. for being featured in the Architectural and Construction Services section of Wyndam Hotel Group’s 2008 Buying Guide. Click here to view. Wyndam Hotel Group brands includes Ramada, Days Inn, Super 8, Baymont and Amerihost Inn to name a few.
We were first introduced to Gallant on a Lululemon Athletica project in the Fall of 2008. As the awarded General Contractor for the project they began to use our application to report daily and weekly activities on the jobsite back to Lululemon. Soon after the completion of this project Gallant began to use Report Hawk on Chipotle, Barnes & Noble and Michaels stores. Their detailed use of our application is a benefit to the project team members and a testament to their organization’s commitment to a detailed, well-organized and well-managed project.
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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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October 24th, 2008
We are always on the lookout for technology that can really benefit our clients. We found this application and decided to try it in our office before recommending it. It’s free, it’s green and it saves you money. If you do not use your PCs Power Settings and/or think they are to confusing to use, then this nifty tool is for you. Edison by Verdiem, www.verdiem.com/edison helps change and manage your power settings. Just move a slider, click and save. We used the slider and set our PCs to one notch below Save More. According to Edison with this setting we save 694.15 Kilowatt hours of electricity a year and thus save 946 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. On top of that, we save $71.71 dollars per PC. A simple step to save money!
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