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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Reduce Project Cost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.