By Lori Allen
Many arduous processes plague the construction industry, such as data silos, process invisibility, and fragmentation, making it nearly impossible to track progress. The industry is realizing that feeding real-time data straight from the field is crucial for success. When working entirely around outdated information, project and financial managers can make mistakes that dramatically reduce a job’s profit; but, when working from consistent, accurate data, guesswork and poor decision-making are greatly reduced. Adding real-time data to the management mix ensures efficient and productive decisions that will benefit every project.
Real-time data allows teams to stay up-to-date with the project status and any issues that may arise. Identifying these issues early on allows management to adjust their plans to resolve issues before they cause real damage. Having data flow from field to office can also help team members learn from patterns and optimize workflows to get the best possible results, and the information gathered can be utilized to derive useful insights for future growth.
BUILD A DATA RELATIONSHIP
Cloud-based, platform-enabled solutions, like CONNEX Jobsite from Command Alkon, digitize information from paper tickets so the entire supply chain can see ticket data in real time, throughout the ticket’s lifecycles, from anywhere. Projects reduce waste, eliminate manual tasks and duplicate data entry, standardize processes, improve materials yield, and track job costs daily with digital workflows from vendor to field to office. The CONNEX Jobsite solution has been a great value add to the team at Grand Parkway Infrastructure, LLC. Providing the streamlined workflow with ticketing, payments and materials tracking needed on such a large infrastructure project, providing a single source of info for multiple stakeholders, and keeping the entire team on the same page.
Although platform-enabled jobsite technologies do wonders from a digitization standpoint, the majority of the tickets in the construction industry are still just pieces of paper that get passed through multiple touchpoints. TicketPro, part of the CONNEX Jobsite tech stack, makes it possible to digitize 100% of your material and haul tickets and invoices and do some incredible things with the digital data, such as job cost reporting, accruals reporting, automated invoice reconciliation, and delivery of more insights that can help to run a more efficient job.
FUEL FIELD PRODUCTIVITY
Capturing tickets on the jobsite takes just seconds using the TicketPro mobile app. The ticket signer simply selects the project, chooses the material being hauled, and snaps a picture of the paper ticket. The app even filters the projects that are displayed to the user by a 1-mile radius and attaches the GPS location of where the ticket was captured, to help eliminate fraud and errors at the jobsite. All of the tickets submitted show up at the top of the Tickets Page instantly, and the user can click on the details to view who signed the ticket, what time, the location, and more.
TicketPro can also utilize scanner integration to upload and analyze tickets in half the time, while extracting data from tickets using OCR technology. Hundreds of tickets can be imported in minutes, and users can also capture tickets directly from the scale printer with an integration that imports the tickets as soon as they’re created by the scale operator, or through an integration with CONNEX for companies that are already taking advantage of the platform.
TicketPro has an army of people around the globe that are working 24 hours a day to verify data entry. This makes TicketPro part of a new generation of technology where robots and humans have a symbiotic relationship and work collaboratively to create a new level of service that traditional software systems do not provide.
The TicketPro Trucking Cycle report displays the total loads and weights delivered to date, as well as monitoring for problematic trips that are running long or short. This report provides project managers and foremen with all of the information needed for job cost reporting.
AUTOMATE RECONCILIATION
In the past if an invoice had a discrepancy, it would take weeks to pass changes back and forth before it gets paid. With TicketPro’s invoice portal, contractors can communicate with vendors in seconds to make sure their records match and then process the invoice within hours. Vendors can also request early payment to fill in those cash flow gaps. With the Reconciliation tool, the user can verify the work completed by simply scanning in a paper invoice and asking TicketPro to match tickets in the system with each line item on the invoice. TicketPro then highlights any missing, duplicate, or previously invoiced tickets for review, to ensure that the work being paid for has been completed, and that it hasn’t been paid for previously. TicketPro integrates with multiple accounting software solutions, such as Viewpoint, Quickbooks, and more.
CLOSING THOUGHT
Digitizing the data from tickets that are coming into the jobsite requires field personnel to work more collaboratively with the back office. Taking this a step further, the relationships between suppliers or haulers and contractors has been contentious, and technology can act as a facilitator in improving and enhancing collaboration across the heavy building materials supply chain. Systems like CONNEX get everyone in the supply chain collaborating more, sharing the same data, and optimizing their business processes.
About the author:
Lori Allen is the director of marketing at Command Alkon. In her 20 years with the company, she has worked in training, technical writing, product development, quality assurance, and process development roles. For more, visit www.commandalkon.com/getconnexjobsite.
Modern Contractor Solutions, July 2021
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