Project Managers (PMs) across the construction industry face a common set of negative outcomes they wish to avoid for the successful execution of their project: these are budget overruns, timeline delays, and accidents or errors on-site that contribute to the above two.
Budget overruns are the key point of failure simply because the project team will either not have the cash flow to fill the gap or will need to source it at unfavourable terms or with penalties. Delays are unwanted since they require the site and manpower to remain operational for additional days, which contributes to budget overruns. Finally, accidents and errors on-site contribute to both delays and budget overruns.
It’s evident that there’s a butterfly effect at play: the sum of on-site errors, delays, accidents, or variations can bubble up to project-level cash flow inefficiencies. It’s critical that these be minimised for overall project success. Geometrid has been able to partner with leading contractors in the region such as Lindner Facades Asia to accomplish just that.
(Read the case study on how this was done here).
The root cause of most on-site mishaps is a twofold issue with information: a lack of information centralisation and a concomitant lack of real-time information.
Information is key to project success far more than numbers of bricks or tonnes of concrete. Information glues together suppliers, material, manpower, decision-makers, and teams. Tonnes of concrete are abstracted into information (quality, type, status, dispatch date) long before they’re ever poured into rebar on-site. Information management is therefore essential.
When information is not centralised (and, worse, decentralised in an ad hoc manner), it accumulates a processing debt that must ultimately be paid manually and in a time- and labour-intensive way. As a single strand of information (say, fabrication updates) moves from origin to stakeholder one to site to PM, it absorbs additional information and reactions (lack of palettes on-site, client update requests, etc.). This is multiplied by the number of stakeholders to arrive at a massive and intricate web of information that must eventually be manually consolidated by PMs and Planning Engineers to derive any meaningful insights.
Geometrid has spoken to PMs across contractors in the region and found that such manual consolidation takes 10+ manhours to perform, takes away productive time from other, more important PM responsibilities, and contributes to wasted effort and time as a result.
Information is key to project success far more than numbers of bricks or tonnes of concrete.
More importantly, since time must be spent on consolidation, all information in a decentralised information system inherently carries a minimum amount of lag time (which scales exponentially as project complexity grows). It is therefore impossible to have real-time information in such a system.
Real-time information is essential for real-time decision-making: opportunities are squandered, mistakes are not detected or rectified in time, site planning is imnpaired, and bottlenecks are either created or worsened. For example, before integrating Geometrid into a new internal monitoring system, Lindner PMs reported delays of 3-4 days between an event occurring and information of it arriving to PMs.
“Lindner built its new internal tracking process around Geometrid as the pivot. It was an anchor for our improved process where we wanted to make sure our information was more real-time and reliable,” said Chong Chia Yan, Assistant Project Manager at Lindner Facades Asia. “This was to improve our internal coordination but also communications with clients.”
(Read the full testimonial on Lindner’s new Geometric-centric process here).
By integrating Geometrid into their project management workflows and tracing systems (or better yet, building a tracking system around Geometrid), PMs have been able to simultaneously solve both centralisation and time delay issues. Geometrid allows PMs to have all of their information stakeholders (providers as well as requesters) on the same platform. Update data can be fed in real-time (and is as simple as pointing a smartphone and scanning a QR code), monitored in real-time by PMs, and generated into reports in real-time for clients and other decision-makers. All of this neutralises information lag time and ensures that information is relevant, timely, and most importantly, actionable.
Reach out to us today to learn more about how Geometrid can be used to level up your project management workflows today.