Document Management – How It’s Hurting Your Bottom Line & How To Fix It

I think you’ll agree with me when I say:
It’s REALLY tiresome dealing with manual coordination of documents, human error, missing files, and, all-in-all, leaving money on the table.

But is this all necessary?
Absolutely not! It turns out, you can dramatically change your misfortunes and keep your projects on track…
In today’s post, I’m going to disclose several problems you face on the jobsite… and explain how easy it is to fix them.

1. Relying on manual coordination rather than capturing workflow digitally.

Problem: The document manager on any project bears a tremendous burden. Should something go wrong, be it a cost overrun or necessary site re-work, focus quickly turns to them. Document managers are tasked with overseeing multiple versions of thousands of sheets of data, while tying together different systems and making sure this info is available to all stakeholders at all times.

Solution: One of the most important practices your company can adopt to ensure better document management is to, above all else, capture all workflow digitally. There are a number of software programs that can do this, and as long as you are able to capture information digitally, you’re one step ahead of the game.

2. Human error that occurs when the document management process is not automated.

Problem: When files aren’t tied to specific jobs, there is a lot of room for people to misinterpret documents, including who/what they’re supposed to be affixed to. This process can take up substantial time, and create costly errors.

Solution: Document management software makes an employee, who is opening a document, immediately know what project a document is tied to. Through software, your business can easily adopt this process for use. You will eliminate several steps and create a user-friendly process to finding correct documents for a specified project in real-time.

3. Misplacing valuable documents because you don’t enforce strict file naming standards.

Problem: It’s easy to get documents mixed up when each are named in different ways. A normal document manager can easily have thousands of different documents to maintain, and if there isn’t a system in place, you can find yourself spending hours digging for documents within your files.

Solution: One of the easiest, and most effective, ways to ensure better document management is to enforce good file naming standards. What do we mean by that? Simply set a standard for naming your files that all workers must follow, and make sure you enforce it.

I can’t emphasize enough: With a universal naming standard, there will never be confusion about what a document has in store. For example, including specific dates, company names, project numbers, and functionality are all good categories to adopt. Try to avoid long names, and saving folders within folders. The point is to create easy to identify, concise, short file names that are easy to “decipher”.

4. Losing documents creates a diffusion of responsibility and decreases accountability.

Problem: When documents go missing, all the blame goes onto the document managers back. This creates a diffusion of responsibility, because when the project runs late, the field workers can blame the faulty document manager. But, for example, what if the field workers begin to slack because they can blame the project running late on that same reason.
Solution: With document management software everyone is accountable. It can also protect you from a potential construction defect lawsuit.  Since the document will be in one easy place, no one can blame another level of the company structure for the project running late.

5. Wasting time because you are not interconnected in real-time.

Problem: A site project manager’s day-to-day focus should be on supporting their team. However, many find themselves constantly needing to travel to a trailer for the latest round of documentation. Further distracting them from their duties, they have to wait for feedback as document managers take data offline to make the required changes. This interruption to the workflow means a longer build timeline.

Solution: A more efficient process, for instance, involving field workers uploading a picture of an issue on site and sharing it directly with an engineer, can mean project managers and their teams can complete projects on time. With more effective streamlined tools, corrective decisions can be made in a span of hours instead of days.

eSUB’s change order software allows you to send out and track your requests from one central location. Input descriptions of change and track status with automatic updates of contract amounts. This makes approvals come quicker so you can keep your project on the projected timeline!