Despite current challenges, the past decade of economic growth has put pressure on construction systems globally. Because of this, it can be both exciting and yet daunting to look ahead at the next 20 or 30 years of transportation expansion projects in regions full of projected growth. This excitement is likely sparked by the potential increase in jobs, economic stability and the continued positive impact of connecting communities.
But depending on what you do and where you work, you are simultaneously facing some intimidating tasks. These include figuring out how to effectively onboard entire workforces, support rapid team development and collaboration, and successfully manage employee training and certification, all while keeping your projects up to date with ever-evolving standards and regulations. The tools with which you approach these tasks will strongly determine the outcome of your efforts.
A Unique Opportunity
The world around us moves faster and faster with each passing year. And in an unprecedented time like we’re living in now, it quickly sorts out those who are prepared to succeed in an increasingly digitalized environment from those who are not. When honestly assessing your company’s preparedness this year, try asking these questions:
- Was your team still living in a world with paper records?
- Were you fighting with outdated software or spreadsheets as your primary source of reference for employee training and certification?
- How easy was it for you to access that information while still limiting person-to-person contact?
- How many times did you find yourself wishing you could research, update or access employee records and project completion data that became stuck behind an administrative resource no longer working from your co-located office?
When viewed through the lens of opportunity, these kinds of challenges can be used to coax or even jumpstart hesitant industries into highly beneficial digital adoption. But no matter where you are on your journey to digitalized project development, there’s likely one particular opportunity still waiting to be exploited: using a common data repository and integrated method to visualize connections between your personnel and your project success. These connections can be made through the management and tracking of items such as policy project compliance, employee certifications, competency tests, recurring project inspections, defect logs, non-conformance reports and much more.
Why is connectivity the key? Because a connected, digitalized environment helps you spot trends, and over time, with more data, draw quicker conclusions and see correlations you never dreamt possible.
There’s no doubt you’ve got access to a wealth of data already, but do you know where it is? Can you find it quickly? Have you been motivated to look?
Setting Your Team Up for Success
My guess is you’re already closer than you think to having a comprehensive overview and system for spotting connections between your teams’ training certifications and performance, but you might not be able to put your finger on a way to generate quick analytics. The following can help set you on your best path to success.
Connecting. Find or create a solution that connects every employee training portfolio to every project that particular employee works on.
Performance. Create key performance indicators that merge relevant employee records with jobsite performance.
Tracking. Use a solution that allows you to maintain a library of your company’s forms in a single system for onboarding, training, recurring inspections, requests for information, defects, test reports, etc.
Flexibility. Make sure that system allows you to evolve your library of company-authorized procedural and operations data with each new regulation, policy change and project compliance update.
Guardrails. Set electronic guardrails to detect project compliance issues, either with personnel or with jobsite execution.
Reaping Tangible Benefits
You know that safety is one of the most critical factors for any construction job, especially those that are high-risk. And the risk will be even higher with the speedy growth expected in an industry set to deliver massive new infrastructure over the next 20 years. This is why managing and tracking your project compliance data and employee data in a common data repository has never been more important. It’s a successful digitalized transformation that can bring together data for correlation and better enable root-cause analysis. Doing so will lead to lower risk, improved safety and better compliance across all your projects, putting you ahead of the game now and helping to ensure you stay there no matter what the future holds.
Ready to take a deeper dive? InEight’s integrated platform can help get your projects where they need to go. Let us show you how.
