Improving Productivity and Efficiency through Mobile Technology Solutions

By Stephen Morgan, Senior Account Executive
Equential - a division of ICS

With today's headlines, it would be redundant to say that the economy is pressuring construction companies, contractors and field service firms. Like many other industries, these companies are increasingly under pressure to decrease costs and to operate at lower profit margins. Competing now and into the future means that construction firms must find ways to increase efficiencies while maintaining margins, quality and safety.

Construction companies are rapidly employing mobile technology to take advantage of simplifying and automating the capture of information in the field and integrating the data back into company systems. Reducing inefficiencies on any single active construction project can significantly raise productivity, reduce costs and positively impact the bottom line. After all, corporate results are determined by individual project results.

A profitable construction job or project often hinges on the accuracy and timeliness of tracking job-related costs - particularly labor hours, equipment utilization and daily production data. Manual, paper-based processes require field supervisors to spend hours collecting and verifying multiple pieces of information for each employee every day.

A mobile solution replaces paper timesheets by enabling a supervisor to record employee hours against jobs, cost codes and other necessary field information, and then wirelessly send the information to the office. Beyond saving a supervisor hours each day doing paperwork, streamlining the timesheet approval process and seamlessly integrating this information into the company's enterprise system virtually eliminates the inaccuracies and inefficiencies of paper-based time keeping processes.

By automating the collection of labor, equipment and production in the field - using handhelds, PCs, PDAs or Smartphones - supervisors can accurately clock workers in and out, virtually eliminating phantom payroll costs of up to $1,200 per field worker, per year.

Lloyd Kuehn, CFO for Scott Contracting, saves 3% - 10% of labor costs by using real-time scanning to track actual clock-in/out times. "At $35 per hour (fully burdened), saving 10 minutes per day per person adds up fast."

If a solution adds tracking equipment utilization, materials, and receipts, supervisors now have the daily visibility into production needed to more quickly make course corrections while they can still change the outcome.

"It's a great advantage for us to be able to track production as it occurs. This way, we know early in the project if we will meet our production and profit objectives," noted Kuehn.

Once data is transmitted to the office, payroll staff or managers can review, change and approve the information and then seamlessly import it into their enterprise data and billing systems. Payroll staff no longer has to decipher handwritten timesheets, manually key information or validate data and cost codes to produce payroll checks. Project billing becomes much more accurate as well.

Within several weeks of implementing the Equential software solution, SelectBuild's accuracy of employee time data and the associated job and cost codes increased by 15 percent. These and other documentable savings from mobile field solutions are easy to find.

It is not unusual for a company such as the InfrastruX Group- a national leader in infrastructure construction services for the gas, electric, water/sewer, and telecommunications industries - to reduce back-office processing costs by 40 percent. Furthermore, they have achieved hard results from increased accuracy of billing equipment, materials and labor to correct job codes and will reap these benefits throughout a large, 10-year project.

For many construction companies, the immediate benefits of automating time, labor and production capture in the field can include: