ForConstructionPros.com

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.