[VIDEO] 4 Steps to Supercharging Your Construction Technology ROI

"If you buy a piece of exercise equipment and it becomes a coat hanger, then it’s probably not doing the job,” says Christian Burger, president of construction technology consultancy Burger Consulting Group. “Ownership is not sufficient – buying solutions only gets you part of the way there.

“Providing training on the solution actually helps quite a bit. We see a lot of companies that have decent solutions poorly utilized. Almost every week I have that encounter.

“Then you add in some process change. That phrase has come up at least a dozen times in the course of the two days here (at the 9th Annual Associated General Contractors’ IT Forum August 3 and 4, 2017): it’s about effectively changing process to align with the solution, or the solution to align with your desired process. That can add tremendous value.

“So own it, train on it, get process aligned, and your ROI will increase quite a bit.

“But we’re still light on integration of the solutions that we acquire. So one department goes out and buys a new product or a new app or something. They put it to work and they’re doing OK, but they’ve not paid any attention to where that data element either came from or went to.

“I think the estimating and takeoff function, to the procurement and the job-cost function and the payables function is a perfect example. How many times do we have to key in the same data?

“And finally, the last item was internalization – the idea that ‘this is what we use, and this is how we use it.’ Understanding and communicating that throughout your organization turns your ROI way up.”

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