Disruption!

Change of any kind can be hard, but disruption in construction breaks up the good ol’ boy network, provides transparency at all levels, and saves you and your company time and money.

At my last conference, I spoke of the old way of doing business versus the new way. In the old way, you let contractors manage your documents, give you “access,” and drive the ship. In the NEW way, you protect your largest asset—the document flow—with technology and smart PIMS (project information managers) to track, gather, and archive all information. ALL information includes weather, RFI, bidders, submittals, red lines, and everything down to the keying schedule and warranties.

Yes, EVERYTHING! YOU control your documents, not some contractor.

In the MySmartPlans history of managing more than 1,300 projects, we get stories all the time of how the new way has provided value for construction companies. Here is one from yesterday:

It has been a pleasure working with MSP on the ATB project. Early on in the project MSP saved the college $120,000 that a subcontractor was making a claim against related to civil site work. Our state project manager and architect said that the subcontractor should be paid because the work was legitimate and the college received benefit from the work. Though I did not disagree with those statements, the claim did not seem right to me and I wanted to really make sure I was getting solid advise.

In my interest to see how well MSP search features worked and wanting to be satisfied that I was in fact contractually obligated to pay out on the claim, I took about 10-20 minutes (while multi-tasking) to search the documents in the MSP database. In that short time I found contractual language that clearly put the scope of work risk associated with the claim on the contractor and not on the owner.

I brought the information to the state project manager, architect, and general contractor so we could all see the same language and agree on it’s interpretation. In no less than five minutes of discussion, everyone agreed that the contractor was obligated and responsible for the work and associated costs the subcontractor was making a claim against. There was no arguing or disruptive dispute because we could all agree that the claim was addressed in the contract documents. This is one example of the value that MSP, through it’s document search feature, brought to our project.

How can MySmartPlans positively disrupt your documents? Call for a demo!