When managing new builds, renovations and maintenance projects, things can quickly go off track due to poor site management. Ineffective time management, finances, communication, and materials continue to be some of the major obstacles to a project’s success.
As a construction owner, the greatest way to gain reliable records of your project’s progress is through 360° photo documentation. This makes it easier for all parties to keep track of deadlines, evaluate costs against your project budget and assess the team’s overall productivity. You get a comprehensive picture of your project’s progress, which helps you develop ways to improve management of future renovations or maintenance projects.
Here are 4 ways owners stand to benefit from 360° photo documentation and a user-friendly construction progress management solution to monitor the site comprehensively and with ease.
Reduce travel time and cost
As owners, you frequently worry about the time and money spent travelling to sites to monitor your construction project’s progress. Your team may be losing more than one full day of work every week due to this inefficiency.
In a 2020 industry survey with participants from 540 construction businesses, two-thirds (66%) spend more than a quarter of their work hours waiting for work to be done. The numerous trips back and forth prevent you from staying within your budget and achieving deadlines, which has a significant negative impact on your bottom line.
The entire process, which includes your contractors physically walking around the jobsite, taking pictures, and manually documenting the site, takes a long time—often days—and prevents the remote team from receiving fast and accurate progress updates.Owners who have their hands on a construction progress management tool benefit from getting a precise, visual representation of the jobsite instantly. A solution like HoloBuilder allows you to get an accurate, digital replica of the site anytime and from any location by bringing the jobsite to the office for you to view clearly in 360°, giving you a way to monitor progress without costly travel to the physical site.
The HoloBuilder JobWalk App – connected to a 360° camera via WiFi – makes it easy to document site conditions.
With HoloBuilder’s JobWalk App, contractors can capture the entire site in 360° where then the photo captures are pinned to the floor plan and uploaded directly into the HoloBuilder cloud for you to access from any location. This feature allows you to view every little detail that is captured on-site as compared to 2D photos that prevent you from understanding the full context of the site.
Reduce rework
Unidentified issues are like diseases in that they can quickly spread throughout connected portions of the project rather than stay isolated. Rework on construction projects significantly affects productivity and disastrously impacts budget and schedule.
For teams to work more effectively in this environment, tracking and managing construction progress on-site is essential. As a result, errors are found sooner and may be fixed before they balloon into larger, more costly, and significant repairs. Hence, a 360° photo documentation tool is crucial as it allows you to experience the site as if you were there.
By using 360º cameras to capture the entire site and combining data into a single shared platform, teams can identify and address issues on-site much more quickly before they get more severe.
Improve communication and transparency
When it comes to effectively managing a project, transparency is essential. Decision-making is often delayed due to inadequate communication between the teams monitoring from the office and the contractors on-site due to poor site visibility and dispersed data sharing.
Nearly 70% of contractors said that poor jobsite coordination often causes projects to run over budget or past deadlines. Meanwhile, 54% attribute delays to poor coordination between subcontractors.
With a secure and seamless way of sharing on-site data through a single source of truth platform, owners who use the 360° documentation tool have the advantage of making decisions faster and more effectively, assured that every area of the site is being overseen in the process.
HoloBuilder Web Editor – easily annotate your 360° photos with PDFs, 360 Markups, videos, and more.
For renovation and maintenance projects, a construction progress management tool such as HoloBuilder allows owners to flag locations on the existing floor plan, leaving markups, comments, PDFs and even videos on the as-built records for what needs attention. This saves time for the contractor because they know what needs attention even before they visit the site.
Create reliable as-built documentation
A good amount of valuable time is taken up by the construction team locating specific files among several hundred uncategorized documents. The low rate of technology adoption in construction costs everyone on the team.
According to Levelset, less than 1 in 3 construction companies use software to organize paperwork while 20% don’t use any construction software at all. Aside from potentially being inaccurate and outdated, these physical documents are often easily misplaced due to the overwhelming number of files, disparate systems and human error.
When working on a project, having trustworthy and current information about the site can significantly improve your bottom line. Your contractors can go about their work confidently when as-built records are comprehensive, reliable and contain accurate information.
A 360° digital as-built record of the site is the ideal method for everyone on the team to stay on the same page with a single updated record that is saved in the cloud and quickly accessed, as opposed to physical as-built records that are easily lost and challenging to update and organize.
Meanwhile, future renovation and maintenance projects can start faster when a thorough digital as-built record is available. The completed construction documentation can be archived and downloaded for decades to come and referenced for future projects. With the HoloBuilder Offline Viewer it can be viewed without internet connection. Contractors can obtain this reliable record of your jobsite to grasp the ins and outs of the site before setting foot on location to begin work with fewer delays.
Conclusion
Utilizing 360° photo documentation technology for your construction workflows will enable you to more effectively track activities on-site, identify costly errors early, and stay on budget for subsequent projects for increased profitability.
To enhance communication between your office and on-site teams, use a construction progress management solution like HoloBuilder to obtain 360° photo documentation of your jobsite within a single source of truth platform.
