As more and more companies are realizing, the preconstruction phase is the most important stage in any construction project. It impacts everything from timelines to budgets and the overall success of your project. The current traditional approaches to preconstruction have enormous inefficiencies created by dozens of manual workflows and disjointed communication among team members and stakeholders. This is where ConCntric provides the ultimate solution.

By addressing the common frustrations our industry faces, ConCntric allows preconstruction professionals to work smarter and more efficiently. In this blog post, we explore how ConCntric can transform your team’s preconstruction operations, boosting efficiency and helping you navigate the preconstruction phase seamlessly.

How Does ConCntric Unify Data, People and Processes?

Today’s preconstruction process is heavily burdened by an overreliance on spreadsheets and a lack of centralized and structured data. Due to this inefficient process, team members are completing multiple different types of tasks manually using far too many steps than necessary. Because these tasks are repetitive and performed hundreds, if not thousands, of times a year, a company’s productivity and efficiency are significantly compromised.

When you translate the cost of inefficiency into people hours, it adds up to an enormous amount that GCs have to absorb as a part of their overhead and cost of doing business.

Data: The adoption of technology in construction is accelerating rapidly and it is not going to wait for you to catch up. Multiple industries have been transformed with the implementation of technology and construction will be no different. Companies from other industries are using their data to make processes more accurate, more precise and more readily available and we haven’t yet reached that point as an industry.

ConCntric was built to help our industry get there. We saw the use of data and the embrace of technology as a way to make a massive change in the trajectory of our industry. By unifying and centralizing project data, ConCntric makes teams more efficient, taking tedious tasks off their plate. Think about how much time people spend on generating comps and preparing for meetings. With ConCntric, once you input your data one time, it’s saved and autogenerated into presentation-ready, real-time graphs and charts that help everyone understand where the project is at any point in time. All of that historical data living in static spreadsheets can be pushed into ConCntric for you to compare past and present projects and set your whole team up for success, not just now but forever forward.

People: The way our industry operates is exponentially changing. 87% of construction projects are moving to a collaborative delivery model and on top of that, ⅓ of the 8 million people in construction will be retiring by 2028. Not to mention, the world’s population growth is expected to increase by 25% by 2040. Think about the infrastructure needed to keep up with our growing population. These stats alone signify a substantial shift in our industry’s operations.

ConCntric recognizes the importance of collaboration at the preconstruction level and the need to increase efficiency. Our platform was built to help our customers get ahead of impending retirements, population increases and the widening knowledge gap between industry veterans and new hires. Because the construction industry will look completely different in the next 3-5 years, our preconstruction management software was built to increase bandwidth (by automating processes), store and utilize all important project data (to make knowledge transfer as effortless as possible) and ensure seamless collaboration between all stakeholders.

Processes: If traditional processes do not evolve, preconstruction professionals will get burned out—it’s inevitable. We need to stop thinking, “Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it” because it’s not getting us anywhere. Any construction professional knows that if you take shortcuts in preconstruction, you are going to get burned.

Every job is very unique and every Owner’s requirements are different, however, you need some level of process in order to keep your sanity.

When you look across all preconstruction teams, you’ll recognize that the experience level is much lower than it was 5-10 years ago and yet there is less of a process, causing a huge void. If, as a Contractor, you can bring to the table a very systematic, well-developed process, you are providing a more comprehensive service than most other Contractors are providing, benefiting your client and your team. 

ConCntric’s holistic platform has many features that touch on all aspects of the preconstruction phase, allowing Owners, GCs, Design Teams and Trade Partners to work collaboratively in real time, using a structured and standardized process. Not only that, but our platform allows you to be safeguarded against the younger generation with less experience giving them the ability to be agile, adaptive and learn much more quickly. ConCntric gives teams a headstart into the evolution of the collaborative delivery model, equipping them to handle the evolving demands of the industry by giving them the tools they need to streamline processes, enhance collaboration and bridge the knowledge gap.

What are the Benefits of Real-Time Updates in ConCntric?

The journey through all aspects of the preconstruction stage of a project is quite fluid. However, there are many stakeholders involved that are consistently measuring progress and risk in many different ways at many different times.

The Status Quo: Project information is not centralized, nor structured in a way that all stakeholders have access to it. Additionally, we typically do not see project information presented in a way that meets everyone’s needs and in a digestible format. This requires whoever the keeper of the information is to continuously manually produce what is needed by the stakeholders, which is highly inefficient and certainly not collaborative.

ConCntric was developed to be your single source of truth in which your data can be accessed at any given time. This applies to every aspect of project planning: cost estimation, checking the status of decisions that need to be made, revisiting preconstruction and construction timelines and budgets, etc.

Real-time updates allow for a higher degree of collaboration and trust among all stakeholders. Not to mention, it offers significant savings in people’s time by eliminating the manual work required to give updates that—let’s be honest—are never really real-time.

How does ConCntric Help in Reducing Errors and Rework?

There is an old carpenter saying, “Measure twice, cut once.” The same can be said for everything done in the preconstruction phase. Rework in construction globally costs $250 billion a year and 33% of all project failures are identified to be caused by poor communication and collaboration. And where does this often stem from? We hate to say it—the preconstruction phase.

As a preconstruction management solution dedicated to the entirety of preconstruction, ConCntric’s platform offers a collaborative system with an array of digital tools to help teams mitigate risk and avoid rework. In turn, this allows for more coordinated and in-depth planning of all aspects of the project. The more in-depth the planning is, the fewer errors that are going to occur during the actual construction of the project, resulting in rework. By keeping a close eye on project details in real-time and having the benefit of a comprehensive platform in which to do all of the planning work, more errors are caught and reconciled in ConCntric before becoming major issues down the line.

How does ConCntric Improve Forecasting and Resource Allocation?

Traditionally, being able to forecast outcomes would involve multiple versions of the same spreadsheet with slight adjustments to each, resulting in hours of manual labor. And when it comes to resource allocation, you need to consider how much labor you are putting into forecasting outcomes and how the cost of that labor impacts your bottom line.

Using ConCntric, teams can drive efficiency and improve outcomes in the planning phase which will, in turn, set the table for success for the project management team that is responsible for executing the plan and building the project. Giving teams the ability to not just plan, but to be able to more thoughtfully and accurately forecast helps all stakeholders be on the same page and avoid surprises.

The benefit of using ConCntric’s platform for resource allocation is that all of your workflows are digitized and you can naturally understand and track many aspects of the project, including who is assigned to what and ensuring that proper resources are allocated in the correct areas without having an imbalance of workload and coverage.

Being in an industry that is rapidly evolving, eliminating inefficiencies and embracing technology is crucial to any construction company’s success. ConCntric unifies data, people and processes to streamline workflows, reduce manual tasks and enhance productivity.

The challenges posed by an aging workforce, a growing population and the shift toward a more collaborative delivery model fuel the need for a more efficient approach to preconstruction. ConCntric was developed to meet these challenges head-on by facilitating seamless collaboration among all stakeholders, automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time updates, reducing risk and saving time and money.

By leveraging ConCntric, preconstruction professionals can improve forecasting, leverage historical data and ensure efficient resource allocation, setting the table for success in the construction phase.

Embracing the future of preconstruction with ConCntric transforms the way teams manage projects, collaborate among team members and as a result, deliver remarkable outcomes. To learn more about what ConCntric can do for you, visit this link to book a demo.