Rising from the ashes of one of the worst economic downturns, the construction industry has seen a gradual uptick in business. During the economic slump, AEC players had begun to look for ways to become more efficient and productive. As part of this trend, the AEC industry has been quick to adopt the emerging cloud and mobile technologies.

There are several reasons why AEC companies are adopting these new technologies in earnest for project and construction management. Projects, today, have much tighter schedules than ever before. There are stiff penalties for not delivering a project on time. It also leads to expensive and time-consuming litigation.

These factors are encouraging the industry to focus on enhancing their productivity, efficiency and sustainable practices.

Cloud technology has made adoption easy, quick, simple and affordable. Cloud and mobile technologies simply provide unprecedented value!

Today, almost every AEC player irrespective of size is working on some form of technology solution. Hence there is a plethora of solutions in the market today.

During my interactions with customers they often ask me:

What should we consider while selecting a solution? Hence, I am going to talk about important factors to consider while choosing a solution.

Who owns the data?

Clearly it is your data and you own it. You are the owner! That’s the only acceptable answer when you are assessing a cloud collaboration solution. Once both employees and vendors begin sharing drawings, plans, photos and contracts all on the same platform, it is important that it remain clear who maintains the rights to the data – It is you! This allows companies to plan in advance for any potential litigation and understand how their cloud vendor will respond to e-discovery and subpoena requests, minimizing delays in the construction process. If this component is missing, you must continue your search…

Who can access the data?

Be clear on the process of assigning permissions and access rights when evaluating a vendor. The owner of the data (Contractor, Owner, Developer, Architect) should have full control over this, it should be easy to manage and crystal clear in the user interface to avoid potential sharing of confidential information. In a high stakes construction project, sometimes seemingly simplest mistakes can cause major delays or even lead to legal issues.

How secure is the data?

The importance of security is hard to overstate as organizations are now hit on a regular basis with denial of service (DoS) and a variety of other cyber-attacks. It is absolutely essential to ask and understand the security perimeters adopted by the vendor. Try to understand if there is an attack, or a breach whether or not the vendor has a mechanism in place to monitor and respond. After the dust has settled how quickly can you, with help of the vendor, conduct an audit?

Not only will an outage of the system ripple through the project, delaying the general contractor, design team and everyone else involved, the loss or leakage of data could cost big; the breach will manifest by way of loss of company’s reputation and future business. It can consume and distract an organization due to mandatory SEC filing, plethora of compliance issues and a potential of litigation.

These are not the only considerations for selecting a solution, there are more!

To talk to an expert about AEC tech solutions, reach out to us:

• Call 844.759.7483
• Email: info@skysite.com

To see and try one of the AEC’s premiere technology solutions for free go to www.skysite.com.

Claims and litigation are an inevitable part of business in every industry – the construction industry is no different. The construction industry too has its fair share of disputes.

As a risk management measure, Project Manager and Project Teams should anticipate factors that can lead to potential litigations at the very beginning of a project. Project managers can take steps to reduce these risks, or at least limit the delays, disruptions and financial overruns caused in construction projects.

There are several factors that cause delay in a construction project. Notable among them are – not working from the latest set of document and not effectively communicating changes. These failures lead to disputes with regards to scope of work definitions, costly overruns, and worse, lengthy and expensive litigation!

Delays in construction projects can lead to a cascade of negative financial repercussions for both owners and their contractors. Damages often even double the cost of the entire project!

While it is impossible to completely avoid litigation on construction projects, steps can be taken to minimize the potential for litigation from the document and information point of view.

A highly effective way to mitigate information risk is to ensure that project members are using high quality technology solutions made specifically for the construction industry. Companies using generic document management solutions seem to be least happy with their systems. Nearly one in three (30.1%) AEC professionals said that current cloud technology tools that are not designed for the AEC market made completing a project on schedule a challenge.

Managing construction project documents is innately complex. Projects are becoming multi-geo; Owner, Developers, Architects, GCs, Sub-Contractors and Vendors are spread out, and often work from different locations. To manage and track changes during a project is a herculean challenge. ARC Document Solutions with decades of domain knowledge recognized and addressed these challenges with their solution.

SKYSITE, construction management software, was designed with features that provide “Control” to the Project Managers.

• Strong tracking & reporting capabilities: SKYSITE tracks and generate reports for each document shared, downloaded, deleted, distributed and marked up by any project participant. Create accountability at every level.
• Customize document tracking: a report can be generated on daily, weekly and monthly basis. A project manager can further customize for a specific period.
• Share a report: a report created can be shared with other project stakeholders.
• Strong Privacy Setting: SKYSITE offers Second layer of Project Password Protection options for confidential Projects. This restricts access to those folders/documents/ information that are confidential in nature.

SKYSITE’s strong tracking and reporting capabilities makes information auditing easy and reduces the risk of litigation. Whereby reducing business risk.

SKYSITE not only provides an overview of information flow but also identifies slackers and creates accountability at every level and increases efficiency.

To start reducing project errors at skysite.com.