I sat down with Robert Salaj, the director of the Buyer Advisory Staff at Quickbase, to debate how development corporations can efficiently digitalize their enterprise processes. Robert shared insights from his intensive 20+ yr profession in lean Six Sigma course of enchancment and his decade-long expertise within the development business.

The business faces a number of urgent challenges, together with labor shortages, provide chain disruptions, and fluctuating rates of interest. Dashing up development and bettering its productiveness with out compromising high quality is turning into more and more vital.

Again to fundamentals

Robert Salaj

Firms are searching for digitalization as an answer however are sometimes upset with the outcomes. That’s primarily as a result of they attempt to repair every challenge with a separate piece of software program. The result’s a mixture of unconnected items in each challenge or inside the identical firm.

“When you don’t have your knowledge set right in your structure setup, you’re not going to get the suitable metrics on the finish of the day. And fairly frankly, you realize what you’re going to do? You’re going to break morale,” Robert says.

Robert advocates a back-to-basics method. He emphasised the necessity to set up a stable basis of ordinary working procedures earlier than adopting new applied sciences. He additionally mentioned integrating varied methods to streamline workflows and enhance knowledge administration.

Ten insights

How, then, are you able to efficiently begin digitalizing your development processes? Listed here are ten insights I picked from the interview:

  1. Set up clear, standardized processes, as a result of digitalizing with out systematization received’t enhance your outcomes.
  2. Consolidate knowledge right into a central, structured system. This allows seamless integration and knowledge analytics.
  3. Interact subject groups, akin to foremen, within the growth and planning levels to make sure buy-in and usefulness.
  4. Outline clear KPIs for each function to measure progress and success and tailor dashboards to particular person roles.
  5. Deal with instruments and platforms that combine effectively with current methods. Spend money on applied sciences that enable for scaling and adaptation, akin to low-code platforms like Quickbase, which allow customized workflows and speedy growth.
  6. Create suggestions loops and apply Lean and Six Sigma rules, akin to DMAIC (Outline, Measure, Analyze, Enhance, Management), to information the transformation.
  7. Digitalize your bid administration and make data-driven choices on which tasks to pursue.
  8. Improve prefabrication workflows by connecting knowledge throughout modeling, logistics, and subject operations.
  9. Harness AI to investigate datasets for duties like bid administration, contract evaluation, and workflow optimization.
  10. Deal with digital transformation tasks like development tasks and emphasize pre-planning and stakeholder involvement.

The last word function of digitalization

Many development corporations have chosen Quickbase as a data-centric, no-code, or low-code platform. Robert shared success tales of how Quickbase has led to notable enhancements in bid administration, prefabrication, security, and extra.

No matter know-how you select, it’s best to assist these within the subject of their each day work. As Robert put it:

“I believe a number of instances we simply overlook a number of the simplicity, Aarni, total. Like we’re very advanced stuff, however they only need to sit down and say, I must know what number of invoices I must work on right this moment. I must know what number of RFIs are open. What are the system submittal logs? […] And should you’re in a position to clear up for that, I believe it’s enormous.”

Take heed to the interview.