By incorporating processes that can be easily repeated and using intelligent construction software, you make it easier for your team to complete a project well.
What is standardization in construction?
A weakness of traditional management processes is the lack of standardization. There is no singular set, no uniform standard to refer to. Project managers are often chosen based on their previous experience, and they end up retaining the same practices they used on previous projects, whether those procedures make sense or not. This typical practice can lead to large amounts of variation in a company. The first step is to admit when a process is broken.
Lack of standardization makes it harder for teams to communicate. They often use different devices and software and rely on paper notes and their own memory. Each additional device or piece of software makes the data your team works with less reliable and usable. Building software makes standardisation easy and ensures you don’t have to deal with issues of organizations with too many programs, policies and procedures.
The benefits
- Standardization creates clarity
Complex processes usually have a few components that can be interpreted in different ways. Standardisation gives you clear guidelines you can design work processes with in detail. The result: a uniform method of working that is clear to all employees.
- Work processes become measurable
The standardization of work processes also enables you to measure the outcomes of work processes, testing their efficiency and productivity.
- Standardization leads to consistent quality
By standardizing work processes, the desired result of each step becomes clear. This is how you create a universal standard that ensures a constant level of quality. Delivering consistent quality is good for your reputation, improves your service standards and ultimately results in more loyal customers.
- Processes become repeatable and less fallible
If you design a process according to fixed basic principles and best practices, you can execute it several times (and in theory even endlessly) while maintaining the same level of quality. Work processes become more defined and less prone to human errors. For example, you no longer have to manually enter the (e-mail) addresses of construction specialists, but always have all data at hand in a convenient database.
- Knowledge transfer improves
Have you just hired a new employee who needs to learn the ropes quickly? Well-developed standards ensure that the newcomer quickly masters the work process and joins as a full team member in no time. Standardization makes it easier for experienced people to quickly transfer their knowledge of a work process to new colleagues.
- Innovating and automating becomes easier
Once you know exactly how processes run down to the smallest detail, innovating and automating them becomes easier. You can implement improvements faster and more effectively, while you simultaneously gain more insight into parts that can be automated. By automating or robotizing repetitive actions, certain work processes can be performed faster and cheaper.
But how?
12Build gives you the opportunity to standardise the quotation process with a simple, time-saving solution. By standardising the tools and workflows you use, different teams within the organisation use the same software in a uniform way. Exchanging documents with construction specialists or creating offer requests in the same, standard way are only two examples. Standardising forms, tools and your workflow helps improve communication and reduce errors, since everyone knows where to find the details. No more unnecessary emails and WeTransfers, everything is organised neatly in one place, in one program that everyone understands.