What apps can you build to help your construction business?

Construction companies are very busy in running the projects, doing estimations, closing the sales and marketing their business to clients. You can’t do everything on papers like you did 20 years back, it will slow down your business and operations if you run it the older way. You can get a custom mobile app or web app built to increase the efficiency in your operations and sales. Here are innovative ideas about your construction business:

1. Estimation and Sales App

Estimation is one of the most critical functions in the construction business. You might lose a customer if you don’t do estimation right and quickly. Estimation process requires understanding the scope of the project, preparing a checklist, understanding various options and doing calculations to come up with the ballpark estimates. If a client doesn’t like your estimation, you may have to go back and adjust the options and pricing to come up with a number that works for you and your customer. You could do this more efficiently if you had a mobile app or web app that understands your business and customer. You can even build sales functions in the app, where you can have customers agree to the proposal and sign the contract. You can send the signed contract to your backoffice so that their life is easier.

2. Safety App

Construction is one of the most dangerous industries to work with. You want to keep your staff safe while working on a contract. Safety is of utmost importance for your team and clients. Any accident can cost your client relationship, staff dissatisfaction and also increase your insurance cost. You can overcome this by building a safety app that you can give out to your staff. Safety App can have a checklist that they can go through to make sure your staff has taken all the safety measures before starting a project. You can even provide the safety video, safety documents and other related resources to your staff to make sure they have the latest information handy to protect them and the company.

3. Calculator App

You have to do a lot of calculations while doing your job and many times the simple calculator does not work. You need a specialized calculator for your specific needs where you can quickly do the calculation specific to your needs and refer to the material that is needed to do the calculation. Good thing is that these calculator apps can work offline, so even if you are working in a crawling space, it will do the job for you.

4. Issue Reporting App

Your client or your field staff reporting an issue to your back office is very common in construction business. If someone reports the issue over the call, or email with sending pictures or detail can lead to misunderstandings, delays and inefficiencies in the process. To make it more efficient, you can have an app for your customers and staff, who can use it at the site to select the right issue, take pictures and add notes to report the right information. You can even capture the GPS of the location to know where exactly the issue is. This can reduce your team’s time in capturing and analyzing the issue and also help you respond faster to the issues.

5. Logistic App

Managing your driver’s schedule, material handling, site productivity, travel time, delivery tickets and other logistics related functions are very crucial for your operations. There are some off the shelf apps available but they may not work for your specific needs. You can get a web dashboard built for your team to manage the logistics and assign the tasks to your team members. If you could save 10-20% of your team’s time by building a logistic app, this can help your business immensely.

6. Task Management App

Your back office and your field crew spend a lot of time assigning tasks and checking off the task list. Field crew doesn’t have time to manually go through the list and report back to you if the task is done or not. You may want to have your crew spend time on doing the task rather than reporting it back to you. By building an app with the task list pre-populated for your crew, they can just punch the list when the task is done. You can also add the function for them to add notes or pictures if there are issues. With the app, all tasks will be updated real time and you can have a more accurate report in the backoffice in time. You can also have the history of tasks done and issues reported in your database for future improvements.

Conclusion

Executing critical construction projects using papers can delay projects and increase the project costs. Mobile apps and web apps can be a great solution to mitigate these problems. Apps can simplify the overall project management processes by bringing more efficiency and transparency. Apps can also mitigate the problem of time wastage or not getting the accurate data from the field force. A large number of construction companies are embracing the potential mobile apps and web apps to strengthen the overall construction process.