Have you ever heard of Grupo Provivienda? It is one of the leading residential contractors in Central and South America, and a great example of how increasing site visibility by seamlessly sharing your programme with your teams can bring enormous benefits to your projects.
Free ebook: Why WhatsApp and Excel aren’t enough for running complex construction projects
Provivienda used to rely on MS Project for planning but updates from site were infrequent and problems could not be escalated quickly. Furthermore, having subcontractors arrive at the right time was very important as Provivienda develops multiple projects at a time. But without a live schedule, it gets difficult to coordinate with multiple teams.
MS Project does not offer communication in real time and with remote sites, which means no one knows what is going on. Excel and PDF reports are complex and not up-to-date leaving Provivienda’s CEO, Federico Salazar, and his team with very little insight into their business.
Federico realised that the tools they were using were inadequate for their needs. MS Project is static and too difficult for the field staff to use for updates. At the same time, WhatsApp and other similar communication tools are not made for construction and, as a result, information from the site can’t be linked to the plan. They needed to find a tool that would allow them to monitor progress and problems in real time. This is why they decided to centralise their planning in the cloud to make collaboration easier.
Learn more: Why every residential project needs a real-time GPS, not a paper-based map
Soon they managed to reduce building time by 80%, mostly because they were able to see everything on the field and escalate problems or questions quickly and efficiently using a single source of truth. Consequently, they experienced an incredible reduction in the downtime between activities.
“The thing that changed it was connecting the teams through a live programme that helped us avoid downtime between activities. If your programme is not updated frequently, problems on site get worse because they have not been communicated to the right person quickly.
In most cases, people on site do not have all the insights to solve the issue quickly. By the time the issue is communicated to the right person, it is too late and we are dealing with delays and downtime,” explains Federico Salazar, CEO at Grupo Provivienda.
But that’s not all! Here are some more gains they experienced by seamlessly sharing their plan with the entire team:
- 10-15% cost savings.
- 80% reduction in average build time per house.
- Materials inventory reduced from $2 mil to $100,000.
- 100s hours a month saved by generating reports automatically.
“Before, it was taking us 310 days to construct a house. It was due to the downtime between activities. Now the same house is built in 60 days,” adds Federico Salazar.
Based on Provivienda’s story, we have put together an insightful ebook on how a construction-specific tool can help you say goodbye to silos and move everything to the cloud. It is completely free and you can download it just by clicking here!
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