Holding a Contractor’s Feet to the Fire Through Schedule Compliance

Most industries are experiencing a revolution as smart technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation shapes the ways businesses meet profit margins and product breakthroughs. The construction industry is no exception, because photo and video documentation that contextualizes projects, and scheduling platforms generated by AI are fine-tuning a long-overdue process of schedule adherence.

Think about the fitness industry, and how access to objective, tailored, and real-time data through products like Fitbit is giving gyms, trainers, and fitness enthusiasts never-before-seen physical assessments. The construction industry is experiencing similar growth. With traditionally programmed construction jobs being delayed at a 70% rate, a scheduling platform like OnSiteIQ is providing technology in which the percentage reliability factor of its schedule adherence is 95% effective.

Data doesn’t lie, and utilizing it to make construction projects more profitable and more timely for owners and developers can be the result.

Sharing Project Information

The weekly goal of the Owner-Architect-Contractor (OAC) meeting is for the sharing of critical project information. This is a contractual obligation of the contractor and is a fundamental key to the project’s success (or failure).

This means that the onus of communication is on the contractor, and their ability to communicate the good, the bad, and the ugly, which should inform the solutions or next steps required for keeping the project on track. These can include:

• Risks for delay
• Progress
• Potential cost changes
• Opportunities

With the project’s success hinging on these key communication points, it stands to reason why an owner or developer would find value in objective data, and AI-driven schedule adherence solutions to help mitigate the potential for delays, change orders, and risks. Otherwise, they are left to the narrative of the contractor, which the previously mentioned an industry statistic of 70% of projects being delayed should give owners and developers insight into the reliability of these traditional communication methods.

Improving Your OAC Meeting With Schedule Adherence Technology

The OAC meeting is an opportunity to discuss the potential cost and scheduling ramifications of delays. When these meetings occur, the contractor should be prepared to give updates on schedule, progress, and associated risks. With most OAC meetings expecting a weekly discussion around delays, the contractor is expected to come with an assessment and a recovery schedule if needed.

The intent of the OAC collective is to avoid as many conversations as possible around recovery plans and change orders, and technology can help do that.

The core mission of OnSiteIQ is to alert owners immediately through an AI-driven platform that delays, or even the potential for delays, are at risk of hitting the project. This extends into improving the OAC meeting by creating transparency and increasing collaboration with OnsiteIQ real time schedule awareness, talking points, and action items with a unified set of objective data that the owner, architect, and contractor all have access to.

When it comes down to an AI solution predicting delays, there is no other tool in the industry that provides data accuracy and the specificity of data, like OnSiteIQ. If you are interested you can explore OnSiteIQ’s offer of a free demo.

Where OnSiteIQ rises above its competition is in the specificity of data. Not only can the project be given a 95% accurate estimate on progress, delays and potential delays for the project, but each specific discipline occurring at an exact location within the job site.

Holding a Contractor’s Feet to the Fire

With technology driving the communications of a construction project, a contractor is beholden to the objective data set that is made available to the owner and/or developer. What this means is that an owner can approach the weekly OAC meeting well-informed of the project’s status, and the OAC meeting can be conducted on discussing three month lookaheads, and not discussing at length issues that have happened in the past, that the owner/developer are hearing about for the first time.

This is what we mean by holding a contractor’s feet to the fire. The owner has the real-time data that provides them the opportunity to challenge the contractor to finish on time and maintain schedule adherence.

With technology like OnSiteIQ, there is no reason to fall behind anymore.