Managing Subs with Mobile Solutions

Frank is the site general manager for a large shopping mall construction company. A couple of years ago, his business moved to an outsourced model. Today, more than 80 percent of the company’s labor force is subcontractors.

Frank’s responsibilities are common to a subcontracting environment: issuing, tracking and receiving work, and auditing and invoicing work performed under contracts. The company currently manages workflow to and from contractors via spreadsheets, emails and paper work packs. As is the case with most of the professional world, more than 60 percent of his business programs are Excel based.

However, the inefficiencies and challenges of this arrangement are substantial, including labor-intensive generation of work packs for contractors and manual data entry and verification of contractors’ completed work. Compounding these challenges is a lack of visibility of contractors’ work schedules, and without early knowledge of delivery slippages, delivering to their timelines is problematic. These inefficiencies place significant time pressures on Frank’s small staff, and the outlook is grim as new projects have even tighter schedules and margins.

To combat these challenges, Frank is launching a mobility project to change how he works with his subcontractors. This project will deliver an app with scheduling capabilities that removes all field paperwork, supplies a single common understanding for variation payments and gives Frank transparency regarding work completion statuses. Quality will also improve with safety compliance enforcement and electronic inspection forms.

How Will This Mobility Project Work?

The company must examine each project participant’s workflow and information needs in order to determine what app capabilities he or she will require: Some workers need to receive job details, update work statuses, detail work completed, record the parts or consumables they used and document the time it took to complete a job. This mobility project will allow them to quickly and efficiently accomplish these tasks from the jobsite.

Supervisors will be able to see work as it progresses on their devices, and in some workflows, they will be able to be incorporated into approval processes. In addition, project participants will be able to post issues that arise during the shift on the site’s electronic collaboration board in the form of questions, photos or videos for the supervisor to review. This will make conflict resolution and assistance much easier.

Frank will do the actual work allocation. The mobile project will allow Frank to complete this task on a digital Gantt chart, where he can simply drag and drop work assignments onto a subcontractor group or individual for immediate delivery to their mobile device. Subcontractor companies will also have access to their special view of the Gantt chart and will be able to allocate jobs to their teams in real time. As the subcontractors complete assigned tasks, Frank will be able to see their progress and completion. When the work is completed, he will have access to review the job’s digital “paperwork”—it is all online and available immediately.

Outside of daily management, Frank will be able to use the data collected through the mobile project to give him reports on his approved variations, allowing easy reconciliation to subcontractor bills. The key to success here is having a single point of reference. The data Frank will refer to for payment approvals is also what his subcontractors will refer to, so the number of debates will diminish considerably when it comes to payment.

How Do You Get Contractors to Cooperate?

Previously, the barrier to a solution like Frank’s was providing a handheld computer to the subcontractor. That involved the cost of the computer, which was about $2,000 per device, management and repair of the device and the temporary nature of the workforce, which meant device loss. The cost of training was also substantial.

Today, 70 percent of business users have an iPhone, though Android phones are swiftly taking this market share. This widespread use of smartphones suggests that the subcontractor already has a device that can host your app and communicate via Wi-Fi or 3G/4G networks. If for some reason the subcontractor doesn’t own a smartphone, he or she can acquire one for as little as $180.

If subcontractors have a smartphone complete with adequate operating software, the need to supply a handheld computer is eliminated. The only issue is distribution of and access to the app, which can be solved with corporate or public app stores.

Once a subcontractor finishes working for Frank, he or she is simply removed from having security access to the app.

This mobile project initiative can also benefit the subcontractors’ companies. They areinterested in some of the data collected by Frank’s app, particularly timesheets and safety procedure compliance. Frank will offer this data to them as a daily electronic transfer. The app also has GPS markers and automatic time stamping on all key events, which will stop the debate on when services were delivered and will improve the subcontractors’ relationships with Frank’s administrative staff.

One key barrier remains: will the workers use it? According to an April 2013 U.S. Department of Education report, approximately 35 percent of North Americans have literacy problems, and often this is cited as a reason to avoid introducing technology solutions to them. However, the opposite is true. If you have a literacy problem, a well-designed app is a great boon. Users can learn by using the checkboxes and drop lists found in the app. Using the app’s checkboxes and drop lists is much easier than writing.

How to Get Started?

Frank doesn’t have his own IT staff, and the queue for his company’s central IT group is more than 18 months long. He also knows the app must be robust, intuitive and that his team must constantly monitor integration with other office systems. These industrial-strength attributes of the app are essential, or no one will have faith in Frank’s initiative, and paper systems will resume. So, he did what he has done for everything else: He outsourced it. This time it was to a cloud mobility company that includes a full help desk capability.

In the end, mobility is simply an evolutionary step, moving the collecting and delivering of information from office staff to field staff where the work is done.