Top 5 tips for a more efficient construction project

12 January 2023

In an industry infamous for cost overruns and slim profit margins, it’s essential, especially in today’s challenging economic climate, for construction crews to maximize their efficiency.

It’s no secret that the construction industry suffers from an efficiency issue. In fact, a recent report revealed that construction professionals spend a massive 35% of their time on non-optimal activities like managing mistakes and rework [Construction Disconnected, PlanGrid/FMI].

To enable you to defy statistics such as this, we’ve assembled a list of top tips to boost your efficiency, prevent costly rework and deliver projects on time and on budget – in short, helping you build it right, first time.

1. Avoid data silos – Construction projects accumulate vast volumes of data. With a majority of this information stored in disparate databases, these information silos result in significant time wasted on miscommunication and inefficiency. The fragmented data also makes it very difficult for project managers to gain a holistic view of any particular project.

When you centralize your data, you create a single source of truth that all parties can utilize to make decisions and inform their processes. This ensures that the goals of stakeholders, clients and construction crews are aligned throughout the build cycle, ensuring a unified way of working.

2. Maintain strong communication – When you prioritize creating an environment that values a consistent and clear flow of communication, you significantly reduce the chance of error.

When people think of “communication,” they usually define it as delivering information in an easy-to-understand, straightforward manner. But communication also means listening to your workforce: stay open to your team leaders’ concerns and work with them to come up with pragmatic solutions. This builds trust and makes everyone feel respected.

This two-way system of communication should trickle down through the whole project. When staff are encouraged to approach managers, for example, it increases their engagement, improving the site’s overall morale and, in the end, increasing building efficiency.

Additionally, word spreads quickly when you establish this kind of positive workplace atmosphere, enabling you to attract (and keep) top talent. Ultimately, nothing improves efficiency like having the best teams working together.

3. Workforce distribution – One of the main causes of inefficiency is imprecise workforce allocation. When you possess a clear understanding of the resources required to hit key benchmarks, you reduce the risk of overstaffing or understaffing your project.

When your teams are stretched too thin, it leads to overwork, destroying employee effectiveness and morale, as well as impacting their well-being.

Likewise, if you have underutilized staff members, your productivity plunges and the bottom line suffers. Therefore, it’s vital to maintain clear insight of utilization rates across your broader project to optimize resources and ensure that your workforce remains engaged, satisfied and, most importantly, healthy.

4. Adopting BIM – From the very beginning of a project, a BIM solution enables architects, designers and builders to work together with absolute cooperation and coordination. For construction project managers, this allows for an improvement in cost control and operational efficiency.

The Atom™, XYZ Reality’s Engineering Grade Augmented Reality headset, can be seamlessly integrated with your BIM processes, allowing for real-time design updates, superior project management and site validation in 3D to millimetre precision.

XYZ’s Field Application Engineer deploys the Atom headset during a site inspection and can live-stream the walkthrough to designers, contractors, subcontractors and clients, wherever they might be in the world. This ensures that everybody is on the same page from day one, eliminating errors, disorganization, and rework.

5. Implementing Engineering Grade AR™ – For many years, technology companies attempted to provide contractors in the field with holographic building representations. But shortcomings in augmented reality tech and its inability to provide the necessary accuracy prevented wide proliferation.

With the availability of the Atom, XYZ Reality’s Engineering Grade AR headset, construction teams can now view 3D models to millimetre accuracy onsite.

The Atom, with its AR displays and in-built computing power, allows your teams to literally see where installations belong to millimeter precision, allowing for real-time validation. This enables you to identify otherwise hidden errors and therefore prevent rework (and its disastrous associated costs).

Despite the fact that the construction sector lags behind in efficiency when compared to other industries, there are some pragmatic ways to improve the performance of your teams.

When you keep information flowing to construction crews, clients and stakeholders, properly utilize and manage your resources, as well as deploy cutting-edge technologies, you ensure the highest level of project effectiveness.

XYZ Reality’s engineering-grade headset, the Atom, gives you a powerful way to unite teams and maximize efficiency by making all aspects of the build available to all involved parties throughout the build cycle.

It enables proactive validation, giving you the ability to uncover mistakes in real-time, so you can immediately rectify them, eradicating costly rework and keeping your project on track from day one.

For more information about how the Atom can benefit your next project, please visit https://www.xyzreality.com, or get in touch with one of our experts today.