Why You Should Consolidate Portfolio Data in One Place

Tracking data is like keeping track of socks on laundry day. No matter how hard you try, when you go to put your laundry away, lo and behold there is a leftover sock with no partner in sight.

Email, smartphones and computer systems may give you some confidence that you’ll be able to locate a specific piece of data anytime…you just need to remember where you stored that data, who you sent it to and on which platform. If that doesn’t work, you may have to recall when you created or sent that data, what the subject line might have been and any other relevant keywords specifically associated with the document.

We’ve all performed these data recall strategies before. No matter how confident we are that we’ll have that document in just a few keystrokes, it doesn’t always work out that way. And this is to say nothing of handwritten documents that are sent to us. How often have you overlooked a communication – whether by email, text or in-person, not even realizing that an important document was attached?

We thought so.

The information superhighway is a wonderful tool. Unfortunately, data storage and management is often overlooked as our devices lull us into a false sense of security that all the information we need is stored within these devices or in the cloud. While that may be true, as the scenario above illustrates, this doesn’t lead to an efficient portfolio management strategy.

Reduce Redundant Work

Intelligent construction management software can reduce the amount of paperwork for your team by eliminating redundant requests. Workers receive hundreds of emails a day, often with multiple emails that address the same topic.

Say a lender is reviewing your draw request, but can’t find one of the invoices associated with it. So they send an email to the developer, cc’ing the developer’s assistant, office administrator and another team member they’re familiar with. The developer responds directly to the lender, informing her that his assistant will send that document. At the same time, the additional team member has also jumped in, attempting to track down the errant receipt. This scenario can play out in one of two ways: each team member assumes the other will take care of this task, or both team members spend unnecessary time and energy producing the same document.

You can eliminate this problem by providing your team one cohesive space where data can be stored (and recalled), tasks can be assigned and project personnel can communicate with each other in a clear, concise format.

Eliminate Errors

Going off of the example above, this missing invoice (if it was, in fact, missing and not overlooked/misplaced by the lender) would not have gone unnoticed if machine learning were involved. That’s because intelligent construction management software not only uploads and organizes your data, but flags errors, inconsistencies and omissions. This would have allowed the developer to note the invoice was missing before sending the draw request to the lender in the first place.

Once the error was identified, the developer could easily assign the appropriate personnel the task of uploading the invoice into the system. Developers that utilize these tools and store data across their portfolio can eliminate this step as well, since their personnel have already been trained to upload any project data as soon as they have it. This is done with one simple tap or click. Automation will do the rest: upload, digitize, organize and analyze the data to maximize its use.

Save Time

It’s no secret that errors, omissions and redundant tasks can eat up valuable project resources, not the least of which are time and money. Your team has better things to do than track down missing documents or manually reconciling data to search for errors.

Data entry and reconciliation are some of the things that automation does best – and it can do it faster and more consistently than a human can. Storing your portfolio data in one place will free up your team members to focus on their high-value talents, leaving lower-level tasks to artificial intelligence.

It may be easy to assume that you’re home free as long as you store all the data for one project in the same place. While this may make your job slightly easier, you aren’t maximizing the value of automation if your data sits in different silos. That’s because these silos can’t “communicate” with each other. You’ll still need a hands-on approach to gathering, organizing, analyzing and disseminating this data if it remains separate from the broader portfolio data. Plus, many people and vendors work across multiple projects. With automation, you can manage all of these vendors, tasks and payments in one cohesive system.

Receive Real-Time Updates

Developers tend to have multiple projects in various stages of development at any given time. While every project is important, it’s time-consuming and tedious to track down project updates at every stage, on every development.

If your data is stored in one optimized location, however, getting up to speed is a breeze. Project snapshots can fill you in on the latest updates, while alerts can inform you if something is overdue or doesn’t look quite right.

Naturally, these real-time updates prevent problems from snowballing because they alert project personnel to issues before they become a big problem. This allows you to minimize the headaches before the issue affects the whole team, outside vendors or, worse yet, the project budget or timeline.

Enhance Forecasting

Active construction projects force us to focus on the tasks at hand – which is a good thing. But what if you could hire a team member to constantly update, review and analyze your project details to improve construction forecasting, trend spotting and cost savings? You can do that with intelligent software systems that utilize artificial intelligence – but only if they have access to all your data.

Storing data in separate places limits AI’s abilities because it only has access to part of the puzzle. AI is at its best and most productive when it can learn everything it can from your data before producing likely outcomes based on this information. Think of AI like a doctor. An emergency room doctor can treat the urgent issue at hand, but a general practitioner, who has your entire medical history and will continue to receive updated test results, can make the best recommendations for your overall health based on this cumulative data.  

A developer’s job is stressful enough when they’re managing a portfolio of projects, all in various stages of development. One of the easiest ways to minimize this burden is by employing an intelligent construction management software like Rabbet to handle your exhaustive data needs. Schedule a demo today to see the benefits of storing all your portfolio data in Rabbet.