Construction Industry Should Embrace Digital Documentation to Streamline Projects

TOTOWA, NJ—The construction industry needs to embrace digital tools to enhance efficiency in managing projects, says Michael Mullin, president of Totowa, NJ-based Integrated Business Systems, which provides computer technology to the commercial real estate industry and associated sectors.

“We know that people spend lots of time looking for paper scattered throughout the office,” Mullin tells GlobeSt.com in an exclusive interview. “Recent studies show that between an hour to an hour and a half a day is spent looking for invoices,l looking for blueprints, looking for change orders, slowing down productivity and truly affecting outcomes of projects.”

You can listen to an extended audio version of this interview in the player below. If you do not see a player below this text, click here to listen to the interview.

An important consideration in making the transition is the sustainability of a company in a world of vanishing natural resources, he says.

“We want to take care of our national resources,” he says. “We’re just mowing down trees to create to create the paper required to print all the all the things that we print today.”

Besides being good for the environment, moving from a paper to digital business model offers dramatic cost advantages, Mullin says.

“Construction expert Houston Neal once calculated that the construction industry prints an average of 37 million blueprints every year,” Mullin says. “At a price of about 50 cents for every black-and-white document printed on 20-pound, 18×24 paper, this translates into about $18.5 million and the death of approximately 42,000 trees.”

“It’s a lot of trees, you know, and it’s just blueprints,” he says. “The industry is pretty set on sending out paper invoices with envelopes and then having to store all that paperwork. Also, we have an awful lot of documents laying around that we could digitally produce and store and make available anytime, anywhere, for whatever device happens to be in your hand.”

Projects are frequently delayed because paper change orders, blueprints and other relevant documents can’t be accessed easily, Mullin points out. A cloud-based system stores documents digitally in a central location, where they are accessible in real-time from multiple devices and locations, he says. “With a few simple clicks, authorized personnel from accounting staff to project managers and field supervisors can simply drill down from the most complex to the simplest details.”

Security of the documents in a digital environment is also better, Mullin says.

“From a security standpoint, having them stored in a centralized location that’s offsite and is backed up by that provider, and is replicated across multiple data centers, certainly is a safer environment to store your information on,” he says. “It’s much easier to restore that data if something bad ever happened to it, than it is on your local server if your local server has a hard drive problem.”

Another advantage to digital documentation is reducing the legal risks construction contractors face, Mullin notes.

“Today’s contractors, builders and construction firms live in a highly litigious environment,” he says. “Every error and omission, no matter big or small, can be costly. This is particularly true when design/build methodologies are increasingly blurring the lines between professional responsibilities, and designs are constantly revised throughout every construction phase. What better way to prepare against claims than with a detailed history of key details captured during the entire project lifecycle?”

Companies looking for digital document solutions should canvass the leading players in the field, especially firms that have experience supporting the commercial real estate field, Mullin says.