Undertaking a construction project is a very tough job. Internal factors like process delays and external factors like price vitality, weather constraints, and temporary contractors can be involved in your projects. All of these factors may significantly impact your projects on different levels. If you are the project manager, this will be your responsibility, and keeping these hindrances at bay should be one of your priorities to ensure successful project delivery.
You should use the allocated project resources effectively and efficiently in any situation. Also, the motivation and expertise of your workforce are other things you must pay attention to for successful project delivery. Thus, resource management plays a crucial role in the construction industry. As a matter of fact, the increasing difficulty of employing skilled labor and rising insurance costs have made your job as a project manager more and more challenging.
This blog post aims to explain the many challenges of construction resource management and provide a more strategic approach to be more successful and efficient. But before we dive deep, let us first understand the definition.
What is Construction Resource Management?
A detailed process involving proactive scheduling, planning, and managing organization-wide resources in the construction industry is called construction resource management. It helps accomplish every task accurately and meet the project objectives within time. It allows contractors or managers to deliver projects successfully by fulfilling project resource demands on time. Overall, effective resource management maximizes productive utilization.
In this approach, construction firms can avoid mistakes like hiring too many people, project delays due to late delivery of supplies, etc. Just in case you are unfamiliar with all the resources you have in your company, here is a complete list of all the necessary resources you will manage one way or another.
- Human resources: Your workforce is the most crucial part of the construction resource pool, and it is none other than the people behind the projects. These professionals include estimators, architects, project engineers, quantity surveyors, supervisors, and construction workers.
- Equipment: Every construction project will require heavy equipment and tools. The equipment selection depends on the project’s costs and time. So, heavy equipment used in the projects is excavators, bulldozers, trenchers, excavators, etc.
- Facilities: The facilities not only improve your workers’ welfare but also improve efficiency. As per regulations, your construction site should include changing rooms and lockers, living accommodations for the workers, drinking water facilities, and a canteen.
- Materials: Materials like cement, metals, bricks, concrete, etc., are the most common building materials used in construction. Therefore, selection criteria like quality and cost-effectiveness play a crucial role.
Now that you already understand the resources required, let’s go to the next section and discover the many benefits of effective resource management in construction.
Top Benefits of Effective Resource Management
Resource management provides a wide array of benefits to construction project managers. Below is a list of some of the top benefits:
1. Gain transparency of all construction resources
In many cases, you cannot get the necessary resources at the prime location, leading you to look at other resources from a different location. Pretty hard, right? Only an efficient resource management solution gives you a centralized view of the skills, experience, qualifications, cost rate, and other important information.
In addition, there is no need for you to integrate multiple spreadsheets to determine and allocate the right resources for the projects. But if you want to level up the visibility of your construction resources, web-based inventory software can make that happen seamlessly. Let’s just say you are to find an available worker for a project. With this system, you can quickly see the worker’s entire schedule and determine the resources using its advanced built-in features.
2. Reduce project costs
Construction projects are always subject to countless constraints like price volatility, resourcing costs, the uncertain nature of construction projects, and more. Due to such limitations, projects are oftentimes susceptible to budget and timeline overruns.
Construction scheduling software track crucial project financial indicators like revenue, costs, profit margins, and overheads. Monitoring project financials can help you avoid budget overruns. And we suggest you control costs by occasionally tracking and comparing forecast vs. actual spending. And if there is any variance, necessary corrective measures will lessen project risks ahead of time.
3. Boost the productivity of the resources
With effective resource management, proper construction resources are deployed to suitable construction projects at the right cost and time. This particular approach maximizes your workforce productivity and enhances efficiency.
Best to integrate your resource management approach with inventory software. This further help you predict the effective utilization of equipment and tools, and other resources ahead of time. Other benefits of using this top-tier software solution include easier allocating resources to a task within seconds and allowing your team to minimize mistakes and perform tasks that are far more included towards achieving your business goals. That sounds amazing, right? Because it is.
4. Facilitate construction team collaboration
Collaboration within your team is necessary to clarify the project’s responsibilities further. In a construction project, tasks are usually interdependent, and therefore, everybody must be on the same page at all times.
Resource management improves collaboration that supports healthy relationships between you, your team, and other stakeholders involved. But only with subcontractor scheduling software can you experience real-time collaboration since it streamlines effective communication between different project team members, ensuring everyone is on the same page.
5. Manage and monitor construction resources
You will surely gain better transparency with effective resource management put in place. So, better transparency means a better way to manage and monitor your construction resources. The ability to visualize your resources as well as their attributes better simplifies the capacity to manage them. If you manage your resources, reposition them as high-priority, high-value assets.
Due to its fluidity, this particular stage of overseeing resources can run within the project’s life span – another solid indication of why a reliable inventory management software solution is an invaluable tool you should have in the first place. This helps you illustrate your resources’ availability, determines your people’s required skills, and even allows you to assign tasks with a click.
Four Steps to Determine Construction Resource Requirements
Identifying resource requirements is another crucial aspect you need to carry out to achieve more effective resource management. Here are the four basic steps you must follow to arrive successfully at resource requirements:
1. Craft a project plan and determine milestones to target
The project plan guarantees that everything stays on track and will give a clearer view of the project scope. In addition, a better understanding of the project deadlines and milestones can help you allocate enough resources to suitable projects. As the project leader, you should better understand on a deeper level what is required for your project’s success.
That is why you need to develop a project plan in the first place. Having one will give you a detailed roadmap of all construction tasks and help you elaborate on the skill set requirements.
2. Determine resources necessary for project success
First and foremost, you must pinpoint the work that needs to be done. And based on that, you need to estimate the number and type of resources required at various stages. Next, plan for resource acquisition so that there is enough work and no idle time for your construction workforce currently onboard.
In addition, you should plan for ramp-up and ramp-down activities as necessary.
3. Evaluate resource availability and reusability for other projects
Make sure the reusability and availability of your construction project resources will meet your project milestones. You should also determine if you can use a resource for multiple tasks on a similar project or if that particular resource will be better suitable for another project based on the skills.
4. Ensure authorization process for appropriate resource planning
A solid authorization process can help you and other stakeholders ensure everybody is aligned with the project objectives. In this way, you can stick to the project milestones and deliver within the deadline.
The Crew Scheduling Software Solution – Pro Crew Schedule
Pro Crew Schedule is designed to help project leaders efficiently mitigate construction site risks. On top of that, you and your team can see, connect and control every single aspect of your complex projects so that you can all deliver results within budget and on time.
This cloud-based collaborative platform enables your company to improve operations through automation and real-time insights across disparate systems and complex processes without needing internal IT teams or in-house engineers.
Pro Crew Schedule is all you ever need if you want to carry out more effective construction resource management and make mega projects more manageable.
