The construction industry is at an interesting period of its life, where growth has been steadily growing over the past years while the industry still faces major issues, both new and old.
Ever-rising labor and material expenses, labor woes, tougher competition, and decreasing profit margins are only a handful of the challenges these firms face.
Here are some of the top construction project challenges that the industry faces.
Managing Documentation
Construction projects typically involve dozens of documents and paperwork to fill out, from the beginning when the deal is finalized, and throughout the process in multiple instances. This includes contracts, receipts, insurance paperwork, building material orders, etc.
Dealing with all of that, and more, certainly makes the documentation process slower and susceptible to mistakes. Fortunately, many different systems and solutions are available to help analyze and categorize documents. One example of this would be entity extraction.
However, not all challenges in the construction industry are as easily fixable or technology-related.
Lack of Structure
Construction companies face massive problems with not having a clear goal or agenda in mind, which makes it challenging to work efficiently and in a productive manner. Not having a clear target to aim for usually leads to projects falling past their deadlines or exceeding the budget.
Effective scheduling and performance management are two of the most important factors here. To incorporate them, every worker needs to have individual targets to complete in a specified time frame. Giving everyone an equal amount of labor and holding them accountable can significantly reduce the risk of the whole project collapsing.
Slow Technology Adoption
The construction industry is notoriously known for its slow and stagnant implementation of new practices and technologies. Even sectors in agriculture and manufacturing have increased their productivity through practical techniques and technological solutions.
Even though most businesses can acknowledge the advantages that new technology can bring, it takes a lousy amount of time because technical departments in construction receive much lower budgets.
For instance, a significant portion of the housing in America, like the Los Angeles area, are wood-framed buildings made before the current building standards. Buildings like these need soft story retrofit programs to reduce their structural deficiencies, which might cause them to collapse in an earthquake.
Lack of Skilled Workers
Construction is largely a reputation-based industry where people mostly work with other people that they know or have connections with. But often there are huge gaps in the skill levels of some team members, making the entire team insufficient. Ideally, you should solve this problem at its root and only hire the right professionals.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. The construction industry has not been attracting enough talent to meet the demands and the number of young people interested in working has been slowly inclining. Some good approaches for this sort of issue are by mentoring the workers yourself or hiring a staffing agency to handle the recruitment and training.
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