With the rising costs of energy, raw materials and labour, it’s a difficult time for the construction industry which is already forced to work within tight budgets and rigid timescales. Every penny and every minute counts. However, by migrating their IT to the cloud, enterprises within the construction sector can cut costs, improve efficiency and increase their agility to deal with unexpected issues, like broken machinery, late deliveries or adverse weather. Here we look at the ways cloud computing can benefit construction companies.

1. Increased agility

   With penalties to pay for late completion, being able to keep to schedule is imperative for today’s construction businesses. This is often hard to achieve when there are numerous things that can go wrong. It’s not uncommon for supplies to be delayed, machinery and vehicles to break down, and unpredictable weather to put a spanner in the works.

   While these things cannot be totally avoided, the impact can be mitigated through the cloud. With regard to supplies, it is possible to link in-house systems with suppliers’ systems to know in advance not just how much stock is available; but to know where it is in transit and when it will arrive. This way, alternative supplies can be sourced quicker and when unforeseen delays happen, operations can be reorganised at an increased pace, with teams sent to work on other projects instead of having to be paid for downtime. With cloud systems available over the internet, managers, team leaders and staff on construction sites can all have access to real-time data and communications via their mobile phones, tablets and other connected devices so that they can be instantly informed of any issues or changes to plan.

2. Better project management

   Today, there are various cloud-based applications that are designed to improve the roll-out of construction projects, even those operating across multiple sites, such as the retrofitting of retail chain stores.

   These can be accessed not just by the construction company, but by all stakeholders, including the client, architects, subcontractors and council planning, environment and building regulation teams. These systems are available anywhere with a connection, whether over a wi-fi or mobile network and can be used to plan, manage and monitor the project remotely, from start to completion.

   Such systems can include everything from health and safety signoffs, construction schedules, workforce timetables, machinery procurement, material delivery timetables and waste management. Of course, everything can be linked to the finance department too, such as employee time sheets and cost analyses.

   With such information available across the project, it can run more effectively and reduce the amount of work people need to do. Managers don’t have to spend all their time on-site and the finance department doesn’t need to wade through hundreds or thousands of paper-based timesheets.

3. Cutting operational costs

   One of the major benefits of today’s cloud-based construction apps is that they not only inform the company where a project has gone over budget but why. Able to gather information from a wide range of sources, including IoT data from machinery and vehicles, it can analyse data on almost every aspect of a project and provide a 360-degree overview, together with insights that can help cut costs now and on future projects. For example, it can alert managers to potential cost issues, letting them act early to avoid major overspending further down the line. What’s more, with artificial intelligence, systems can make predictions for future financial risk, cash flow, material costs, asset management and so forth. This can help construction businesses to manage their finances even better, for example, helping them organise transport routes more effectively to cut fuel costs.

4. IT cost savings

   While it is possible to host business systems in-house, the cost of doing so is expensive. Servers require significant capital expenditure, cost about £6,000 a year to run at today’s electricity prices and incur cooling, security, insurance and maintenance costs. By migrating to the cloud, the infrastructure a business uses is owned by the service provider, and this means capital expenditure is replaced by a more manageable monthly fee. Nor are there additional costs for maintenance, energy, cooling, insurance and physical security, all of which are taken care of by the vendor. What’s more, with a managed cloud service, even the server admin tasks are undertaken on the customer’s behalf, reducing the burden on IT staff.

5. 100% uptime

   Today’s construction projects take place around the clock, often happening late at night to avoid disruption to clients. For this reason, the company’s systems need to be online all the time. Indeed, system downtime can lead to construction site downtime and be extremely costly. Another advantage of the cloud is that it offers 100% uptime guaranteed by SLA. The reason it can do this is that cloud servers are virtual and are not tied to the hardware on which they run. This means a hardware problem that could take an in-house dedicated server offline, cannot have the same effect in the cloud. If there is a hardware problem in a cloud data centre, the virtual server is simply moved to a different physical machine without any interruption. Indeed, even if an entire data centre is taken offline by something like a flood or fire, redundancy at other data centres means services would still go on unaffected. This means critical applications that need to be online 24/7 can do so without issue in the cloud.

Conclusion

Companies that deliver and carefully manage large, complex construction projects can gain significant advantages from migrating to the cloud. Using cloud-based, construction-focused, project management applications, they can improve agility, communications and project management, while benefitting from new insights and data that help them work safely, efficiently and cost-effectively. For more information about our managed cloud solutions, visit Hyperslice.com.