72% of firms say that projects have taken longer to complete than anticipated.

That's a sobering thought, I'll make it a bit more sobering for you: Construction Industry spend grew 7% in 2023. However, civil engineering jobs only grew 5%. More frightening, architecture roles have only grown at 1% per year over the last several years!

The takeaway is that as an AEC professional you'll have to do more work with fewer resources.

This challenge is probably not new to you overall. What may be new are the particular challenges you'll deal with, and the strategies you use to respond to them. Building Data Simplified is a way for me to share these strategies with others.

The challenge of doing more with less is not new to the built environment.

Architecture and Engineering were two of the first industries to digitize. If you are old enough, you may remember these days (even if they were just in college).

The reasons why we made this shift are clear: we design highly complex projects with lots of calculation involved. People make mistakes by hand.

Even though our industry was one of the first to digitize, we lag behind in terms of productivity today.

According to McKinsey, over the past 20 years, the construction sector has seen an annual global labor-productivity growth of just 1 percent. This is in stark contrast to the total global economy and the manufacturing sector, which have experienced annual growth rates of 2.8 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively.

So how do you solve this challenge? I'd be lying if I said there was one particular answer. But there are lots of little pinch points.

Here are the 3 common ones you can quickly eliminate:

1. Managing & Responding to RFIs

The average project has 15-20 RFIs per $1 million in value. On average they cost $1000+ in time and effort to respond to each. Let's assume that you're building a school that will be 75,000 sq. feet at about $250/sq foot in construction cost. You can expect that the RFI process could burn $280,000-$375,000 in value.

Most often the issue here is in the process. Many firms still use a digitized "pen and paper" workflow to respond to RFIs. The forms may be digital, but are still passed back and forth in a PDF or spreadsheet. This means there are many sources of truth floating around, even with a strong document control culture. Worse, this workflow adds lots of steps in order to eliminate or reduce risk.

If this sounds like your RFI process, there's an easy way to recapture all that lost value. Moving to a more dynamic tool that keeps each RFI as a record over time instead of a single document means that everyone is always working off the latest information. Likewise, you can automate the more administrative aspects of RFI responses. Software can automatically add data such as dates, who responded to what in the case of multi-party answers, and much more.

2. Crafting Room Data Sheets

When was the last time you went searching for a PDF or image that you know you had, but couldn't remember the file name for? This is a classic case of a challenge we all face behind a computer. We've all been there. The average white collar worker spends up to 20% of their day searching for the right info.

Searching for the right file or photo becomes especially burdensome for many working on renovation or adaptive reuse projects. There may be hundreds of thousands of files documenting the existing conditions of a building, but they're typically labeled some type of default file name such as img_1234 or DSC_4321.

But what if you could automatically tag these and associate them with a drawing or floorplan when they're being taken then instantly generate a document? The time savings would be drastic.

3. Punching out Punch Lists

2/3 of contractors experience delays "getting off the job." Getting to the bottom of a punch list is critical because it is the point in time where the parties involved get paid. On one extreme, this leads to rushing at the end and poor quality work or normal items getting pushed to the punch list so the contractor can move workers to another project. On the other, as the architect you may be faced with multiple walk throughs if the contractor does not complete everything to your satisfaction.

There is often a level of back and forth between parties, particularly when spreadsheets or word documents are used to manage this process. The clock is already ticking when static documents are passed back and forth.

There is no one "silver bullet" to cure every inefficiency in our industry.

But, there are many little things that you can do to have an oversized impact.

Interested in learning new ways to do more with less?

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You can also grab your lunch and join me every Friday on Linkedin Live at 12:30 eastern for Layer Quick Bytes where I'll show you first hand!!

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