F E AT U R E An Inside Look at the Current State of Cost Management in Construction by John Biggs, writer
The wave of new construction technologies has been dramatically transforming the industry. On today’s construction sites, robots conduct building inspections, drones buzz overhead capturing a project’s progress, and every drawing and plan is accessible to workers in real-time through the cloud and mobile devices. Still, despite construction’s significant digital transformation, it seems cost management has lagged behind. “Today, we live in a world where nearly every tool used to manage a job is in some way digitized. However, construction’s digital transformation has focused on digitizing drawings and documentation management while largely ignoring cost management,” said Katie Rapp, Procore Senior Product Marketer. A new industry report by Dodge Data & Analytics commissioned by Procore took a close look at the industry’s current state when it comes to cost management.
26
O C T O B E R
2 0 2 1
The study aimed to learn how owners, general contractors, and specialty contractors manage their costs, what tools and technologies they leverage to gain the insights needed to keep costs in check and uncover areas that need improvement.
The Confidence Factor The report revealed an apparent gap in confidence between general contractors and specialty contractors in terms of their cost management capabilities, with GCs 12% more likely to be satisfied with their current tools than trade contractors. General contractors have traditionally taken on most of the responsibility for managing project costs and so are generally more familiar with the tools. However, effective cost management requires all hands on deck. We can’t get there without trade contractors being really participatory partners along with general contractors to help everybody manage costs,” said
T H E
Steve Jones, Senior Director of Industry Insights Research for Dodge Data & Analytics. “At the end of the day, they’re actually spending the money. They’re putting the labor on the site. They’re actually buying the materials, and they’re dealing with the fluctuations in both the labor and the materials markets firsthand in the trenches, so it’s got to be a partnership here.” It’s also worth noting that owners, perhaps not surprisingly, were more confident than any other group when it comes to their cost management capabilities.
One Tool to Rule them All Spreadsheets have their place, but today there are bespoke, custombuilt tools that are made for specific challenges, such as assessing risk related to potential changes, controlling project cash flows, and status reporting during the project. In terms of user satisfaction
C O N T R A C T O R ’ S
C O M P A S S
