Construction Project Delivery—Solution Brief

Protecting margins and meeting owner demands for visibility leave little room for error. The benefits of digital transformation are seen throughout the construction industry, with compelling proof points from organizations already on the path. The question is not whether contractors need to transform, it’s where to start?

Set Your Goals

Transformation is not a one-size fits all process, and everyone’s path will be different. A comprehensive overhaul may be right for some, while others may want to triage specific areas and adopt a more phased approach. Regardless of where your organization sits on that spectrum, the most critical decision is selecting a partner and comprehensive suite of cloud solutions that provides flexibility and lets you determine where to begin.

Oracle Construction Project Delivery unites the front and back offices, the field, and the supply chain. Organizations gain a holistic view across the business that shows not just how one project is being executed, but how a full portfolio of projects is being executed. Project transparency is achieved, and performance is assured. And after each project is completed, lessons learned can be used to improve on best practices so that success stays consistent, with repeatable processes and predictable results.

• Read: Why choose an integrated project delivery platform in a world of niche?

Schedule Management

The schedule is the heartbeat of project delivery, enabling contractors to ensure that they have the right resources to support the project timelines – and can adjust quickly to changes. Visibility into both is critical. Improving the communication between construction execution teams and project schedulers will help increase that visibility, boost productivity, and improve quality.

While there has historically been a disconnect between the critical path method (CPM) schedule and the growing area of Lean task management, Oracle Project Delivery digitizes and integrates these activities. Integrating scheduling and Lean task management provides far greater transparency into activity status, the reason for delays, and any remediation plans. Visual dashboards drives quality collaboration and job site employees can quickly see what needs to be done and when. With data and workflows integrated into the scheduling management system, they can request clarifications and communicate details with mail notifications and attachments. Teams stay on top of changes with instant status updates and can see the impact of every RFI and change order on the construction schedule. Here, digitization brings greater connectivity, visibility, and control to enhance operational performance.

With functionality based on each user’s responsibilities, team members can effectively track, manage, and mitigate change. Project teams on the go via mobile devices can easily collaborate on tasks and communicate status updates, issue resolution, and scope changes. Greater visibility into resource demand means that any potential conflicts are apparent to managers, optimizing resource use.

• Read the eBook: Get five tactics to boost schedule accuracy and optimize your resources.

Project Controls

Complexity is growing across all areas of construction — aligning field and office, depending on external teams, interpreting vast amounts of data, and making rapid decisions — all requiring greater digitization to perform optimally. The legacy systems and spreadsheets used throughout the years to manage projects will not allow construction businesses to grow and adapt quickly in today’s market. Oracle Construction Project Delivery provides modern, cloud-based project control systems that enable businesses to rapidly deploy new projects, adapt to unique business requirements, and operate leaner with teams using data rather than just collecting it. With robust controls, organizations can automate, track, and manage budgets, commitments, spends, forecasts, and business processes within the organization and across the supply chain.

Project Controls: Key Areas

• Cost management: A digital approach enables automation, flexibility, and the power to handle complex cost control, cash flow, and fund analysis.
• Contract management: Digitization enables more efficient and transparent management of subcontractors and the supply chain, improved workflows and communication, and robust audit trails.
• Change management: Change is a constant on construction projects and failing to manage change effectively can have adverse impacts on project cost and quality as well as on business relationships. Builders need full and real-time visibility into changes—their root-cause and impact — to ensure proper resolution steps can be taken quickly and plans adjusted accordingly.
• Risk management: Having the visibility across teams and activities afforded by modern digital project controls enables organizations to model, analyze, communicate, and mitigate project risks – and to spot and address risks on in-flight project quickly and effectively before they become issues.

Design and Construction Coordination

Design and Model Management is not just for the design team. If the entire project isn’t connected to the centralized and current model and plans, you risk inconsistent project team results and data, which slows processes and decisions, and contributes to errors and disputes. A Common Data Environment (CDE) allows the entire project community to collaborate on models and plans while connecting all teams and data to the BIM process.

In the delivery phase the centralized management of the many key processes is crucial to reduce the risk of unplanned cost, delays, quality issues, and exposure to liability. All organizations in the project delivery chain must have secure access to current documents, including drawings, BIM models, contracts, reports, schedules, RFIs, and more.

Oracle Construction Project Delivery provides digital document repositories and processes that enable efficient management of the huge volume of documents across the entire project lifecycle, ensuring that everyone has easy access to what they need when they need it. This simplifies and automates document distribution and workflows, while mitigating risk and confusion by ensuring the entire project team is working off a “single version of the truth” for every document, as well as streamlining the management of change requests for all upstream and downstream documents.

Work Packaging provides additional control, allowing a project’s documentation and correspondence to be broken down into discreet controlled sections, or ‘packages’. The digitization of document management also creates robust audit trails across all project documents, while enabling the seamless handover of a comprehensive and fully connected data set upon project completion.

The Oracle solution brings project management into the field. Digital access to information onsite empowers field workers to solve problems quickly and independently, which boosts productivity.

Payment Management

Traditional construction payment processes are manual, disjoined, paper-laden and labor-intensive. Excessive time is wasted chasing information, and errors are common. A digitally enabled collaborative approach to payment management streamlines and automates processes, mitigating risk, reducing cost, and improving cash flow for contractors and subcontractors.

In the cloud, the entire payment process – invoicing, compliance, lien-waiver exchange, approval, and payment – can be digitized, standardizing activities and increasing speed, accuracy and trust across project participants. With the right tools, contractors can reduce draw cycle time, ensure draw requests are correct the first time, and accelerate cash flow.

• Find out how Austin Commercial speeds payment application 60%.

Security and Cloud Deployment

A move to the cloud—if done correctly—can transform your business with scalability, agility, lower costs, and higher application performance. It’s an opportunity to replace disconnected data silos and disparate processes with more streamlined workflows that increase productivity, provide deep insights to optimize processes, and empower employees to innovate and collaborate.

When selecting a cloud software partner, secure data is critical. With ISO 27001 certification, two- factor authentication, and security options which span three levels of control, Oracle Construction Project Delivery meets the highest international security standards. Minimize risk with the most secure system and ensure adherence to compliance requirements.