Have you ever heard of Grupo Provivienda? They are one of the top residential contractors in Central and South America and a great example of how increasing site visibility by seamlessly sharing your program with your teams can bring huge benefits to your projects.
Provivienda used to rely on MS Project for planning, but site updates were infrequent and issues could not be escalated quickly. Furthermore, having subcontractors arriving at the right time was very important, as Provivienda develops several projects at the same time. But without a live schedule, it's difficult to coordinate with multiple teams.
MS Project doesn't offer real-time communication with remote sites, which means no one knows what's going on. Excel and PDF reports are complex and outdated, leaving Provivienda CEO Federico Salazar and his team with very little insight into their business.
Federico realized that the tools they used were inadequate to their needs. MS Project is static and very difficult for field staff to use for updates. At the same time, WhatsApp and other similar communication tools are not made for construction, so the information on the website cannot be linked to the plan. They needed to find a tool that allowed them to monitor progress and issues in real time. That's why they decided to centralize planning in the cloud to facilitate collaboration.
Find out more: Why every residential project needs real-time GPS, not a paper map
Soon they were able to reduce construction time by 80%, mainly because they were able to see everything in the field and escalate issues or questions quickly and efficiently using a single source of truth. Consequently, they experienced an incredible reduction in downtime between activities.
“What changed was connecting the teams through a live program that helped us avoid downtime between activities. If your program is not updated frequently, on-site problems will worsen because they were not communicated quickly to the right person. In most cases, the people on site do not have all the knowledge needed to resolve the issue quickly. When the problem is communicated to the right person, it is already too late and we are dealing with delays and stoppages”, explains Federico Salazar, CEO of Grupo Provivienda.
But that is not all! Here are some more gains they made by seamlessly sharing their plan with the entire team:
- Cost savings of 10-15%.
- 80% reduction in average construction time per house.
- Material inventory was reduced from $2 million to $100,000.
- Hundreds of hours per month saved by automatically generating reports.
“Before, it took us 310 days to build a house. It was due to downtime between activities. Now the same house is built in 60 days”, adds Federico Salazar.
