Operational Excellence

Process Optimization Strategies for Project Managers in Construction

Written By: Quickbase
January 2, 2025
7 min read


Making changes in construction isn't easy. Resources are typically tight, delays are costly, and each project has unique challenges. But analyzing and improving everyday processes can be the difference between profitability and loss, so you have to implement the right changes — and that's what process optimization is all about.

Let's explore how to optimize construction processes, including how it all works and the key steps to take. We'll also touch on some challenges that tend to come up along the way and share how Consigli Construction improved its efficiency, prioritized safety, and managed documentation needs through optimization.

What Is Process Optimization for Construction?

Process optimization is the process and practice of improving the way a company performs processes to achieve better outcomes, improve efficiency, and reduce the costs of those processes, producing products, or providing services. Optimization teams analyze and adjust workflows, operations, and systems within the organization with the goal of improving how the company runs as a whole or performs a specific task.

While very similar, process optimization for construction refers specifically to improving the efficiency, effectiveness, and performance of a construction company's common workflows, resource allocation, and decision-making.

That's a mouthful. Essentially, the goal is to make progress faster, reduce costs, improve quality, and ensure safety.

Contractors can optimize processes at just about every stage of construction:

  • Design: Implement building information modeling (BIM) software to improve collaboration and reduce errors.
  • Procurement: Use just-in-time delivery to reduce storage costs and foster more reliable supply chains.
  • Preconstruction: Use project management software to improve resource allocation before the project begins.
  • Construction: Improve safety culture by implementing wearable sensors and real-time safety monitoring.
  • Project controls: Use project management software and earned value management to monitor costs and schedules.
  • Project closure: Use document management software to streamline handover.

To get better at any stage, companies should establish clear and measurable goals. For example, let's take a construction company that is struggling with budgeting, so they aim to cut labor costs by 10%. This provides a clear goal for the process optimization team to hit, and helps break the greater goal into smaller tasks such as:

  • Analyzing current labor costs
  • Identifying areas for inefficiencies, such as labor downtime due to scheduling issues
  • Negotiating with subcontractors for better labor rates
  • Implementing key performance indicators for labor efficiency and monitoring continuously

With these concrete goals in place, process optimization has real, measurable standards to compare and improve upon.

Challenges to Getting It Right

The aim of optimizing processes is to help a company perform better, but it comes with challenges. While the benefits usually outweigh the struggles, the initial optimization hurdles often include the following.

Resource Limitations

Optimization comes with some upfront costs. Whether it's software, tools, technology, or several other implementations, they typically have an initial cost that companies have to weigh against the long-term savings.

Lack of Oversight

Someone needs to oversee the changes. Without enough qualified personnel to go around, it's impossible to verify the changes properly and quantify their impact.

Resistance to Change

Alas, the age-old issue of construction personnel resisting change. Team buy-in is one of the biggest hurdles. As an industry, we've been performing the same tasks for many years, so many teams have a hard time understanding why we're changing it now.

Unrealistic Expectations

It's hard not to shoot for the moon, but the truth is that setting achievable goals allows for faster, more measurable progress. Go too big too quickly and it will be hard to stay consistent with meaningful changes.

Lack of Training

Pretty much every change needs some training or reeducation. Whether it's learning a new software program, adapting to updated safety standards, or figuring out how to use a new tool, both on-site and office teams need training. Without that knowledge, data can end up incomplete or inconsistent, making it hard to drive real change.

Key Steps in Process Optimization

This might not surprise you, but optimization is actually a process itself. It involves taking the right steps to identify issues, make improvements, and implement new processes, all while keeping up the momentum for continuous progress. The following are the seven key process optimization steps to help improve a construction company's day-to-day processes.

1. Finding a Problem

The first step in optimizing a process is finding an issue, flaw, or inefficiency within a system or process to improve. This could be cost overruns, delays, jobsite accidents, resource allocation, or cash flow issues.

2. Defining Goals

We mentioned it earlier, but optimization requires defining clear, measurable goals. Setting goals like "make more money on each project" won't work, but goals such as "improve profits by 10%" will. Consigli's objective was to be considered the best-in-class when it comes to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) safety compliance — a measurable and admirable goal.

3. Predicting Outcomes

While potential changes might come to mind, first predict their impact on the existing workflows. For example, would implementing project management software make creating change orders easier? By how much? Predicting outcomes allows project management teams to manage expectations and ensure smoother implementation with as little disruption as possible.

4. Making Changes

With goals set and results predicted, it's time to make changes. This might involve new processes, tools, or technologies that should push the company toward its goals. In the case of Consigli Construction, this meant implementing a customized solution to consolidate data from core systems into a single, transparent view.

5. Quantifying Progress

Remember how we stressed the importance of measurable goals? Here's where they come into play. This step is all about taking the real-time data from the changes and gauging their effectiveness. Certain software platforms provide reporting features that can help simplify this process — and that's the name of the game we're in, right?

6. Refining Processes

There isn't a "process optimizer" button a company can press for instant improvement. It's an evolution through which progress is constantly quantified and processes tweaked and improved. Regular feedback from on-site teams is important, as is the data generated. If inefficiencies or failures occur, it's time to make changes again.

7. Automating Strategically

Automate the processes that make sense! These often include data-related tasks that don't need much creativity. For example, you can easily automate safety documentation and compliance reporting with software. Plus, since no human input is involved, these automations are less likely to make errors.

Just be strategic, as taking your hands off the wheel completely could lead to its own challenges down the road. We suggest carefully choosing the construction automation use cases that best fit your business and the goals you're trying to achieve.

The Role of Technology

Technology plays a starring role in optimizing processes — particularly for construction. Software and other tools can streamline workflows, improve safety, reduce costs, minimize errors, and maintain accountability. They can also track progress, allowing teams to analyze data and adjust as needed.

The Consigli Case

When Consigli Construction wanted to improve its safety standards, it leaned on Quickbase to optimize its safety processes.

By implementing Quickbase, Consigli moved from the nightmare of physical forms and signatures to a digital platform accessible from mobile devices. All of the company's safety data was centralized for easy access and organization. This enabled streamlined reporting and analysis, allowing team members to witness and quantify the changes' impact.

These tools made implementing changes easy, but what were the results? For one, Consigli met and maintained high OSHA compliance standards. It also increased efficiency in tracking safety data, allowing the team to adjust when needed. Also, improved worker accountability and safety awareness are never bad things, and Quickbase helped support both.

The best part? Consigli leveraged a central data source to its advantage. The team used data-driven decision-making to develop safety protocols, identify training needs, and allocate the right resources to optimize its safety processes.

Streamline Your Business Operations

Process optimization is key for construction companies looking to enhance their performance. By improving workflows, firms can reduce costs and simply build better projects. Consigli Construction nailed this by optimizing its safety processes with the help of Quickbase. This collaboration helped the company improve tracking and compliance with OSHA standards while fostering a culture of safety and accountability.

Other construction companies can do the same. Regardless of the area that needs improvement, optimization can help companies work faster, leaner, safer, and with less waste, preserving their profit margins while serving their customers' needs.

Written By: Quickbase
Quickbase is a cloud workspace that helps teams get more done with apps that match their exact processes. Easily customize and build business apps to collaborate on data, automate workflows, and turn insight into action with dashboards and reports.