The field employees create various reports as per project progress, which is sent to the office for analysis and further action.

The construction industry is usually seen as being slow to adopt the latest innovative IT technologies. One major reason for this is the great amount of documentation and approval it needs at various levels which becomes a project itself. Also, the work culture being more field-based, people prefer having handheld documents to searching them up in the online office system. Cloud computing today has matured enough to address all these concerns while creating a transition of the industry more into online.

Elastic Database

The various kinds of contracts, project reports, correctional drawings keep increasing and increasing as construction project rolls. This huge amount of data piles up as hardcopy files everywhere –  at the site offices, at the main branch, at the sub-contractors office and so on. This occupies a lot of space on the systems and servers incurring a huge cost. Cloud has an ever-expandable memory like an elastic, where all this data can be economically stored and retrieved online.

Connected Employees

Construction people are mainly seen working on the fields at their respective sites. A small bunch of them though sits at the office looking after contract creation, project documentation, and other jobs like payroll, marketing, research, etc. The field employees create various reports and documents, which is sent to the office as a project progresses for analysis and further action.

Cloud can serve as a point of access to the data, generated by on-site employees, for the office employees. Also, the cloud is flexible for access by onsite employees with numerous types of laptop, tab, smartphones to be flexibly used as an interface, in the event of no connectivity there are platforms to store data offline and upload them to the cloud whenever internet is available.

Communication Center for Agencies

The industry has a rigid hierarchy as it involves multiple numbers of agencies. There is one main contractor, multiple sub-contractor and vendors. All have their own processes generating tons of insights. Passing them through traditional channel up and down the hierarchy causes delay, increases the chance of loss or manual error and communication gap. The cloud can serve as a common point for storing and sharing info. Advance security can be deployed to control accessibility from agency to agency or rank to rank.

Cost Efficiency

Cloud can save opex in several ways and prove beneficial to the construction industry. The huge data stored on rented cloud space takes away the cost of maintaining internal server and hardware. The time saved in terms of data accessibility is again convertible to monetary gains achieved through the fast operation. Use of cloud-based analytics for project planning is more efficient as it deals with a larger database and creates more accurate results at a cheaper price.