How to save money on your next construction project
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Despite the relative strength of the UK’s construction industry within the economy, and within the wider context of Europe, times are becoming increasingly difficult for businesses. Rising supply and overhead costs alike are squeezing profits, and budgets for commercial projects are getting smaller. As running a construction project becomes more expensive, what can you do as a manager to bring costs down for the next project?
Hire a Quantity Surveyor
Some of the costlier elements of larger-scale construction projects relate not to expected material and labour costs, but instead additional costs arising from mistakes in design and practice. When an error is discovered ‘on the ground’, so to speak, hundreds of man-hours and additional overhead costs are created in rectifying the mistakes and pushing the timeline back.
Quantity surveyors are a powerful provision for gaining more comprehensive control over construction progress and cost. They examine work in progress and work to mitigate the cost of potential structural or legal issues and what quantity surveyors earn annually pale in comparison to the costs they could save your next project.
Improve Communication
But there is also opportunity to mitigate the cost of mistakes by minimising them altogether, through addressing their root causes. Worksite inefficiency and errors often arise from misunderstandings, which themselves arise from poor communication strategy.
Not only can communication falter between contractors and teams, but also between the boots on the ground and the executives at the top of the chain. By overhauling your internal comms processes, and encouraging active communication between workers on the ground, you can ensure everyone has the relevant information they need to work accurately and effectively.
Set Up Contingencies
There are, of course, events and impacts that no one can effectively predict. The coronavirus pandemic was a strong example of this, being an unprecedented global event with existential impacts on existing and proposed construction projects.
Whether world events or localised incidents, it is important for your project manager to institute contingency plans for certain scenarios. By baking these into your plan from the beginning, you can poise your project to pivot in strategy when such events arise.
Tighten Up Time Management
As touched upon above, mistakes and miscommunications can lead to significant longer-term project costs, as the knock-on impacts of lost time lead to increased expenditure on overheads and labour costs. This illustrates perfectly the high value of time to a project – whether or not it is a time-sensitive one.
Nailing down time management within your production schedule means ensuring maximum productivity and efficiency, in order to minimise the creep of time costs tantamount to profit penalties. Coming down on time management requires a delicate balance, in order to get the most from your workforce. The harder you agitate for quicker work, the less motivated your team. Instead, short-term rewards for timely completion of elements can incentivise staff and lead to a healthier form of productivity.
