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Contractors operating in multiple counties and/or jurisdictions in Alberta encounter more requirements for doing business than their counterparts working in only one county/jurisdiction. This is especially true when it comes to figuring payroll taxes.

Heavy construction occurring in the Alberta oil and gas fields can be characterized as challenging, given the sometimes harsh conditions and demands on both equipment and workers. Consequently, the trials of heavy construction project management are many.

As we’ve said, companies relying on spreadsheets, documents, or email threads to track things like equipment rentals, purchase orders, inventory shipments, and invoices are dealing with inaccurate, incomplete, and/or duplicated information. This is the cause of many problems, including loss of profits as a project gets stuck in downtime waiting for a part they didn’t know was out of stock.

It’s a common problem for engineers and project managers: the search for the right equipment to match a customer’s needs. Almost no problem is as challenging for energy professionals as engineering the right indoor climate system to provide maximum efficiency and energy savings. To make it even more challenging, the engineers/project managers must ensure that the HVAC specifications received match the proposed system size and output, among other things that must be matched.

As such, RFI tracking for HVAC companies is a crucial part of keeping vendors and manufacturers competitive. Without RFI tracking, most businesses would fall back on legacy methods like written data or spreadsheets, which can mean perpetuating a system of inaccurate and isolated information.

The success of heavy construction project management is in the details.

And the best way to manage details is with good software. Many business owners are still relying on old methods for managing their projects, their paperwork, and their people. Consequently, the profitability of a project can be put at risk simply because of a lack of the right technology tool: Sage 300 ERP.

As the owner of a construction company, you’re used to wearing many hats in the office and out in the field. What’s crucial to the profitability of your projects is knowing where budgets stand and making sure payment is on time for employees, vendors, and other third-party suppliers.

With the growth of your business, you find yourself away from your home office more and more. Consequently, you can’t initiate the payment process in a timely manner like you could before your expansion took place.

A common approach in the construction business for measuring productivity is to calculate the firm’s output in dollars and divide it by the total number of hours assigned to the labor behind it.

Often, although it’s crucial to include rental hours to gauge an accurate productivity outcomes, the operational costs of machinery and equipment are overlooked, making the productivity measurement inaccurate.

As an owner of a construction business, it wasn’t long after you opened your new branch in other regions that you saw the need to ditch your antiquated accounting system for one geared exclusively for contractors.

Project management for heavy construction is only as efficient as the  software you’re using, so while it’s definitely easiest to grab an online template or throw together an Excel spreadsheet, those types of cheap fixes won’t help you in the long run.

Tracking project costs