General contractors often ask their subcontractors to download, install and use tools like Sage 300 or Procore. Subcontractors are a critical part of most construction projects, so it makes sense for GCs to want them to be on the same (digital) page.
But since subcontractors often use the data ecosystems owned and operated by their GCs, they sometimes conclude that there’s no reason to invest in their own resource-management or data-analytics platforms. “We’ll leave all of that to the GCs,” the thinking goes.
There’s a significant downside to this: It means that too many subcontractors are missing out on the chance to gain clarity into their own key performance indicators, which would allow them to run their office and field operations more efficiently, and make better decisions.
As you can see in the subcontractor webinars and other videos on our site, it’s perfectly viable for subcontractors to use their own cloud-based platforms to do things like…
+ track key data on bids, resources, equipment and schedules
+ connect people, projects, schedules, tasks and apps
+ streamline clunky approaches to reporting and data entry; and
+ analyze data from past projects to make predictions and see trends.
Data Warehousing for Subcontractors
The ProNovos Construction Intelligence Cloud connects to the majority of the most widely used apps in our industry, and we’re able to integrate with many lesser-known applications as well. Let’s say your field personnel send data in Procore when working for some GCs, and then report in Sage 300 or Foundation on projects involving others.
As a subcontractor, you can use ProNovos to pool all relevant information from these different systems and see it in your own analytics dashboards, including big-picture views into long-term company and project performance.
With automatically generated reports, you no longer have to painstakingly extract data from those multiple systems and then re-enter the information into separate spreadsheets, which tends to be error-prone, time-consuming and (in the form of the unnecessary labor hours needed for double-entry) expensive.
Our case studies on ProNovos clients Molin Concrete Products, McClone Construction and OTL offer some examples of what this can look like in practice.
In a recent conversation with us, Mikeal Kanouff, McClone’s Washington Area Operations Manager, summed up why it’s so important for subcontractors to have their own platform. Founded in 1975, McClone specializes in structural concrete and concrete formwork and has completed more than 1,000 projects across the United States.
“As a subcontractor, you just cannot be in multiple systems and think that you’re going to be able to track those KPIs by piecing all of that data together later,” Mikeal explained. “It’s just too time-consuming. But an analytics platform like ProNovos, which has connectors for all kinds of different data sources, allows you to do that automatically. You’re still on the same page with all of your GCs, but now you can stay on top of your own company and projects as well.”
