What to Ask When Switching Productivity Management Providers

3D productivity solutions offer complete visibility across your projects and your progress to plan. They eliminate the need to physically survey a site frequently, with the cut/fill visibility at your fingertips. This saves you time, money, and provides peace of mind around that status of your jobsite, anytime. 

Making the decision to implement a productivity solution or to switch providers may be triggered by any variety of business cases. 

• You’ve invested in machine control on multiple machines and seen the benefits in the field.  Now you’re looking to pull actionable data from those systems.
• You need a productivity solution that will be able to scale with your business and integrate with a portfolio of construction management solutions.
• Your current solution requires too much training or onboarding.  You need a system with an intuitive interface that can be rolled out quickly to your team.You’ve invested in machine control on multiple machines and seen the benefits in the field.  Now you’re looking to pull actionable data from those systems.

Whatever your reason for considering a new 3D productivity solution, it’s important that you not only consider what will solve today’s business challenges but also what will solve tomorrow’s.

Consider the Long Game

When you select productivity software for your operation, you are choosing more than one application, you are choosing that provider’s solution stack. Because as your business grows the data you’ve amassed over time will become more and more valuable—-particularly if it can be accessed and interpreted all from the same portfolio.

Five Important Questions to Ask When Choosing a 3D Productivity Monitoring Solution

1 - How do I monitor what’s going on in the field from the office?

Understanding what visibility is possible between the office to the field and what it would take to achieve that visibility is an important foundation for the management of any construction business. WorksOS users, for example, benefit from tight integration with WorksManager, Trimble’s office-to-field software used for managing all assets on the jobsite. Users can dispatch work to machines in the field using WorksManager and see the actual work progress in real-time within WorksOS.

2 - How easy or hard is it to see what I need to see? 

Every minute counts when it comes to jobsite productivity. The more intuitive and responsive an interface is, the more information you’ll be able to quickly interpret and make decisions from. Additionally, having more space to view your progress maps along with faster data processing and map tile loading means you’re never waiting for data to load.

3 - How will my productivity solution integrate with my project information? 

It may seem obvious that projects, users, and accounts need to be synchronized between project and productivity software solutions. But this functionality is not a given in solutions widely available in the construction space. This leaves users in a position where they have to recreate data platform by platform. Trimble prioritized solving this issue when they developed WorksOS. With WorksOS, users can easily integrate their project data across their design, data prep, and field solutions without recreating everything. 

4 - How easy is it to see where my machines are and what they are doing? 

One challenge we hear from customers is the frustration and time wasted when they have to jump between multiple systems during the course of a working day to understand where their machines are and what design version that machine is working from. The release of Trimble’s 3D productivity solution changed all of this, now when you view your map in WorksOS you can see machine location along with the last reported date and design version in real-time. 

5 - Can I do reliable quality checks remotely? 

Understanding jobsite’s progress and the quality of that progress is one of the most important day-to-day metrics weighing on any site manager’s mind. Your productivity solution should be able to retrieve the latest productivity files from your machines and safely store them in the cloud. Trimble WorksOS solves this and offers the ability for users to click on a particular cell on the map and see the most recent information about elevation, pass number, operating mode, and more.  

Whether you’re switching solutions or choosing a productivity solution for the first time, there is a lot to consider when evaluating the right productivity software for your construction operation. The good news is that the technology keeps improving, the data keeps getting more accurate, and the capabilities keep broadening. What this means for you is that once you find a provider that shares the same vision of how construction management software should work, you'll be on the same roadmap to adapt and grow with that vision.