If your business grows and changes, your construction management software should help you on your journey. Sikich HEADSTART for Construction can help you drive and manage growth—through acquisitions and mergers, new services, or simply by becoming the best at what you do. You can extend the solution with powerful business insight and innovation resources in the cloud.
Earlier, we discussed subcontractor management, managing insurance certificates, and invoicing with HEADSTART for Construction. In this post, we are going to highlight how the solution can help you as your construction business grows and changes, and how you can extend it with wider-reaching capabilities.
Achieving growth without increasing complexity
Traditional construction software products may fall short when you plan to offer services to generate predictable, recurring revenue and when you acquire or spin up additional business entities. When you get to these junctures, HEADSTART for Construction can prove its value as a management platform with a wealth of capabilities and vast scalability.
In our construction management software, you can configure and add as many business entities as you like—even in different global regions. For instance, you can create and brand a new business group for a type of construction that’s new to your company’s portfolio. Or, if you acquire or merge with another business, you onboard it to HEADSTART for Construction by using standard functionality. You can run finance management and generate reports per business group, line of business, region, revenue type, or according to other criteria, or in a consolidated, all-up manner.
Launching new services and managing inventories
For many construction companies, providing clients with valuable services is an efficient, sustainable way to create revenue and balance the volatility of the market, especially when projects may be delayed or reduced in scope. You can rely on HEADSTART for Construction to manage service contracts and service delivery, including workforce management and dispatching properly skilled people to field assignments. You flexibly configure contracts and service types in the system. Those could include warranty or maintenance services; electrical, plumbing, or other services provided by third parties in a partnership with you; and entirely new services you create.
Inventory management can pose challenges when a construction company launches services that require parts and supplies. HEADSTART for Construction as your materials management software takes the pain out of inventory management. You configure items with their costs, mark-up, status, and attributes, such as data about material fatigue or time remaining before a likely failure. You allocate inventory to client projects or services, and track it in transit. And, if you decide not to keep inventory around and prefer just-in-time procurement, you set up purchasing and delivery schedules in HEADSTART for Construction to ensure the flawless continuity of projects and services.
Extending the construction software
When you adopt our construction management solution, you don’t need to discard favorite software tools that serve you well. HEADSTART for Construction can integrate with Design 2020 and other industry software that many companies have used for years. Many common integrations are easy to configure, and Sikich can help you overcome any integration challenges.
By means of integrations, you can also access a new realm of powerful software functionality. In the cloud, extending your construction software with solutions that are part of the Microsoft Power Platform is risk-free and non-disruptive. With your initial deployment or later, you can connect HEADSTART for Construction to:
- Power BI: a collection of analytics, business insight, reporting, and data management resources that help you review historical and current data from your operations and make the best decisions for the company
- Power Apps: an arsenal of modular tools that let you build highly usable, connected apps to meet specific decision-support or management requirements with minimal coding
- Power Automate: a resource for creating automated and robotic workflows that help you free up employee talent and time for valuable tasks instead of routine chores
- Power Virtual Agents: a portfolio of utilities to build and configure chatbots without coding and put them to work in common employee and customer interactions
Your in-house technology managers will be able to take care of most use cases for the applications on the Microsoft Power Platform. Sikich will help you refine your approach and provide hands-on assistance if you don’t have the right skills in your organization or if there is just not enough time.
Empowering people to accomplish great things
Many of our construction clients integrate HEADSTART for Construction with Microsoft Teams, the cloud-based collaboration software. In most construction businesses, people at office locations and project sites need to exchange information, documents, architectural drawings, and other files. They have to meet to discuss project and client challenges, complex bids, subcontractor issues, and lots more. Many companies also offer employees skills development through meetings and webinars.
With Teams, your employees and other contributors can securely meet in a digital space, where they can talk and see each other. Communicating that way tends to be much more productive than using the phone line alone or time-delayed communications like email or text messages. For most people, it’s easier to participate and remain engaged in Teams interactions than in more remote channels, and ambiguities and misunderstandings won’t get in the way when they can immediately be cleared up. In Teams, you can also connect to other resources, such as your libraries of architectural drawings or contracts.
When construction teams work at sites where internet connectivity is not available, Sikich can configure Power Apps for offline data lookup and data collection. Our field service application also offers offline capabilities. Workers won’t by stymied by connectivity issues, and the system can sync whenever they are back in a connected environment.
Take the next step
If you want to explore how Sikich expertise and HEADSTART for Construction can help you as your construction business grows:
- Contact us and we’ll be right back in touch to answer your questions or arrange a demo.
- Visit the Sikich construction page with the latest on our services and solutions.
Co-written by Tim Tucker and Jason Niccolau
