The coronavirus (COVID-19) has been a challenge for a number of industries. Listening to the news you hear about airline companies dropping flights by 80%, tours being canceled, schools closing and quite recently whole cities falling under quarantine.

Construction is also an industry that was hit by the coronavirus – though less talked about in the media. I was recently at a construction site in a Gulf state and was surrounded by masked staff starting from the Project Director (who welcomed us without a handshake) … all the way to the site worker hauling steel bars off a truck. When I entered the site offices, I was asked to sanitize, have my temperature taken, asked to wear an N95 mask and handed a pair of thick rubber gloves.

With all these precautions, I found most of the team I was supposed to meet at home! I was told by several of the office management that the drop in productivity and availability of staff has almost halved. Many false alarms have left entire crews sent home for 2 weeks until they are cleared as per the law. Not only that, with the flight restrictions (which are not expected to end anytime soon) some staff have been left outside the country – not just the project.

And it made me realize just how important cloud-based solutions are, and how critical it is to lift borders which can suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Our approach at BlackSmithSoft has always pivoted on collaboration and mobility as key success factors. Being a fully cloud-based solution, a lot of the project management part can be done from home over a regular internet connection. Even the documents that you need from engineering or even site crews send, review and sign-off on can be uploaded from anywhere.

For management, all the dashboards and reports they need including live progress of the project can be accessed from the BlackSmith BIM or WFP portal from any device. Even if they are stuck outside of the country. For the owner and his rep, he too can be part of the collaboration and reporting.

That’s great. What about the actual workers on site? Our platform won’t stop sick workers from going home and stopping site work. But it will give management insight into any potential red flags due to crew issues, drops in productivity and unforeseen delays since progress is captured from the site and reported in the cloud.

My advice to construction companies wanting to minimize unnecessary contact, revive productivity back up again and increase visibility on potential issues is to look into cloud-based solutions such as BlackSmithSoft, Autodesk BIM 360 Docs and other cloud-based solutions to manage projects as remotely as possible.

Stay safe construction world.