Benefits

Scale answers the question, "What do I need to do now?" for everyone on the project team, whether they are a contractor, project manager, procurement manager, warehouse clerk or sales representative. This sounds simple but is rarely achieved in the world of construction. Scale achieves this by automation, real-time data capture, and integration across departments.

Not only does this real-time integration of human effort across the organization make the project run smoother, but it improves the quality of life of each team member by giving them a sense of order, control and predictability over their area of responsibility. It also reduces the need for meetings or manual feedback between departments, allowing each department to "run with the ball" with a minimum of fuss.

Scale captures every task in real-time, at source, without any redundant data entry. Project performance is transparent for the project, within departments and right down to the level of each project manager or contractor.

Scale's scheduling algorithm predicts start and complete dates for every task based on resource limitations and historic performance, thus enabling detailed cash flow predictions and timelines, while capturing present performance in real time. At the beginning of a project Scale provides utterly realistic estimates of project execution time and depth of financing needed, based on desired speed of build and expected sales inflows.

Because Scale completely automates payroll, "discretionary pricing" of work is prevented. Rates are locked in and can only be changed with stakeholder permission.

The Project Management, Procurement, Warehousing, Sales and Payroll/Back Office teams are all connected through Scale to one source of truth. Teams can execute their functions confidently, knowing that the information they are working with is real.

As an example, let's say that there is an optional Solar Electricity upgrade available for homeowners, but to avoid expensive retrofitting the project management team must know if this option has been chosen before the walls are poured for the unit. Because Scale tracks the build of each unit in real time, the system provides deadline dates to the sales team. Should a sales rep try to sell this upgrade after the walls are already poured, the system will block the upgrade. Conversely, if the sales rep does sell an upgrade for a given unit, when the project team comes to build that unit they will know that the Solar upgrade has been chosen and must be installed. Similarly, the procurement schedule will be updated to include the purchase of everything related to that upgrade for that unit.

The same pattern applies to the many other changes that happen all the time on construction sites: changes are allowed or prohibited based on policies; successful changes are propagated seamlessly into the tasks of each department and team member. To say that this reduces the communication burden of running a construction project is an understatement. In fact, the system coordinates the efforts of the team so well, that the daily productivity of the project becomes something that is taken for granted.

Scale is built to enforce one cardinal rule: Never pay for incomplete work!

There is no more effective way to control quality on a job site that withholding pay for incomplete or substandard work. But enforcing this rule eludes most.

This feature alone is a game changer. Paying for incomplete/shoddy work slows down the project, wastes material, requires expensive re-working and exponentially increases the management burden. Ultimately, this extra time and effort increases cost and reduces profit. Doing it right the first time makes life so much simpler: the project team has a better quality of life, the stakeholders make more money, and the customers get a better product.

Getting material from the warehouse to where it is needed on site when it is needed is hard.

If you go for speed of production, you will drop out material ahead of time. The problem with this is loss of control: with material at hand, contractors may begin a task before it is fully ready for execution, or before they have completed their work-in-progress (work hoarding). This will lead to loss of quality control, which is a disaster. Goods may also be damaged or stolen.

If you go for control and only deliver goods on the day when they are needed, you will create a bottleneck and production will suffer. Scale solves this problem in a way that preserves both speed and control.

Again, this one benefit alone is a game changer. On a Jamaican project, production time for a 900 sq ft. home went from 200 days to 90 days upon implementation of this system.

You have better productivity, profitability and reliability when responsibility is delegated to the lowest level possible in the organization. There is also the added benefit of each person in the team--even those on the lowest level--having a concrete sense of their significance to the operation. It's a win-win situation when each team member has a discrete and fairly narrow area of responsibility in which their tasks are clearly defined, success is predictably achievable, and performance is both objectively measurable and consistently recognized and rewarded by their supervisors. It's a win-win because in this scenario, managers can truly be managers: no longer in crisis mode, they have the liberty to observe the team in action, catch the exceptions, and reinforce the wins. And for the stakeholders, it's a much more comforting position: instead of being dependent on a "Super Project Manager" to hold the operation together (which is both inefficient and vulnerable to disaster should that person leave) they have the assurance that because the system is delegating tasks in real time to each person, the system will continue to work, regardless of who may come or go from the team.

Also, it is easy to onboard new players, because the system provides such clear delineation of each person's role.

Which brings us to the benefit of predictable and repeatable performance. It's not enough to successfully complete a project. We should also be able to repeat the performance with absolute confidence. The things we learned on the project should be permanently captured and become part of the company's DNA. And when we move to the next project, we should be able to start with a completely new team and still have the same confidence and predictability. All these benefits are guaranteed by Scale. Not only do stakeholders have confidence in taking on new projects, but management focus can now be lifted from managing the operation (read "daily trying to make order out of chaos!") to improving the operation: reducing costs, improving designs or reworking processes.

Finally, the benefit from which Scale got its name!

By reducing the management burden and providing real-time transparency to stakeholders, Scale allows for scaling up of operations. Scaling can be done by increasing the build speed of a project, or by running multiple projects simultaneously.

The integration and automation of procurement with project execution leads naturally to optimization. The same procurement team can now serve the needs of multiple projects at once. Payroll automation implies the same for the back-office team.

Ease of onboarding new team members, preservation of knowledge within the system, and transparency of performance allows for replication of teams and confident oversight of multiple simultaneous projects.