How can SharePoint be beneficial for the Construction Industry?

One platform to ease communication

There are different ways of sharing information within your company, with emails being the most common choice. However, every time an employee checks their email account, they distract themselves from working. Furthermore, there is a higher likelihood of them missing important information if they cannot check their emails all the time.

As a solution, SharePoint allows you to share information through a company intranet; by using SharePoint features such as internal blog posts, your employees have the chance to engage more with content, allowing them to use likes, emoticons, and comments. Implementing this within your construction business will lead to open communication & trust among employees.

Another benefit of using SharePoint intranets is that you can find information within your construction business much easier. Instead of storing your data such as Construction or Assessment reports on multiple platforms, a SharePoint Intranet provides a centralised solution where you can store all your data, and query relevant information needed, for a given construction project.

Collaboration is vital not only for the construction industry, but for all type of businesses, and that is why SharePoint lets you bring in the right people, at the right time, to contribute to project and keep all the gathered feedback and contributions.

Project Management

Construction project management has clear phases of its lifetime - planning the budgets, costs, time schedule, preparing reports and documents. To connect this information and your team, SharePoint makes it easier for people working on a project to know what needs to be done, allowing them to stay on track and update information instantly.

As no two construction businesses are the same, each require a solution tailored to their business requirements; SharePoint allows creating bespoke solutions for you and your needs. Build pages, forms, workflows, and dashboards customised to your construction business' needs. SharePoint also allows you to have control over what each user sees and has access to, by setting permissions, making SharePoint the obvious choice when it comes to reliability and security.

SharePoint intranets come with a variety of different project management tools that can help you with the delivery of a project such as Sites (internal websites), Search (find what you are looking for quickly), Insights (aggregate information) and Composites (create no-code automated workflows). Moreover, your employees are likely to be familiar this, as SharePoint is deeply embedded with Microsoft 365, and other tools they already use.

SharePoint is cross platform, designed for sharing information, and as such, it allows users to co-author, edit and share documents and other resources on different devices. This makes collaboration between teams and departments much easier. Furthermore, construction companies can make use of SharePoint to build and manage complex reports such as Accident, Assessment, Completion or Construction progress reports within the SharePoint intranet, making it easier for them to query and find. In addition, SharePoint can also display data visuals using Power BI or other third-party systems.

Safety, Health, Quality and Environment awareness

Health & safety in construction is of particular importance as this industry is prone to hazardous situations and can often be dangerous. That is why, to help you improve the health and safety in construction, SharePoint provides internal video management and streaming services to help train workers before they start working on a site. In addition, SharePoint allows you to maintain ISO 9001 quality management accreditation and keep your risk-assessment reports and HSE policies available in team sites, and keep track of completed training.

Registers

Keeping track of your equipment is vital for your construction business, for maximising equipment usage, complete visibility of assets, automation of regular maintenance, and more. Another important registry every construction company must keep is the subcontractor register, including the clearly defined roles and responsibilities for both the subcontractor and your company, the training, all financial accounts and so on. To make this easier for you, SharePoint helps you track your equipment and subcontractor registry, through its features like the SharePoint Lists.

Other benefits

SharePoint intranets also help construction industries keep track of their Activity Diary (to monitor the work conducted by the workers on site), Site Induction checklist (through using SharePoint Task Lists to automate the process), Staff Dictionary (to easily locate staff contact information), and Document Version Control (to monitor who visits drawings, diagrams and other important documents for a given construction project).

Activity diary

• Keep track of workers' site activities

Site Induction

• Checklist using SharePoint Task List

Employee Dictionary

• Keep track of your employees' contact information

Document Version control

• Keep track of who access your drawings, diagrams and schematics

One platform to ease communication

• Share information with the entire organization
• Find information quickly & easily
• Empower collaboration and improve the process for receiving feedback

Project Management

• Platform rich in features
• Familiar to your employees
• Built-in Collaboration
• Trade Knowledgebase
• Create Reports
• Customisation

Registers

• Equipment safety
• Subcontractor register