In these times of uncertainty, with labor shortages and supply chain disruptions topping the list of concerns, general contractors continue to adapt and pivot to win bids and complete projects with efficiency and quality. Maintaining high productivity will likely require a re-look at existing processes and workflows.
Here’s three areas that general contractors might evaluate that can significantly reduce risk.
- Automate Your COIs: Certificates of insurance are an essential and required piece of insurance coverage for any contractor that uses contract labor. It’s important to have effective policies and procedures to collect COIs, but also to track continued compliance and alert when non-compliance issues arise. Automated centralized systems request, collect and manage COIs. A system such as Constrafor’s COI Management Tool manages the entire approval workflow and, with machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, uses real-time data and analytics to monitor COI status and proactively notify appropriate individuals when there’s a problem.
- Refine Your Contract Management Strategy: Contracts are increasingly complex, particularly in these times with addendums and provisions. Are your most current contracts readily available? Are you able to track changes and receive notifications of new versions? Are you using digital signature technology? A streamlined contract management solution like ensures a single source of truth for all contract documents. It stores templates and documents for easy access, facilitates safe and secure signatures, tracks changes while maintaining a versioning history, and it can integrate with invoice management.
- Proactively Track Diversity Requirements: Minority/women-owned business enterprise (MWBE) goals are ever increasing. Too often, tracking diversity goals is left to the end of a project when project managers must scramble to tally total dollars spent. Your organization should be able to track diversity spend from day-to-day, week-to-week as a project progresses. With an automated diversity procurement management system, diversity certification requests are automatically sent to subcontractors with reminders for late submittals. The system automatically confirms documents are ready for review, and alerts subcontractors that diversity documentation is complete. Since the system automatically compiles diversity numbers from invoices and RFQs, your diversity quotas are available in real-time throughout the project.
Optimizing any one of these areas – COIs, contract management practices and diversity quotas—can improve bottom lines and assure success in the coming year. To learn more about how Constrafor can help automate your back office tasks and reduce risk schedule time with an expert here.
