The daily report is a standard in the construction industry. It will never go away.
Making the process fast and easy for site managers, while also capturing valuable and time-sensitive data in real-time is a reality in 2020. It makes the difference between a project languishing and falling behind deadlines vs. a project being on-budget, and on-schedule.
Much like handling submittals, Fluix makes this process extremely efficient for both on-site leaders as well as off-site managers, corporate analysts, and executives.
Daily Report Key Components
Every company may have its own preferences for the data that’s reported every day. But the most essential components of a daily construction report, daily journal, or daily standup — whatever you’d like to call it — are as follows:
- Project summary details such as name, project number, client, date, and the person completing the daily report.
- Weather details such as the temperature and conditions (sunny, cloudy, partly cloudy, rainy, snowy, windy, etc.)
- Number of personnel on the site that day by job classification (supervisors, carpenters, finishers, laborers, truck drivers, and all other specific roles and subcontractors)
- Noteworthy events both positive and negative (events that occurred at the site that may cause a delay and events that were significant milestones or customizations made to speed the work).
- Materials delivered (what material was delivered, by which company, and in what quantities).
- Equipment on-site (identify the equipment that was used and by whom it was used that day).
- Safety issues and incidents (this is often best reported by health and safety documentation that can be separately submitted or attached).
- Important photos (some site managers find it valuable to submit photos highlighting any of the above activities, events, or equipment used).
If you’ve never created a form like this for your construction firm, we have one available for you to download at the bottom of this post. We can customize it for you as well.
Who needs to receive this report every single day? Separating who needs to receive a project’s daily report from those who would like to is important. We recommend staying focused on the essential crew who may need to provide a status report, review data, or make a decision based on comments added to the report. But it’s up to you. Fluix supports whatever process you want in place.
Fluix allows key stakeholders to receive daily reports within seconds of submission from a site, with full data capture, and third-party integration. As long as the submitter is on a cell signal or Wifi, the process is nearly instantaneous. If the site is too remote for either, the report can still be completed offline and submitted when the device is back online.
Good Project Folder Hygiene and Hierarchy
Before automating construction workflow — the process you want to automatically route a document upon submission, a good account setup is important. We recommend each project being given its own set of subfolders to contain preconstruction files, daily report templates, and other employee files pertinent to just that project. It may look something like this:
- Name your project for easy identification of folders and files in the iOS app.
- Daily Reports submitted will have one automated route that follow from site submission to corporate stakeholders. Therefore, they should be in their own folder.
- Construction plans that only need to be distributed to certain employees on the project should be placed in their own folder.
- Safety files such as job hazard analysis forms, inspection forms, training rosters, and toolbox talks, should be saved in their own subfolders as well.
One of many great advantages with Fluix is, once you’ve set up your folder hierarchy for your first construction project however you prefer as a new Fluix customer, you can duplicate that setup, including all subfolders and form templates, with a single click within your account admin.
Further, the combination of good folder hierarchy and using Fluix’s pinning feature means starting a new daily report never takes more than two taps on the iPad. Far faster than most heavyweight, alternative construction software.
Automating the Construction Daily Report Process
Now let’s talk automation. Within your Fluix account admin, you establish the automated workflow you want to trigger when a daily report — or any other repetitive document or form — is submitted via iPad or iPhone. For example:
In this example, the workflow is very simple. After the site manager fills out the daily report on his or her iPad and taps submit, the daily report is automatically routed as an email attachment to each of the four recipients indicated.
There’s no “Save as…” necessary. There’s no need to attach the PDF to an email and switch apps on their device either. The site manager simply opens the form, fills it in, taps submit, and they’re done. Everything else is handled automatically by Fluix.
Workflows can be as simple or complicated as you like.
You can optionally allow the submitter to type in the email address of additional recipients; you can elect to have daily reports “reassigned” to others instead of sending it by email (in which case the document is routed through Fluix to the recipient for them to complete and approve or upload to an archive within the Fluix app or in the browser); you can submit the daily report via API to your project management software, and there are other options as well, including the next important one!
Capturing Data from Your Daily Reports for Benchmarking
As we’ve said before, documents are for audits and compliance, data is for decisions.
While there are so many additional subtle features that make Fluix the most efficient software for managing construction daily reports, often the final step in the setup process is to configure Fluix Data to capture data from your form fields for benchmarking. Fluix allows you to configure ‘datasets’ which extract some or all data from form fields.
In this example, only the yellow fields highlighted above will be extracted for this dataset when the form is submitted. The data can be aggregated for download as a CSV or Excel file. Or, it can be routed in real-time to Power BI or Tableau.
Full Configurability for Account Admins
This blog post can’t outline all of the customizations you can make to distribute and route documents automatically to transform your processes into 100% paperless workflows. Suffice it to say you are not stuck following a rigid, predetermined process for managing your construction projects or documents. We can get you established faster than any other construction software you’ll ever deploy, and you can customize as you get comfortable with advanced features.
We’ve heard from our customers that rapid user adoption is one of the most coveted benefits of Fluix as your document management solution for construction daily reports and other paperwork.
Book a Demo today and we’ll walk you through a complete demo to kickoff a 14-day trial of Fluix, including best practices from our best enterprise construction customers.
