Trade Contractors today are living in a constant state of jumping from one cloud provider to another to find project documents losing hours in the process of tracking down information.
In fact, the average construction worker wastes 23 hours every month just looking for project information across cloud platforms.
Fortunately, there are plugins and integrations that can offer your business an advantage. Keep reading to learn more about how they work, and how to start reaping the rewards.
Talk with your teams about where they're spending time and their challenges when accessing project information and managing documents. How you ask this will impact what you hear, so we've recommended specific questions to ask. As you do, stress that this is not the fault of the individual but a symptom of the construction industry and how information is shared.
Based on our research, you aren't the only company having issues when navigating documents. We found:
These statistics are the main reason we launched DADO Sync right from the beginning of DADO, and why we have continued to invest in expanding the platforms we integrate with and improvements that reduce admin time.
Sync integrations are software applications (either embedded in software or that you download and install) that enable data synchronization.
What do we mean by “data synchronization”? It’s the ongoing process of synchronizing data between two or more devices, updating changes automatically between them to maintain consistency within systems.
Let me break that down - when you use a sync integration, you can synchronize data across two or more platforms (such as Procore and DADO) so that you automatically keep the information consistent across the two platforms. This gives you accurate, up-to-date project information across the document platforms, without needing to move between different platforms, with different logins (a personal pet peeve!), or dig through different folder structures to find what you need.
You'll go from wasting hours moving project information from one platform to another every day, to just minutes spent on the setup at the start of a new project.
For the purposes of this blog post, we’re going to focus on sync integrations between document management platforms (like Egnyte or Sharepoint) and construction project management platforms (like Procore).
There isn’t just one way to sync documents and data, so it’s important to understand what the options are, and which meet your needs. Here are the main options we think you should consider:
One- or Two-Way Syncing
A data syncing integration can either pass data from one platform to another (one-way sync) or back and forth between platforms (two-way sync).
Sync that passes OCR
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a process done to documents that are images where the text is recognized and extracted from the document. Some general guidelines on passing OCR data:
Here is an example of OCR data from DADO’s system - all of the handwritten information has been converted to text (blue overlay text) and in our platform easily found with a search.
Syncing administered data
Construction-specific integrations may pass the administered information on the document in the form of metadata. This is a big productivity win for your team, as you won’t need to key in the information that had already been administered.
There are two main hubs for construction sync integrations - the Procore Marketplace and the Autodesk App Store. Each of these hubs have multiple integration options for cloud storage platforms that you may be using today.
One note on reviewing the integration options - the listing on the search results often doesn’t necessarily explain what it does, so it will take some digging into the app listing or reviewing further materials provided in the app listing.
In a follow-up blog post, we'll review which integration options are available, and when they might be a good fit for your business, helping to cut down the hunt and peck of what does what in these app hubs.
There's not a specific “sync” category in the marketplace, because integrations cut across multiple categories. But the Search function in the marketplace will allow you to find most (if not all) sync integrations.
If you don’t see what you're specifically looking for and you're a Procore customer, every Procore account rep gets trained on the different apps in the marketplace, and they can help you with what might be useful.
For example, the DADO team works closely with the Procore team on where DADO is valuable in the Procore ecosystem, and when our integration may solve a customer problem such as customers who want to easily search all of the text in their Procore documents.
Similarly, there is not a sync category in the Autodesk App Store so a search for “sync” is your best bet to find all of the integration options. You can further filter down on product line - and for document syncing you can also filter on “Powered by Autodesk Forge”. All of the data you would want to access exists within Forge and will not be deprecated (turned off) as Autodesk continues to develop and expand its platform offerings.
Now that you have a sense of what kinds of information can be passed, here below are some general guidelines on what to look for. These criteria won’t tell you whether to use the sync, but they'll give you insight into what limitations or benefits there are, and what gaps might remain to consider and make sure you can work around them.
When we bring on new customers, we start with a small group and a defined use case and focus on getting it right before a wider rollout. If it's a good fit, we may tune a few things up before we roll it out to more people. If for some reason it isn’t a fit, at least it had minimal impact on your business, and hopefully, we address the gaps or issues in the product with time.
This practice can help with rolling out any new software, or integration, that changes how your teams will work.
Once you have set up your data syncing within your organization, the ideal state is to ensure for every project that your teams have access to all of the latest information, in a single platform, that can be accessed all from an easy-to-carry mobile device, from a computer in the trailer, or back at the office.
At DADO we call that the "information hub" where all of the information about a project can be accessed from anywhere, ideally with as little administrative upkeep as possible.
Learn more about how DADO's document platform works and if it might be the right fit for your business.