Content sponsored by: Vizzn
Are you prepared for a *Black Swan event? In the world of construction this refers to an unforeseen and very serious job complication that results in extreme losses, compromised relationships, and may even bring your company to the brink of bankruptcy. Every construction company, if it exists long enough, will encounter at least one of these events. You are experiencing a Black Swan event if a single unpredicted event causes a major deficiency or delay on your project and 3 or more of the following statements are true:
1) Losses on the impacted project are outpacing even your most pessimistic predictions.
2) Your project is lasting significantly longer than expected and there is no end in sight.
3) Your insurance company is involved, the claim is in dispute, and your coverage is uncertain.
4) The relationships with the impacted customers and engineers are becoming severely strained.
5) Your legal team is involved, or legal costs are already incurred.
Most Black Swan events are seldom the result of just one thing going wrong. There are often many other contributing factors and contributing parties. Unfortunately, in Black Swan events, those other parties will not be much help to you; they will be busy covering their own butts! Your documentation will need to stand alone and might be your only line of defense. If your documentation is not complete and indisputable, you will be taking it on the chin alone.
Here is the bad news – Unless you have a solid Quality Control (QC) Software System, you will be hard pressed to irrefutably link your documentation to your assertions of a job well done. Even the most extensive documentation is useless if it cannot be specifically connected to locations, dates, and times. For example, a hydro-vac invoice to expose a gas line does not prove where exactly that line was exposed, nor will it prove what was seen at the bottom of the hydro-vac hole. Substantiating documents and photos and videos that are geo-stamped, dated, and oriented will be necessary to ensure you win your defense. Advanced QC Software is the only solution to ensure you are prepared.
Construction companies that invest in Quality Control Software fare far better in surviving Black Swan events and due to those same QC processes, the likelihood of these events even occurring are decreased significantly.
The following two examples are real-life construction events (details changed for privacy):
Black Swan Example #1:
Black Swan Example #2:
As contractors, all we have at the end of a project is a paper trail. Proper QC Software will not only validate your documentation by a 10X factor but is also more likely to prevent quality control problems from happening in the first place.
Here are some key features of proper Quality Control Software Systems:
1) Unlimited quality control photos can be taken by anyone on the team at any time.
2) All photos go to a shared site map and overlay the drawings themselves.
3) Photos and videos are all geo-stamped and show the direction the camera was facing when taken.
4) Additional documents and forms, complete with signatures, can be attached to those same photos and identified points (also dated and geo-stamped).
5) Quality Control Plans, Quality Control Forms, and Quality Control Checklists, complete with signatures, can be generated for each project or scope.
To optimize the benefits of the QC Software, the contractor should also establish best practices that detail what, how and when documentation should be occurring. One example: Companies may mandate that all hydro-vac services are documented, complete with photos of the truck’s work as well as the view of the exposed hole.
Being a contractor is a risky business and Black Swan events are rare, but when they do happen there is no such thing as documentation that is too thorough or too well organized. QC Software is not just there to protect you from Black Swan events, but you will find that proper QC Software will eliminate many quality control problems from ever happening. See examples below of one of the leading QC Software providers and how you can document all aspects of your job site work:
https://www.vizzn.ca/quality-control-interactive-drawings
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The leader in QC Software for construction companies is Vizzn Inc. and its Quality Control product. Find out more at www.vizzn.ca.
*https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blackswan.asp