New Quality Management Tools Promote Subcontractor Involvement, Connect Workflows

Want to reap the efficiency benefits of an effective quality management program on your construction projects, but afraid your stakeholders will find it too challenging to implement?

We hear you! So we've added a set of new enhancements to BIM 360 Field to make the tool easier for the whole team to adopt and use, and which also connect the workflows of different subcontractor trades. More specifically, the enhancements promote subcontractor involvement in quality management; connect issue, equipment and task workflows to resolve issues holistically; and speed the process of creating QA/QC checklist templates.

These latest updates focus on access, usability and standardization – three core areas that can lead to adoption and use of a quality management tool.

More Efficient, Inclusive Quality Management

Staying on top of subcontractors’ work is one of the most critical aspects of deploying a quality management program. Compiling and managing this information has typically been the job of the general contractor (GC) – as only certain aspects of a project need to be visible to each subcontractor. This adds a layer of responsibility  onto the GC, and can slow down work and issue resolution.

The latest release of BIM 360 Field adds subcontractors to the standard permission matrix. With these permissions, subcontractors gain access to a broad set of use cases to manage their own scope of work within BIM 360 Field.  At the same time, it gives GC project administrators the ability to individually control what a subcontractor can see, as well as what they can do, including:

          ♦  Create new issues and assign directly to their own company or to the GC to review & reassign 

          ♦  Access QA/QC, Commissioning, Safety checklists, equipment and reports

The new subcontractor permission settings gives BIM 360 Field project administrators full control over what information is visible and what actions a subcontractor can perform on the project.

With these new permission settings, subcontractors will be able to take a much more active role in quality management – speeding up resolution to project issues and gaining the benefits of BIM 360 Field for their own internal task & issue management.

Additionally, by gaining access to the Equipment module, subcontractors can now play an integral role when gathering O&M and Close Out documentation.

More Effective, Holistic Issue Management

Most issues that come up in construction don’t exist in a vacuum - dealing with one issue will often have an impact on another, or possibly several. For example, an issue created to patch drywall may also be linked to an issue to paint the wall.

To remedy this, and simplify both project and quality management, a new linking feature allows users to create an association between two or more issues or tasks to help bring visibility to and track process across multiple items. Picking up the drywall example again, both issues can now be viewed and tracked together via the linking feature to make it easier to track the issues holistically.

When issues are linked to one another, related issues are displayed on the issue summary.

Customize Equipment Status and Permissions

This linking functionality is also applied to the Equipment module to help monitor the progress of related equipment or tasks.

Linking equipment components helps project teams identify the status of each part of an overall system.

To further improve equipment categorization, BIM 360 Field project administrators can now create custom status sets for equipment and associate the status with equipment categories. For example, a set of status items could include Ordered, Delivered, Installed and Inspected. And, permission settings can be set by company to ensure that the appropriate project teams have visibility to the equipment sets that they are involved with.

Speedier checklist-ing

To help speed the checklist creation and management process, we’ve added more controls to checklist templates and access to the full set of premium checklist templates.

New checklist controls: Will make it easier for you to give external stakeholders access to the templates they need. Company permissions to checklist templates can now be granted by selecting a single company, or multiple companies. This makes it much easier for project stakeholders to find and focus on the inspections that are relevant to their work.

Access to the full set of premium checklist templates: Now, project administrators can choose from more than 100 commonly used templates, then quickly customize the checklist items to match the project’s quality practices, speeding up project management processes.

Additional improvements to enhance project efficiency:

• Visibility into issue comments from the issue section of a checklist
• An enlarged caption input box for photos
• The ability to view and restore deleted checklist templates.

Dutch Language Support!

BIM 360 Field now supports Dutch on both the web and mobile UIs. The language setting is controlled in BIM 360 HQ in the Project Profile setup screen.

For more details on these new features, or to keep up with all BIM 360 Field web and mobile releases, view and subscribe to our BIM 360 Field Release Notes in the BIM 360 Forums.

Ready to upgrade your quality management game?

Try BIM 360 Field for FREE!