Let me ask you a simple question: Do you have document controls in place?
Don’t worry – not many people do. In fact, some of the world’s best project managers don’t have a handle on where their documents are. And it’s a problem! As projects grow in volume and complexity, documents start to multiply FAST. And if you’re spending time looking for docs because they’re not logically sorted, well, you’re going to have yet another reason why projects aren’t getting done on time.
We often hear “Well we call our documents x but Hank’s team calls them y and Heather’s team calls them z.” Or, “you know we’re not sure where ALL of our documents are located, but we know where MOST of them are.” This excuse turns into a severe headache. Fear not, because we’ve got the remedy for you – its name is SiteTraker.
Let’s take construction drawings as an example. Reviewing drawings with colleagues can be one of the biggest pains when it comes to managing documents. Immense time wasted marking updated drawings and waiting for approvals only to have a different set of drawings from the one you marked up approved.
SiteTracker modernizes the entire process.
SiteTracker’s Document Collaboration module is an add-on component to SiteTraker that provides end user’s with the ability to upload documents and route to other users for comments or approval/ rejection. SiteTracker’s notifications, reporting engine, and robust audit history will eliminate the uncertainty of knowing whether your team accessed the document you sent around. Welcome to the future.
SiteTracker’s Document Collaboration module allows users to annotate documents during the review process. I put a change in you put a comment on top of mine, and it moves along like that. You can initiate document collaboration workflows concurrently or consecutively. Essentially, this means your team can receive their notification tasks at the same time (concurrently) or the workflow will dispatch one review task at a time, waiting for one person to review before the workflow moves on to the next reviewer (consecutively). At SiteTracker, we’re all about options. As the document proceeds through the team, the module sends email notifications and populate fields on its parent project. After all the comments are entered in and applied, the drawing can be approved with a click and logged into the system. Pretty great, right?
If you’re at a site, you can upload photos onto the site or project record. There’s no “hey can you send me a photo of x” or “Hey I’m not sure what you just sent me” – attributed details are all there. If a site manager finds that bad weather damaged equipment, he can post a photo of the incident. And in this case, a picture might just be worth a thousand words. Now, someone going out to the site knows if the equipment needs to be repaired or replaced. Gone are delays caused by inefficient document management. If people make changes to documents uploaded, anyone who has access can view it.
The alternative to this is hopelessly waiting for a team member to upload a document, which should happen on Thursday, but instead, happens the following Tuesday. Or a SiteTraker ensures those four days of thumb-twiddling never happen. So stop waking up in a cold sweat because you forgot the location of a document, or because you’re freaking out waiting for Jim to upload site photos and Jennifer to edit to the updated proposal. SiteTracker gives you a centralized hub for document storage and management and an array of resources and features at your fingertips. Let us help you get rid of the document blues.