As we have moved forward in trying to unravel the COVID-19 thread – in our professional and personal lives – management and trying to make most of the available data or insights comes to light.

The lockdown has vastly affected our ability to make decisions and the crucial component which has taken the most severe hit – time. Timing of decisions as it works in the real world has taken the COVID-19 delay; whether it is due to reduced operational capacity, the delay between decisionmakers and stakeholders or simply put, lack of uniform and transparent communication (modes and medium).

In a recent report by PwC; (COVID-19: What it means for engineering and construction), a quick glance at the key factors which will be affected by COVID-19 have been presented – (in an opinion poll format).

It is plenty clear to us concerns related to financial impact, spending, liquidity, supply chain disruptions and productivity remain the most obvious challenges.

The other challenge which remains a hurdle to starting and scaling operations post-lockdown is “…not having enough information to make good decisions”.

These worksite challenges can and will magnify given the mass return of migrant labour to their native states. A sudden deficit of cheap and abundantly available labour has been taken away from the construction engineering sector (and it is a crying shame that better economic and social safety nets were not available for this group and they are still under distress).

Given multiplicity of issues larger organizations that rely on construction engineering activities both as a business and for plant expansion projects – should look into contractor management software – it provides reliable solution to the following hurdles:

• Siloed approaches for labour workforce, asset and equipment management causes liabilities.
• Liabilities such as these deeply affect accountability and safety – esp. missing data capture and analytics.
• This missing data affects cohesive decision-making and the missing metrics affect operational performance.
• Lack of HSE policy coverage and monitoring magnifies issues for stakeholders.
• Planning-management roadblocks cause systemic operations to breakdown, often.

Digital contractor management post lockdown can help organization keep careful tabs on both human resource and asset management. And has the potential to become single window management portal that has the following multimodal capabilities.

Post lockdown operations would see a frenzy of activities kicking off all at once and the synchronization would be critical towards building a productive momentum. This is precisely where contractor management software is ably placed to help you take the charge and enable the proactive decision making with the timely available data.

1. Features

   • Registration of labour- employees and vehicles for Contractor-Vendors via web portal
   • Training division associated activity, planning, verifications and authorization via web portal
   • Punch-in/punch-out biometric feature for attendance and work hour calculations.
   • Transparent and authoritative data capture point for superior coverage.
   • Proactive safety deployment, implementation and metrics.

2. Advantages

   • Bridge, ‘sync’ & link organization to contractor- vendor association.
   • Review report and activate HSE performance management for worksite.
   • Performance management data reporting for effective accountability.
   • Aggregated and granular data capture for superior decision making.
   • Proactive compliance and adherence to standards via digital platform.

3. Deliverable

   • Conform to contractor qualification and contractor on- boarding.
   • Enhance contractor safety with analytics.
   • Reduce the potential for contractor-related incidents.
   • Improve collaboration with real- time feedback and performance metrics.
   • Permit and authorization based digital platform.

To gain a better understanding of how one of the world’s prominent tyre manufacturer leveraged ASK-EHS Contractor management software to enable their expansion operations, please download the case study here.