Author: Travis Jaramillo
Defining an accurate path of construction across stakeholders for a single project is always a complex dance—which is only augmented when adding the design of software to facilitate the Path of Construction, while at the same time reorienting those processes for effective implementation as a corporate standard combining the people, process, and tech across projects of various sizes. Whew. Say that out loud. It’s a mouthful. Actually doing it is tremendously harder. But solving these problems is one of my favorite challenges to tackle at WorkPacks.
I feel that sometimes, the best way to approach a complex problem is by aligning all the possible solutions in tandem. This enables us to tailor specific functionalities of the software, tweak processes, or combine both when needed to solve a particular issue. In one case, the ability to automate the starting indices of CWP’s, EWP’s, and PWP’s by having templatized mapping between packages has greatly sped up the Path of Construction Process and proven to be highly valuable.
This automated approach also allows us to consider digital threads from a ‘consumed vs generated’ perspective, enabling us to map the full digital thread and tailor our software to fill in the gaps effectively and efficiently, all while decreasing the need for manual data transmission and transformation. We can now have our package lists at the click of a button, then refine them, removing the sometimes-overwhelming and time-consuming task of continuously generating various types of packages as needed, then incorporating them into the AWP Nomenclature and project data for stakeholder alignment. In essence, this is an example of truly planning with the end in mind by having the project nomenclature and mapped package relationships in our back pocket, and greatly speeding up necessary processes for defining an accurate Path of Construction and alignment across project stakeholders.
It has been highly rewarding for me to handle these challenges hand in hand with specific clients, gaining insight from the obstacles they frequently encounter on a project, and work with them in a truly cooperative fashion to design solutions that will be effective across their portfolio. Viewing the progress from the start of this year and what we’ve been able to create in such a short time only makes me more excited to further build WorkPacks and see how robust our solutions repertoire is a year from now.
