Whether you’re running a small construction job or a multi-million dollar project, familiar failings can reduce safety on-site, hinder progress, and hit your bottom line.
Whatever the project, margins are likely to be tight and safety is always going to be paramount. Here are some of the most common mistakes in construction, with more details on how adopting drone technology can help you avoid them.
Poor planning
One obvious step you can take to ensure your construction project doesn’t go over budget is to plan properly. Carrying out accurate surveys before a bid is submitted means that, on the one hand, you’ll be in a strong position to estimate the exact amount of work and materials required to get the job done.
On the other, up to date surveys lower the risk of unwelcome, potentially expensive surprises once a project is underway.
Drones, increasingly sophisticated payloads and software have come together to revolutionize the way construction sites are surveyed. You can now generate precise maps in order to plan projects down to the centimeter.
Poor site visibility
One challenge faced by every construction manager is site visibility. In practical terms, good site visibility ensures that everyone working on a project can access the information they need when they need it.
That information can include anything, from plans and stockpile measurements to proof of compliance.
Incorporating drones into the construction project workflow ensures that aerial imagery of one kind or another can be utilized and shared to keep everyone in the loop. Inspections can be organized and automated, with updates digitized and sent to the cloud.
On large-scale projects, site visibility goes hand in hand with progress tracking, which brings us to…
Not tracking progress properly
Progress tracking is more than a box-ticking exercise. It’s one of the only tangible ways to measure the efficacy of your methodology and make informed predictions for the future.
Unless you properly track a project from the start, it’s almost impossible to accurately plan ahead, whether you’re finalizing budgets or estimating the date of key project milestones.
Having drones on-site gives you the ability to keep tabs on progress and make smarter decisions.
Regular mapping missions can build a day by day or week by week picture of a project as it develops; time-lapse videos can be shared with stakeholders or prospective clients, and practical information, such as stockpile measurements, can be used to ensure decisions made by management align with the reality on the ground.
Putting workers in harm’s way
A construction site is a dynamic and potentially dangerous working environment. It’s almost impossible to remove every element of risk, but one thing managers can do is put processes in place to minimize the chances of employees getting hurt.
One of those safety measures should be using drones to carry out inspections where possible. Many construction injuries occur as a result of simple but dangerous tasks: scaling a roof or climbing some scaffolding.
Whenever there’s a hard to reach or dangerous location that requires a visual inspection, drones offer an alternative that doesn’t involve putting humans in harm’s way.
This leads to the last on our list of construction mistakes...
Not modernizing manual processes
The running theme across all of these common construction errors is clear. Applying outdated methods is going to yield outdates results, whether you’re spending days manually surveying a site before a bid or sending workers up a ladder to inspect a roof.
Using drones not only prevents building mistakes but can also save time, cut costs, keep workers safe, and generate better results than traditional data gathering methods.
Take a look at our drone construction services for more information on how drone technology can support your architecture, engineering or construction project.
