How to effectively manage a small construction company?

Question

CRM

Hello everyone
There is a small construction company with big ambitions. Management leaves much to be desired. Everything is on the knee, all the documents are unclear where, who owes whom, it is not clear who is responsible for what and when.
Where do you need to start to make management and accounting in the company quick and understandable? What is the process logic? What services or programs will allow you to collect everything in one place - accounting for money, materials, mutual settlements, documents, + a common environment for employees to communicate???
And all this is not for an accountant or a financier, but for an ordinary rather smart person !!!

Answer 1

As a PTO engineer of a construction and installation company, I will express my IMHO, according to my personal experience and how your post was understood by me: You
need to start first of all with the concept and understanding and formalization of your desires into some kind of TK. Your question has deeper roots than you voice on the technical forum. The answer to the question can be briefly divided into 2 branches:
1.1 Here you need to start with a competent System Administrator and investments in working PCs, Network, Server and Peripherals. Here it is also necessary to accustom employees to work with the server and store up to drafts only in specially designated directories (network folders). The director at my first job said that the most valuable thing in his company is hard drives with data (projects, accounting, documents, estimates, etc., etc.)
1.1.1 As a rule, a folder structure is created on the server (which in turn has an information security system and a necessarily working data backup system - a backup) for Contracts, Departments, documents and letters. If desired, you can oblige people to fill out additional papers and registration tables, approval sheets and keep records of them. It is perceived, as a rule, negatively by employees, for various reasons, incl. and objective.
Then 1C is configured, its users, and through the credentials, both primary accounting documentation is entered into the database, and standard papers are issued, such as s / f, invoices, as well as the expenditure of budgets, financing items, cash receipts under contracts, receipts and write-off of materials, etc. etc.
As a rule, estimators (VET) are the link between those who serve the cash flows (accounting), those from whom the money comes (Customers) and those who directly earn it (line staff and workers).
In this place is the personnel structure of the company and its specialists. Everything is simple here - normative literature and MS Office.
1.2 The software used in construction has long been known and is a kind of gentleman's set like:
MS Windows (operating system - usually for everyone, but there are Linux implementations, but extremely rare), 1C (for finance), MS Office (for drafting and editing documents), engineering systems (Compass-3D, AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, SCAD, Grand-Smeta, etc., etc.), bases of regulatory documents (Guarantor, Consultant, Norma CS, etc., etc.) as a rule, System Administrators for your, excuse me, account (software costs money).
1.3 Inventing the wheel and other innovations, some of which make life very easy, namely, as a rule, the introduction of additional software products, both free and paid and written / finalized to order, for example, what I have only come across:
- installation of various wiki engines to organize a corporate knowledge base (encyclopedia);
- the introduction of various kinds of CMS, in which managers give formal orders to subordinates and monitor the statistics of task completion, as well as the workload of employees (meets furious hidden resistance from office workers);
- the invention of the bicycle by programming Excel/Acsess forms to create electronic tools for work foremen (foremen/foremen) for their reporting and as-built documentation (Acts, all kinds of pile logs, monolithic work logs, etc., Incoming control log, monthly daily schedules linked to contracts and weekly reporting on them with reference to electronic timesheets);
Here again, the question can be divided into two parts:
2.1.1 These are the specialists who single out routine processes from emergency work and formalize them. These are QMS specialists, standardization, labor protection, lawyers, etc., i.е. all those who can compose, formalize and change the structure of the company (naturally in coordination with top management), those who, together with the heads of departments / areas and management, monitor its illnesses, make adjustments, and also do not forget to introduce changes / innovations and cancel outdated principles . These are various kinds of instructions, orders, charters, labor and collective contracts, standards, etc.
2.1.2 Separately, I would like to say about the motivation of employees and the psychological climate in the team. I will be brief: the processes left to chance lead to the fact that hidden conflicts result in motivation for the departure of valuable specialists. And at the same time, I have seen and know situations where people valued relationships and pulled out an enterprise in difficult times. People appreciate Attention, no matter how trite it may sound.
2.2.1 Here we can and should talk about training both employees and management, not only in accordance with the regulations and standards for self-regulatory organizations, but also refresher courses, additional education is possible, writing out periodicals and even organizing automatic distribution for employees based on open and closed sources according to news and developments in the industry, according to their specialty.
PS.
You want a quick and understandable workflow, but these are relative characteristics, not qualitative ones, because It is not clear what exactly you are investing in them. I knew organizations where the entire report between the majority of employees and the accounting department was reduced to filling out a time sheet by an employee / foreman with the calculation of wages according to the tariff. Now I work in an organization where any piece of paper must be certified and entered into the journals for maintaining and accounting for these pieces of paper. And, judging by the innovations, the management believes that this is not the limit.
In order to understand the processes, it is necessary to know how a piece of paper wants, how orders are given and orders are carried out, to get at least an overview of the work of the employees who draw up these papers / perform work, because management problems, as my experience suggests, lie in the details that remain behind the written text, for example, not everyone can withstand the frantic pace of work, others manage to unleash, by virtue of their nature, intrigues, others fight like fish on ice against the structures of cunning general contractors, the fourth share work and responsibilities, for example, in my current organization of accounts and invoices , the write-off of materials is carried out by the PTO, and also maintains and draws up a budget for the development of the PC park in the office ... i.e. There are both subjective and objective reasons.
IMHO, if you do not fully understand or there is no competent employee nearby who you can rely on as a specialist in matters of structure, forums and sites will not give a clear answer to this question.

Answer 2

What are the names of specialists who are engaged in building a structure, workflow? Can you recommend a forum where I can talk about my problem?

Answer 3

An interesting task!
As a rule, this is done by the directors of the company with the involvement of business process specialists and IT specialists to set up 1C.
I would not be as pessimistic as in the treatise published above. If the company is small and more or less modern, and you have enough authority, you can deploy everything much cheaper and easier using cloud technologies.
Mail and Documents - Google Apps (gmail for businesses) + Google Docs + Podio.com as intranet. Later, with the help of additional services in the podio, automation is performed. For salespeople, you can look for a separate CRM that will be more tailored to your needs, and integrate it with podio via API.
As an alternative, Bitrix24 or Megaplan can replace all this, but they are less customizable than Podio.
It would be interesting to participate in such a project to expand experience. I have a small company, but with remote employees, we work with podio + several additional services. If interested, write "hello" to [email protected]

Answer 4

Hello.
First, specify what function do you perform (contract, customer or general contractor)?
Secondly, specify what exactly you do not have in the organization. Give an example of a "bad" project so that process "jambs" clearly follow from it.
Thirdly, how many people are you in the company?
You have been given a lot of solutions. My opinion - it's not about automation. Start with project management technologies: appoint construction project managers, send people to study.
I'm waiting for your answers.