In the daily tasks of construction, engineering and professional services, companies must deal with change orders to effectively manage costs, revenue and forecasting on a project.
Whether that change order is initiated in the field, or a proposed change order, someone needs to take note of the change, inform the sales representative about this change and have the project manager review and approve the change order. Adding to the fact that change orders are initiated on the project site, how do we effectively track that change order and guarantee payment later? It can be challenging, especially where structured and unstructured information circulate through different people and systems.
Today, Dynamics 365 Power Platform offers the capacity to create a personalised business application. Microsoft Dynamics 365 proposes a Powerful Platform which allows unification of different system to make it a business application driven by the user experience. In this article, we will discuss how we manage change orders with the powerful Dynamics 365 Platform. We will present how the user can create a change order with a mobile phone or tablet, send that change order for approval to the project manager, and finally have that change order sent to the customer for approval.
1. Change Order Creation:
When change orders are initiated, it is usually between the foreman, the specialist or the engineer on site with the customer, whether that is the owner, general contractor or someone else. To be able to create the change order, we need to be able to grab the information in multiple ways:
- Define the scope of work
- Take pictures of the job site and proposed scope of work
- Create high level estimate while being able to select products from a catalogue
- Recording your notes, measurements and other information
- Capturing signatures
Dynamics 365 has the capability to capture multimedia on mobile phones or tablets. It also allows to be easily personalised to the requirements, user experience and flow of the information.
Once the change order is created, the user in the field can send the change order to the project manager through his phone or tablet.
2. Project Manager Review:
Once the project manager receives the information regarding the change order, the process of preparing and verifying the change order can begin.
The challenges that SIS encounters with every customer is that the project manager/estimator uses different industry specific estimating software in their industry, just to name of few: McCormick, Measure Square, Quick Bid, TurboBid, QuoteSoft Duct, FastEST.
The challenge is to be able to save time by sending information about the change order back and forth. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Power Platform can communicate with most of those system directly which allow the project manager/estimator to quickly create the estimate.
Once the estimation is completed, it can be sent to the customer for approval.
3. Have the customer approve the change order:
Once the project manager receives the information regarding the change order, the process of preparing and verifying the change order can begin.
The challenges that SIS encounters with every customer is that the project manager/estimator uses different industry specific estimating software in their industry, just to name of few: McCormick, Measure Square, Quick Bid, TurboBid, QuoteSoft Duct, FastEST.
The challenge is to be able to save time by sending information about the change order back and forth. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Power Platform can communicate with most of those system directly which allow the project manager/estimator to quickly create the estimate.
Once the estimation is completed, it can be sent to the customer for approval.
Conclusion
To summarise, Microsoft Dynamics 365 powers come from its capabilities to unify different system and adapt easily to business processes. Companies need to think of the business application they need to perform on while on the job. With time, customers can adopt additional capabilities with ease. Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform allows companies to reinvent productivity.
