Procore introduces Custom and Configurable Fields to further simplify your workflows

Modern construction is increasingly complex—to say the least. Construction process digitization has vastly improved outcomes, but construction workflows can still hide inefficiencies. The accrued financial impact of these inefficiencies is significant. The Reinventing Construction: A Route to Higher Productivity report from McKinsey Global Institute explains the disparity in stark terms, suggesting that an alignment of construction’s productivity with that of other sectors would spike the industry’s value by $1.6 trillion.

How to most effectively address construction’s broken processes? Mining project data to find and plug efficiency gaps is one sure way forward. Digital construction management technologies are now so effective at effortlessly archiving and formatting project data, that the sheer volume of data becomes daunting. According to FMI’s Big Data = Big Questions for the Engineering and Construction Industry 2018, of the hundreds of terabytes of aggregate project data being mined from active projects, some 96% of it goes unused in the engineering and construction industry.

Why?

Data silos, unstructured data (photographs, paper reports), and the plain difficulty of managing the data will often lead to a “scratch the surface” approach that fails to optimize the analytical tools at hand. Procore’s new Custom and Configurable Fields feature allows for just this level of end-user data management–simplifying data entry, while increasing accuracy and efficiency.

Simplify workflows

Procore customers now have the flexibility to easily configure and add fields on page forms. This functionality helps these customers’ end users in the field collect only applicable data. If a form field is critical for your business, simply mark it as required—and likewise strike those fields that offer no project benefit. These custom-configured fields are then reflected on both Procore’s web app and mobile applications. Your project team will focus on project-relevant data intake, while avoiding needless, time-consuming data entry.

Peter Zafros, Director of Technology at EYA LLC put it best when he said, “No longer is enterprise software trying to force the standardization of expensive and overly-detailed protocols. Procore configures to our needs and our way of working, not the other way around.”

Configurable and Consistent

Customers can also create new custom fields to track nonstandard project items and business-specific information. Once a new custom field is created, Procore automatically makes the new field available on all tools where custom fields are supported. This allows companies to capture consistent data across projects and improve data integrity.

Custom Fields and Contextual Search at Full Project Scale

Users can now search custom fields associated with our Quality & Safety tools. With Procore Search it’s easier and faster than ever to find information. Users can now search across the entire project for custom field values—be they numbers, plain text, or rich text—and be taken to the item directly.

Procore Search gives users the ability to search from one single location across all tools and frees up time for them to do more meaningful tasks. Search results include not only records from Procore tools, but references found inside documents and attachments, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, CSV, and PDF files.

“This is a game changer in terms of how we search for and find information throughout the different elements of our project management tools,” said Matt Redman, Director of Technical Operations, Del Amo Construction. “It brings contextual search to a full project scale, and has allowed our people to find and connect information that would have been extremely difficult to correlate before. In construction, making those connections quickly and efficiently can add up to real savings in the long run.”

Better Reporting

The Procore platform is redefining how data is recorded and how insights are surfaced, allowing for better reporting, so you can make better business decisions. Unlike non-integrated, siloed systems that don’t talk to each other, Procore tracks data across all projects, allowing customers to broadly search throughout the whole of the Procore platform’s ecosystem–from one single search location. More importantly, customers have the ability to customize and tighten Procore fields to collect only that project data critical to the business. Users can leverage custom fields to strengthen the depth in data collection and reporting, all custom fields can show up in custom reporting. Procore customers can establish new data points to gain unique depth and visibility into project performance, while saving time and working the way they want to.

To learn more about Procore’s latest configurable and custom fields features, watch this webinar.