Step 4. Construction company task customization

Materials acquiring

Specificity of construction company may require proper customization of tasks in VIP Task Manager. For example it might be helpful to work with numbers (prices, quantity), because there are a lot of tasks that require not only time tracking, but money expenses tracking as well. For such purpose VIP Task Manager allows to create numeric custom fields and calculated custom fields with formulas.

To construct a house it is necessary to acquire building materials. Initially, an estimator makes a list of construction materials that are required for a project and a purchase manager gets a task to find the most advantageous suppliers (to find the lowest prices for certain quantity of materials ). For this purpose it is possible to create list of building materials in a form of " to do list " , where each task will represent certain kind of material and will be shown required quantity of this material and estimated price of this quantity.

There is a special folder in each project, which is dedicated to construction materials purchasing, this folder contains such purchasing" to do list " assigned to purchase manager. Purchasing manager filters his/her task list by folder "Building materials acquiring" and starts suppliers search. For example the first task is to purchase 1000 of bricks. Often the estimated and real price may be different because of many reasons (purchase manager can find a supplier that offers lower price than estimated, or only suppliers with higher price are available at the moment). So when purchasing manager finds a supplier that offers a price different from estimated he enters actual price into special field of the task and the difference between estimated and actual price will be calculated automatically, but anyway project manager will be immediately aware about price of building materials and will be able to make proper changes into budget.

Step 5. Planning construction company tasks