A common language
A major distinction from nearly all other construction companies.
Achieving integration depended on the key step of creating a single, uniform way of digitally describing every piece of information that requires identification, description, tracking and use throughout the project life cycle and our business. It was an ambitious vision: commonly describing every individual input – labour, materials, tools, services – plus larger pieces like construction elements and work results, throughout our system. This meant developing thousands of individual descriptors that would show up the same way in every database, department, job function, software application and report.
Graham achieved exactly that: every individual item that we do, purchase, need or use has the same code in every application. We created "a common language" within our company – and it made data integration possible. It means information seamlessly bridges the different parts of our business and the many specialized work applications that our people use. It's a key distinction from the methodology of nearly all other construction companies.
By using common work descriptors, we overcame the different ways of talking – different informational "dialects" – in our numerous specializations. It means estimators can talk easily and effectively to engineers, to project managers, and so on. Achieving a common language encourages collaboration and communication across the specialties and hence through the phases of the project life cycle. It means we can communicate not only within a project, but across projects, departments, locations and time.
Using a common language also creates synergies with unrelated projects and clients. Most buildings have common elements – such as foundations – and information learned on one project in one place can be applied efficiently to an unrelated project for a different client in a different place. We can apply the things we learn in building an office tower in one place, for example, to save time and money or improve quality to a water treatment plant or highway overpass in another. If you're starting a project today, it means your project will benefit from the things we learned on previous projects.
The common language and data integration achieved by Toolbox help to create a learning culture, making us stronger and helping Graham to continually improve and enhance its performance on behalf of its clients.
