Future-Proof Your Business Through Digitization of Your Contractor Workforce

February 26, 2021

Carolyn Alex

digitization contractor workforce With the current state of the economy, many businesses are still in survival mode working to cut costs, eliminate unnecessary spend, and working to regain profitability. While many industries thus far have weathered strong through the storm, consideration must be made to adopt digital solutions to increase transparency, cost controls, and streamline business processes.

Into the Future: 2021 & Beyond

In the first month of 2021, many companies across industries are assessing their retrospectives with future initiatives. The year 2020 and the onset of the global pandemic prompted contingency plans across businesses worldwide. A cumulative approach to goal setting for the new year is to consider industry trends, and what challenges the industry faces separate (and considering) the pandemic’s influence on the economy and workforce. The ever-evolving digital demand and the coming of Industry 4.0 (Fourth Industrial Revolution) brings further advanced technology to the mining industry.

To prepare your business for the future, the time is now to adopt digital tools like the TRACK® Platform from MCi to reduce a company’s manual processes and promote more accurate spending and allocating of time and resources.

For the sake of continued process improvement and to future-proof your business, take advantage of digital tools to reduce costs and make contractor management more efficient, more transparent. In doing so, companies reduce bottlenecks, more accurately control spending, and increase successful project results.

Standard Management Software Won’t Cut It

Standard contractor management software only tackles a few of the heavy industry’s administrative challenges. Most products don’t offer all the features you need for an all-in-one digitized experience. The purpose of digitizing your business is to streamline, not to complicate an already intricate course of management with thousands of contractors.

The right contractor management software can help you toward your goals for improving processes and better managing costs. TRACK® Platform is an all-in-one software solution that automatically calculates the exact cost of each contractor, whereas other platforms rely on time input from contractors that can't easily be validated. As a result, TRACK® helps contractor management companies by reducing overpayments and preventing inaccuracies.

TRACK’s Key Features:

TRACK Platform is an all-in-one contractor management software that gives companies real-time visibility into the skill mix on-site and enables owners to properly assess talent, reducing delays and setbacks due to the wrong skill mix. Such insight is paramount to managing resources, as not just skill mix, but availability and scheduling could become increasingly tricky as the pandemic continues and possible economic downturn looms.

Streamline business processes – eliminates manual timesheet processing, invoice handling, and post-invoice reconciliation.
Automated & accurate invoices – automatically calculates contractually accurate labor, rates, and schedules to achieve net time.
Manpower visibility – gain real-time workforce visibility, fatigue status, and time, on-site.
Manage spend – delivers daily visibility and control of contractor costs at the po and wo level, down to the individual.

Future-Proofing – Saving on Costs Too

Powerful digital tools like the TRACK® Platform from MCi can help you easily automate your processes in an all-in-one solution that eliminates the need for manual spreadsheets to control, manage, and reduce contractor labor, equipment, and materials spend. With real-time visibility into daily operations and built-in contract compliance, TRACK helps streamlines business processes that increase productivity and reduce cost. Using TRACK every day can help companies achieve up to 10-15% in annual savings while tightening controls over labor activity. Real-time reporting of activity, including spend, gives your company fast and accurate information to proactively manage routine maintenance and large projects. Allow MCi’s TRACK Platform to help you stay ahead of economic hurdles, and to propel your business into the future digitally.

Mining Industries in 2020: Retrospective

When we look back at 2020, we can consider the pandemic’s effect on productivity and cost (i.e., lockdowns, contractor availability, health and safety.) The mining industry remained solid, but not without noticeable and reoccurring pain points, such as proper skill mix, manpower visibility, and staying within budget. According to McKinsey & Company, four out of five mining projects are completed late or over budget, by an average of 43%.

While other industries are braced for potential economic crisis, the mining industry has everything to gain from investing in tools to future-proof their businesses.

Overview of MCi’s Study of 100 Mining Companies

Management Controls (MCi) set out to better understand the highs and lows of contractor management by surveying 100 mining companies. In analyzing our survey data, MCi found that:

60% of surveyed companies reported projects being behind schedule and over budget
Enterprise-wide contractor spend is upward of $1 billion per year for 11% of companies
Nearly 90% of respondents are using manual spreadsheets to track project metrics such as completion, productivity, budget, and timeliness

If a majority of mining companies have recently reported that contractor management is costing them so much time and money, then the next approach to overcoming these pain points is to digitize the model – and not just with any contractor management software – the right one for your business.

TRACK® Platform is contractor management software that empowers companies with a far more efficient means for tracking the costs of labor, equipment and materials. Today, at over 300 sites worldwide, our platform processes more than $50 billion annually in contractor spending. TRACK’s proprietary real time insights, increased transparency and time saving automation, saves our customers an average of 15% on total contractor spend each year. That’s a savings to aspire to.

TRACK also offers real-time fatigue management and alerting. Fatigue is tied to the individual, so TRACK can tell owners when a individual has been on site more days that their fatigue thresholds (typically 14 days in a row) and it can tell owners when a resource has been on site for more than 12 hours in a day.