GoReport work extensively across the commercial and residential surveying sectors. There are many common challenges that surveyors face in both sectors in their pursuit to adopt technology to realise true business benefit.
In this article, we will focus on some specific areas where digital transformation is so important to those in the Commercial sector.
Commercial surveying covers a wider range of disciplines and specialisms. From Condition based Surveying, Planned Preventative Maintenance, Due Diligence and Dilapidations through Fire Risk Assessments, Access Audits, Asbestos Management and Health & Safety to name just a few.
For the purposes of this article, we are focusing on aspects that affect all surveyors and inspectors while performing work on behalf of commercial entities. Customer expectations vary between sectors from the type of information or report they receive to the level of service delivered.
In residential surveying, the nature of the engagement means that the client can be a singular entity (the homeowner) and may not be experienced in or have knowledge of the subject matter to any great extent. They are often looking specifically for understanding of what resolves an issue, for example in the case of a structural or damp issue the client will want to know what protects or guides the value of their property.
In the commercial world, the client is a business with a wide range of strategic, legal and compliance challenges to be met that are always evolving and introduce multiple stakeholders into the process. This alone creates a need for the surveyor to be flexible and adaptive to their client’s needs and hence, whatever solution they choose must support this ability.
The changing business landscape and the ever present need to react quickly inevitably means that commercial surveyors have to maximise their efficiency to ensure they are responsive to their client’s timetable. As commercial clients are engaging specialist surveyors to deliver insight for decision making or action, this efficiency must be present in all aspects of the engagement from preparation, through data collection and analysis of findings.
This is particularly important when delivering across portfolios of work where the efficient aggregation and analysis of data is vital in order to provide appropriate time for consideration, guidance and advice. In addition, the nature of delivering across large individual assets, hospitals, factories for example, and/or across multiple assets in a portfolio means that consistency of approach in data collection across different individual surveyors is crucial.
There are many small or sole traders providing specialist commercial surveying solutions. However, for large portfolio work, larger surveying practices are often engaged due to the resource capability and reach to satisfy the volume of work and associated timeline requirements. Alongside the need to ensure consistency of approach across individual surveyors, the need for Quality Assurance and visibility of activity across surveyors of different experience levels also becomes very important.
With so many surveying practices now beginning to adopt digital solutions, it is impossible to remain competitive without implementing an effective digital corporate capability.
GoReport clients have digitally transformed their businesses with adoption of GoReport and have experienced and overcome the challenges we discussed in this article. You can find out more here or read on to the next article ➡️
