Change is the most critical factor in any business and in construction, change happens on the project level, on the organizational level and on the industry level. What the economic collapse in 2008 showed us that small changes – changes in regulation, changes in the way banks do business – can cascade and have a serious negative effect on seemingly disconnected areas. The success of many construction companies in the next few years will depend heavily on their ability to manage change. We have seen organizations fail in the last few years, or be lead to the edge of destruction, by their inability to manage change, to respond quickly to changes in the market and understand what the changes are. In order to be successful in this new market, construction companies need to embrace the concept of futureproofing – implementing business processes and technology to handle change.
Prediction is a difficult business, especially when it's about the future. In 1999 CMiC released the first fully integrated, web-based, software system specifically designed for the construction industry. In working with our customers, some of the largest and most technologically progressive AEC/O companies in North America, and dissecting some market trends, we realized that we needed to grow the functionality of our system, and over the last 10 years we added collaboration, CRM and imaging and workflow capabilities. As a company we could see the change coming, that companies would want to have these functions on the same database as their financial and project management functions. We futureproofed our product.
As our client base began to grow, we repeatedly heard that users wanted the ability to customize the solution – rename a field on a screen, change the placement of a field, even build their own screens – and CMiC software was flexible enough to handle any changes. However, we recognized that our customers, particularly the more technologically sophisticated, wanted to have the power to customize the solution in their own hands. This concept matched a trend that was happening outside of construction software – the introduction of on-demand TV, MP3 players and the ability to build your own website through click and drag templates – signalled a change in the way people interacted with technology. People didn't want technology to tell them what to do; they wanted to be able to tell technology what to do.
CMiC brought this concept to construction software with the introduction of CMiC Open Enterprise and the CMiC Experience Management suite of products. CMiC Tools allows users to customize their own screens through a simple interface, changing the way the system looks and feels, without massive amounts of programming. Outside systems, such as a BIM application or an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program can be integrated into the enterprise with XML adapters.
What CMiC now offers is the ability to futureproof your organization by giving you the power to customize the solution to match your organization's needs. What the industry has learned over the past few years that in order to survive, companies need to be lean, agile and have processes in place that allow for decisions to make quickly. Your organization needs to be futureproofed so it can handle any changes, especially the unexpected ones, and CMiC Open Enterprise v10 is the best construction software package available to help you do that and take you through the next phase of the market.
For more information on how CMiC Open Enterprise v10 can benefit your company, please contact us.
For more information on CMiC Open Enterprise v10, please visit here.
