Construction is one of the largest industries in the world and continues to be a key driver of economic growth. Still, the industry is continuously challenged to improve its transparency and productivity. From small-scale projects to larger sites, project managers are trusted to act as gatekeepers between onsite workers and the top management team; nevertheless, critical information can still fall through the cracks.
A large, specialized commercial and industrial services provider in South Africa began to notice that the system it had in place to manage necessary paperwork for job sites was inefficient. Employee paperwork and medical records were either inaccurate, missing, out of date or even forged, leaving a large amount of risk on the table for the company.
The company's biggest concern on a daily basis is safety, and if something happens or almost happens with personnel onsite, the company would be responsible. From a risk perspective, if the training and safety paperwork is missing or a person’s medical has expired, the company is exposed and to blame.
With labor making up nearly 50% of the company’s project costs, it needed to find a more accurate solution for recording workers’ hours. There were gaping holes in the way manual timesheets were being handled, adding unnecessary project costs into the mix. It was paramount to ensure more efficient and auditable record keeping, immutable proof that onsite compliance processes were achieved, and that workers were following the appropriate procedures.
The company decided to embrace the opportunities presented by emerging technologies and teamed up with IBM Business Partner DoshEx, a South African technology company, to explore its options for a modern digitized working environment. The organization focuses on industry problems that could use distributed ledger technology to solve inefficiencies within a business. DoshEx CEO Alex de Bruyn and his team quickly saw the potential for blockchain technology to help this company fix onsite issues with both time and employee management and reduce human-error.
“I believe how we use blockchain makes a more efficient and trusted system for construction businesses. We focused on making this service provider’s business more efficient across all of its projects,” de Bruyn says.