Buildr, the construction industry’s first all-in-one client relationship management (CRM) and workforce planning solution, today announced new features that continue to position Buildr as the most collaborative and user-friendly preconstruction platform for general contractors on the market.

“Due to advances in contech, more calculated adoption, and heightened communication between builders and their clients, the preconstruction phase is expediting,” said Buildr co-founder Edward Gonzalez. “The GCs that are able to decisively prioritize the right jobs, and staffing those jobs with the right people, are the ones that will rise above their competition. 

“Removing the divide within preconstruction and consolidating everything into one workflow was a no-brainer. A world where business development and operations inform each other simply looks like workforce planning built inside your CRM—it’ll very soon be the industry standard.”

Construction’s skilled labor shortage leaves little room to let tactical workforce planning become an afterthought. With updates to workforce forecasting, general contractors can benefit from prospectively staffing jobs that have yet to be won, drastically improving their ability to make impactful business decisions. A new Map view allows heightened clarity on logistical workforce planning that takes into account employee commute. An updated dashboard and increased workforce visibility lets GCs strive for 100% utilization—not shorting their bottom line by leaving team members on the bench while also not over-utilizing their team and burning anyone out.

Along with optimizing the preconstruction process for GCs, Buildr’s mobile app and offline functionality ensures vital opportunity data gets logged whether a member of your team is out on a job site or up a creek without a signal. New Workforce Certifications allow GCs to correctly staff their projects and ensure their teams’ certifications are up-to-date with notifications for upcoming expiries.

“We have our entire executive and preconstruction teams in Buildr,” said Jeffrey Forrest Jr., Director of Business Development at WPC. “It’s a living document that stays updated at all times that everyone has pulled up in meetings. 

We didn’t have visibility into when teams were becoming available as new jobs were starting. Buildr's workforce planning now allows [us] to filter through opportunities and determine which will make the most sense for different sections of our pipeline. Once a project approaches higher win probability and project executives and operations start to get involved, they can easily pull up project info and shoot around questions. Our internal communications are 5x more efficient which has improved our ability to collaborate.”

To learn more about Buildr’s thought process behind folding workforce planning into CRM functionality, check out their blog.