5 Reasons Why Successful Landscape Companies Use Project Management Software
There’s a lot that goes into running and scaling your landscaping company, and much of it depends on how well your company can manage its projects. Project management ensures that you can reach your businesses targets and objectives by ensuring that tasks are completed in an efficient manner, and operational functions are all tracked.
While you can manage projects ad hoc, it’s much more effective to use a project management software. Many successful landscape companies use project management software for their business, as it allows you to properly report the scope of the project, assign resources accordingly to cut back on wasted time and materials, and it tracks all of your landscaping business costs. Instead of handling your project management manually, software allows you to automatically do all project management functions through one tool.
Project management software is an integral tool in being able to run a successful company for many reasons. Here are five main reasons project management software for your landscaping company can help you be more successful:
Organization of jobs
A messy process means that money can be slipping away from your business without you even realizing it. It’s important to have all of your estimates, work orders, and service costing in order in one place so that every single thing can be tracked and accounted for.
When you can combine a variety of different services and work orders within the same project, you can see actual costs versus plan and profitability by project, in real-time. That means you can view a project any time you’d like and see where you’re at in order to adjust things accordingly if they require. Maybe you have to send out more crew to finish a job that’s falling behind, or you estimated you needed more materials than you actually did. Once you realize that, you can cancel an order you had planned or schedule an employee for a shift.
The more organized you are, the better your projects stay on track and you can better optimize spend.
Preparation for inventory & material
Project management allows teams to pre-plan inventory and material costs when you actually need them, rather than guessing and ordering in advance. By ordering in advance, you are not only taking up cash flow that can be reallocated to more pressing functions, but you are also opening yourself up for losses when you have wasted materials.
With project management software, you can stop ordering material months in advance and with this, reduce your current cash flow. The bottom line is this: if you’re sitting on inventory, it means that you are sitting on cash. That money could have been better spent on other resources, such as marketing and sales efforts to win you new business. You absolutely do not want to have more inventory and material than you need, and you also don’t want to suddenly be without.
Project management software allows you to have the line of sight needed to order what you need, when you need it.
Efficiency scheduling
Scheduling is key to making sure that you crew finishes jobs in a timely manner, and it also ensures that staff time isn’t wasted. If jobs go overtime, that’s money out of your pocket. The same goes for if there are too many employees to one job site when they could be elsewhere – it’s money spent that didn’t need to be spent!
With project management, you can schedule concurrent and consecutive crews to optimize the time on site during each work order so that there's no unnecessary overlap or waste of labor hours. Your crews need to be managed properly if you’re going to scale and grow your business.
Dive into reporting
Measurement and reporting is the backbone of any successful company, and landscaping companies are no exception. Solid project management software will include important business intelligence reports, with visuals, graphs, and charts so you can easily see if you’re on track with timelines, project costs, and profits.
Being able to pull a report in real-time allows you as a business owner or manager to make adjustments on the spot to better optimize spending, or change the course of a job in order to make the most profits. Reports are also handy for quarterly or yearly business reviews, when you want to look over certain projects, teams, employees, ordering, and balance sheets.
Knowledge is power when it comes to running a successful landscaping business, so the more data and business intelligence you have at hand, and the easier it is to digest, the better.
Customer relationship management
Customer relationships should be your number one priority, and project management helps your business be customer focused by allowing you to quickly handle customer requests of any nature. For one, customers want to know where you are in the project at any time. With project management software, you have access to see and quickly share what's scheduled, what's completed, and what's still schedule pending.
Being able to quickly access project information is a huge time saver and relationship builder with your residential or commercial client. When you can provide transparent updates in a few simple clicks, they can trust that your landscaping business is organized, knows what they’re doing, and can rest assured that your company has it covered.
You can also quickly access everything to do with one project, so you can pull up the estimate, order forms, who was working the job when, and any other information about the job so you can problem solve a lot quicker. If an issue arises, time is crucial to customer satisfaction. Project management software will allow you to easily pull up any information you need about a job, and handle it accordingly.
Project management software will allow you to better run your business
Simply put, project management software allows you to streamline all of your business operations into a system where you can make quick updates, run reports, and have a full view of every single project. This not only saves you time, but it allows you to make informed decisions every single day. It also assists your team with project planning, monitoring, and helps everyone plan for resourcing, material ordering, and customer relationship management.
Efficiencies across the company mean that your revenue streams are making you money, and your jobs are optimized and not costing you any losses. It also means that you can focus on things that matter more, such as driving new business, managing and growing your team, and building a stronger company rather than running timely orders, hand making a schedule, and other functions that take a lot of company time and resources.
A successful company is one that has access to quick decision making and data, and project management software will allow your landscaping business to have access to everything you need to ensure the success of your business.
Arborgold Landscaping Software is a premier choice for project management for many leading landscaping companies in North America. Try a demo today, and see how project management can help your company become even more successful.
