Ever heard the story about the blind men and an elephant? It is a story of a group of blind men who have never encountered an elephant before, and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it in different places. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences, which may be equally true.
Everyone within the construction industry has a limited, subjective view or opinion of why a project is delayed. The producer says he didn’t receive the right amount of aggregates and had to wait until more supplies were sent. The aggregates company says they didn’t get the purchase order in time. The hauler says his truck broke down or went to the wrong location. The project contractor says he lost his paperwork and made two orders of the same amount of cement, when he should have just made one order.
Each of these stakeholders in the construction supply chain – from bulk materials suppliers, to ready mix producers, to bulk materials haulers, to building contractors – has a different perspective on what went wrong in the project timeline. Each could be at fault or blame each other, but what does that do to speed up the project? The answer is nothing!
Now, with the Command Alkon Platform, everyone involved on the project connected to the collaborative network has the same single version of the truth. Supporting shared digital transformation goals, the platform ensures stakeholders are all working with the same trustworthy information; creating transparency and removing inefficiencies.
Critical materials like aggregates arrive in the right quantity at the right time for ready mix producers to make the concrete, which is then delivered on time, in the right quality via haulers to the construction jobsite. Paperwork is eliminated so it can’t be lost. Automated workflows between stakeholders means orders arrive on time and in full.
With a collaborative network, no longer are the blind leading the blind. CONNEX-enabled companies have real-time visibility to experience better collaboration and communication to keep projects on time and on budget.
