Professional general contractors face many challenges and manage several variables during construction projects.

One of the biggest challenges they face is unfavorable weather conditions. During the colder months construction can become a challenging thing to continue. Keeping up a good pace on the project becomes impossible. There is a need for proactive planning and extra vigilance to make up for delays and other problems caused by cold weather.

A General Contractor Manages Delays

Cold weather forces workers to stop operations at a construction site. This delays your project and makes it cost more than expected. The most critical challenge is to manage the financial matters needed to cover these delays.

Experienced general contractors ensure preplanning and covering this aspect in budgeting right from the start. You might think that snowfalls, blizzards, and other cold-weather elements are unpredictable to a great extent and yes you are right. So to save yourself from problems, it is vital that you plan everything before.

Planning ahead will allow your general contractors to take the necessary steps to minimize the effects of delays caused by the weather.

Frozen Ground

Snowfall makes the ground hard to prepare and manage for constructing your project. Cutting the ground becomes problematic due to snow. This increases the time required to prepare the ground for your project to stand tall. The ground becomes hard to dig as well due to the snow and extremely cold weather.

Thawing Effect

During winter, when your general contractor lays down concrete, it may look perfect. But as the ice on top of the concrete starts to thaw out during spring your concrete will start to crack. Consequently, your concrete may shift or move from its original place.

Even if this movement is trivial, the entire building’s damage may still be massive.

Managing Fuel Cost

During winter, construction sites consume more fuel than in summer. One of the reasons for this is that during the winter heaters are used excessively to warm the site and to keep workers working at an average pace. There has to be a set budget before you start your project. Apart from heaters, other equipment like mixers also need more fuel to deal with cold construction materials.

Removing Snow From Site Area

When there is snow everywhere on a construction site, there are risks. Risks of falling, slipping, and damage to construction material. Snow removal is an inevitable thing to keep your construction site functional. General construction experts must be able to dedicate a separate workforce and the time required to do this job.

Snow removal is a repetitive process that is not supposed to hinder the construction process. Therefore, the timing and frequency of removing snow are crucial aspects to consider.

Little Tasks Become Time Consuming

Due to heavy winter clothing, laborers take more time to deal with tasks such as taking a map or design out of their pocket. First they will need to remove their gloves, the outer layer of their winter clothing, then their PPE, and then in there somewhere lies that pocket from which they will need to take out something.

Several invisible instances of time wastage come into play during winter. This time wastage is hard to manage and control. The only way is to understand and include a margin of such little things that the winter weather demands.

Taurus Projects ensure quality work with continuity regardless of unfavorable weather conditions. Our team of professionals takes everything into account before starting a project. To get in touch with us, click here.

For any construction site project to begin, a range of pre-requisite facilities is required to execute construction protocols and procedures smoothly. These include temporary electrical and mechanical services. A construction manager must ensure their provision through proper planning well before commencing the actual project. This will allow for the successful completion of the project without any delays.

Let’s discuss these temporary services below and why they are essential on construction sites.

Temporary Electrical Services

A good, uninterrupted supply of electricity is essential to allow for the trouble-free running of construction equipment and heavy machinery. This requires a well-distributed power supply across the construction site, with safe accessibility. Temporary electrical services provided by general contractors are also essential to ensure that all electricity requirements on the construction site are met.

Furthermore, it is equally essential to ensure that the temporary electrical installations follow safety standards, are certified for use, and fulfill usage. On a construction site, you can use electricity in several equipment and operations, including:

Telecommunication And Information Systems

These include mobile equipment and machinery, which is being remotely operated through computer systems or other wireless services with a central power station. These systems require an interrupted electricity supply for efficient functionality. Hence, temporary electrical services need to be carefully installed so that no electricity blackouts occur that may hinder the construction site’s workflow.

Exterior and Interior Lighting

Temporary electric services should be capable enough to provide and withstand the load generated from electricity usage on the construction site. Besides information systems, electric supply is essential for regulatory machines like air conditioning or heating facilities in storage containers. For lighting within site offices, on workstations, and welfare units. Also, for operating hoists and to support 10kva transformers.

Temporary Mechanical Services

Mechanical services also play an integral role in the smooth operation of activities on a construction site. Mechanical services include plumbing, hoists, mechanical ventilation facilities like space heating and air conditioning. We have discussed these services in detail below:

Plumbing

For the welfare of all construction sites, they must be equipped with basic yet essential facilities like running water and consequently waste disposal. This provides human necessities and is important that it complies with the work sites’ health and safety standards. Hence, temporary but efficient plumbing services are a must for a construction site.

These facilities need to be present from the beginning of the project till its completion. They constitute services like toilets, washing spaces, accessibility to clean and safe drinking water, water heaters, bib-taps, standpipes, and silo connections.

Hoists

Different types of hoists are needed and employed on construction sites to lift and carry objects or passengers from lower levels to higher ones. Simple passenger lifts are used to carry many people. Other heavy-duty hoists include gantry and scaffold hoists, designed to lift and lower materials onto different levels.

Air Conditioning And Heating systems

Air conditioning and heating facilities on a construction site are utilized in storage or office containers or welfare units. They are used in places where the temperature needs to be regulated according to the construction site’s requirements.

Moreover, workers also require heating and conditioning facilities to work efficiently. This is because most construction workers are already working in extreme environments. On a scorching day, employers must provide their workers with air-conditioned and cool rooms and buildings to relax and take some time off from work.

About Taurus Projects

Taurus Projects is an industrial and commercial site services provider in Alberta and Western Canada. We provide exceptional site services like a temporary electrical and mechanical supply to our clients so they can work on their construction sites comfortably. For more information, visit our website or contact us today for personalized care.

Construction site trailers are a useful construction project asset, whether you are working on a large scale commercial building or a conventionally built home. These temporary portable spaces come with electricity and other functional supplies that can serve a great deal for the workers and contractors on site.

Customized Spaces

Construction trailers can be customized and set up according to the requirements of the crew. Sometimes it is used as a personalized space where the workers can come to cool down or rest. While other times it can be used as an ‘office’ space by the contractors and construction site managers, for project planning and organization, or as a room for official meetings with the crew.

Durability

These useful construction site resources are challenging, weather-proof, high-grade steel containers manufactured to withstand extreme temperatures. Furthermore, they are equipped with electric fittings, ventilation and air conditioning systems, restrooms, storage capacities, and general kitchen installation to assist the crew as space where they could take some time off after a hard working day or rest in-case of a health issue.

Useful Yet Low on the Budget

Indeed! Cost effectiveness is the focal point that is strived for on a construction project. When it comes to a construction site trailer, they are beneficial while also very affordable.

You can easily rent construction site trailers for the duration of your construction project. On a monthly fee, depending on the contract length, trailer size, and installations. ‘Taurus projects’ offer flexible prices and discounts, especially if the trailers are to be rented for long durations. Moreover, renting a trailer for an ‘instant office or storage space’ has proven to be more cost-efficient than building or renting a covered space nearby a construction site.

Portability

As the name implies, trailers are portable spaces that can be moved from one construction site to another. Where they can be quickly and easily transformed into a space, according to the workers’ needs, all you need to do is rent a suitable trailer from a supplier Like Taurus projects, who will deliver and unload it to the place most fit for you at the construction site. Once your construction project is over, they will return to pick up the trailer without any hassle.

Provide Security

An active construction site is one of the most vulnerable places for theft and robbery. Expensive tools and machinery that form an asset for a construction project are the main target for thieves. Therefore, it is crucial to protect these assets during and after business hours.

Construction site trailers can be the best solution for this, as they come with heavy-duty locks and other security mechanisms that ensure your equipment and resources remain safe inside.

Environmentally Friendly

Yes, construction site trailers are environmentally friendly, unlike custom-made buildings. You can customize them according to your needs. Further, their ease of mobility allows them to be transported anywhere. Therefore, they non-invasively impact the environment, contributing less waste compared to other buildings.

Moreover, when construction site trailers get old and overused, you can recycle them to create new trailers. This disassembling is carried out in factories. Hence, any waste produced is handled by the factory instead of the construction site.

Taurus Can Help You Find The Right Construction Site Trailer

Taurus Project is an expert service provider for construction sites. We deal in all kinds of construction-related services, from project planning, management, providing resources to supporting workers, engineers, and managers on site.

If you are looking for a construction site trailer, Taurus Project is the right place for you! We can provide you with the best construction site trailers at the most affordable renting prices. For more information on our services, visit our website or contact us here.

Site service providers know many things that you, as clients or even a general contractor. This is why we need site service providers to keep construction sites manageable and safe to ensure the project is completed on time.

Potential Hazards

Keeping a site safe requires a professional to assess the risks and hazards involved in the processes and operations of the construction site. Only those who have expertise and years of practice in the field are the right people to ask about what can go wrong at a project’s site.

Trips and falls, short circuits, building material wastage, injuries, and fire are just some of the most common hazards. Site service providers handle these and other threats on a construction site effectively.

Tips To Avoid Hazards

A project owner requires someone to point out potential hazards and suggest adequate solutions to avoid and mitigate these risks. Professional site services can provide you with the best suitable solutions for the risks your site has.

A professional site services expert protects your employees by avoiding hazards, the materials present on the site, and the site itself from irreversible damage and loss.

What’s The Safest Approach

Site service specialists can tell you how to operate on the construction site to remain safe and keep the site a safe place. They are the ones who can guide you on which way is the safest to carry out daily activities.

For instance, if your workers needed to lift something heavy and take it to the top floor; using the stairs would be the most inefficient and dangerous. On the other hand, using a pulley attached with a cart or an external lift is an efficient and more safe way to carry the load to the top floor.

Avoiding risks at a construction site may include two things. Firstly, the essential tips and measures a construction worker takes while proceeding with their daily tasks. Secondly, the guidance and consultancy you can get from experts to know how to do the job safely and accurately.

Where To Put The Materials

The most challenging thing for workers to do on a construction site is to manage construction material effectively. Professionals will know how to manage materials, where to store which material, and how to access it. They are responsible for ensuring that the materials are available on time, keeping it easily accessible and safe from any damage.

The distance between the place where you have stored the material and where the construction workers require it must be adequate. In addition to distance, how you store the material will determine its lifespan and efficiency.

Cost-Effective Alternatives

Whenever a problem arises, there are multiple solutions for it. One solution involves more cost and time, whereas the other might be a cost-effective and more affordable alternative. It does not necessarily mean that the cost-effective solution to a problem is not reliable. It is just a matter of compromising on one thing while prioritizing the other.

Project owners will always prefer the less costly solution but will not compromise on quality and safety. This is where things become tricky, which only experienced site service providers can help you with. If you don’t hire professionals, you are likely to face trouble towards the end of the project or even after completion.

Taurus Projects has the best team of professionals with years of on-ground experience in providing construction services and managing construction projects of all sorts, sizes, and scopes. To get in touch with us, click here.

When it comes to a construction projects process uncertainty is almost inevitable. From constant schedule changes, cancellation of material orders, extreme weather conditions, and the COVID-19 pandemic, uncertainties are bound to happen at some point in time. However, general contractors and project managers can work around people, processes, and tools to reduce ambiguities and resolve critical issues.

The following are some vital tips to help you handle uncertainty in your construction project:

Invest In Construction Industry-Specific Tools

Investing in construction-related tools will allow you to stay on top of your weekly project planning and overall plan. Unlike Excel and other traditional instruments, construction industry-specific applications will help you better understand time-sensitive and delicate construction processes.

In other words, they enable all team members to flag critical issues on time and help Project Managers maintain full visibility over each task’s progress. This way, you can timely address process problems, resolve serious legal conflicts, or even avoid them more straightforwardly and effectively.

Divide Work Into Smaller Tasks

The best way to deal with a long project is to break it down into smaller tasks whenever possible. Although you might not be sure about the amount of work to be done in the upcoming year, you should at least determine what you will need to do over the next few months.

Instead of focusing on a two-year project, you can start by defining a project that will include only the first phase. After that, you can redefine and forecast the next stage as a separate mini-project. This way, you can plan and manage each of the shorter projects more efficiently.

Reduce Administrative Workload

Project Managers need to choose industry-specific digital tools for continuous process improvement. Many commercial construction projects continually battle against excessive administrative workloads. This is because all stakeholders don’t have a smart way to report progress and connect their updates to the master program.

Many project managers spend endless hours calling people, get stuck in pointless meetings, or visit the physical site to confirm that they have the right information available to them. Things can get even more problematic when it comes to fighting a claim. You might have to go through never-ending email threads to determine the origin of the problem.

Use a platform that would enable you to keep track of your project’s every detail without having to go through a sea of information. It must allow all stakeholders to submit their updates easily so that the right people immediately receive a notification. Having a real-time updated audit trail would guarantee documentation of every step of the process to help you safeguard your project without diving into a congested email account.

Automate Your Systems And Processes

Standardization is often neglected in the construction industry because each construction project has different goals, requirements, and expectations. However, that’s not entirely the right approach; while some parts of the commercial construction project might require special adjustments, most processes remain the same.

When you standardize your systems and processes, you can increase the chances of predictability and deal with possible risks more effectively.

Taurus Projects is a construction contractor in Fort Saskatchewan that provides high-quality commercial and industrial construction services across Alberta. Visit our website to learn about our construction services, or contact us for personalized service.

It becomes quite challenging for some general contractors to maintain the required quality in commercial construction projects, especially when there’s a tight deadline dangling over their heads. However, with the right planning and scheduling techniques, you can vastly control your project’s quality from start to finish.

Here, we will discuss some of the most vital factors that affect a commercial construction project’s quality:

Not Meeting Material Quality Standards

When a construction management company fails to meet the required material quality standards, it results in significant construction issues and safety hazards. To avoid these problems, project owners and contractors must ensure ordering materials from trusted suppliers and that each shipment is checked thoroughly before use.

Subcontractor Mismanagement

It’s vital to keep all stakeholders informed and on the same page to maintain and enhance a project’s quality. If subcontractors fail to hire adequately skilled and trained workers, it can result in significant work quality issues that could halt the entire process.

Not Documenting Changes

Some quality problems do not arise due to ill-skilled labor or design changes; instead, they’re mainly due to a lack of documentation of these changes. If you’ve recently substituted a particular material with another and failed to update the final papers, it can lead to incorrect handling from the maintenance team.

Making Last-Minute Changes

When you’re still discussing the essential features at later stages of your project, it can often result in severe quality issues. Before making any last-minute alterations to your existing project, it’s best to set aside an ample amount of time by extending the deadlines and verify and test any changes to the current designs.

Team Miscommunication

Communication issues are one of the leading factors that negatively impact the quality of commercial construction projects. Continued miscommunication among different team members can lead to severe problems. These issues may include misapplication of new methods, mismatched materials, and inadequate secondary and tertiary testing for discovering current issues.

Design Complexities

Including unnecessary complexities to a commercial building design is also one of the major factors that can badly affect a finished product’s quality. While it’s not possible to prevent some level of complexity in some ultramodern construction projects, the design-build team should make efforts to minimize complicated techniques and unnecessary features wherever possible.

Simplified commercial building designs are increasingly affordable, offering construction management companies improved profit margins while producing high-quality work.

Lack Of Project Management Systems

An effective project management system can help project managers determine the ideal intervals for examining the already completed work for possible errors and omissions. Without proper plans and checks on quality control and assurance, many commercial contractors have to wait to conduct essential checks to assess the quality of work.

To avoid this issue, it’s best to invest in a project management system based on mobile applications. This is a flexible and fast way of bringing current projects under control for increased work quality.

Ignoring Audits And Testings

Some construction management firms rely on 3rd party auditing and testing plans, ignoring these test results, and continuing their operations with existing quality issues or flawed designs. This problem usually arises due to a lack of designation for quality control. That is why it’s necessary to be sure who’s responsible for reading the audits and tests to make suitable recommendations for repairs or rework for contractors.

Taurus Projects is an experienced general contractor in Fort Saskatchewan that offers high-quality commercial construction services to Alberta’s various businesses. For more information, visit our website, or contact us for personalized service.

When it comes to construction, labor and cost are assumed to be the most important factors for a profitable construction project. However, successful construction projects are a combination of strategic planning and efficient utilization of available resources, including labor, money, material, and equipment.

Hence, a construction project is likely to yield more profit if cost reduction and labor administration, equipment handling, and effective material management are employed.

Advantages Of Material Management

Effective material management can yield several advantages that can ultimately reduce the overall cost of a construction project while providing standard exceptional services. It reserves stock and satisfies demands in times of replenishment. It can help stabilize the fluctuations in material consumptions by keeping track of the material utilized and kept for storage while ensuring adequate material is always available when required.

Material management is imperative, especially for large scale construction projects, as it can help prevent unnecessary material and time wastage. Here, we combine some basic material management strategies that will help increase the overall productivity of your construction site.

Strategic Material Distributor

Mismanaged equipment and material are likely to be dispersed around the construction site, unprotected, and unaccounted for. This results in unnecessary fuel consumption for transporting material and labor employment, which could be otherwise avoided. Furthermore, it creates confusion regarding the availability of material and, in turn, leads to over-ordering.

Hence, it is best to organize your inventory by employing a strategic distributor supervisor who will manage your material on the construction site and ensure its provision in the right place at the right time.

Strategic Planning

It is common for contractors to order material daily after listing the requirements for the day. This adversely affects the workflow as, sometimes, materials can take too long to arrive, or it does not align with the specifications. In such situations, a lot of time is wasted.

However, we can avoid this through prior project planning that provides a strategically designed material management plan to ensure smooth workflow. This way, materials will be made available on time, maintaining and increasing overall labor productivity.

Delivery And Storage

It is not favorable to make bulk orders of the materials required on the construction site at different project stages. This can result in potential damage and defects due to storage and transportation. Therefore, having a thorough strategic material management plan can be helpful to pre-schedule deliveries to avoid long term storage issues.

Material Packaging

A detailed management plan can easily be worked out when you know what type of material will be required for a particular space or room. Hence, the contractor and distributor can coordinate to pre-work a customized delivery for a specific day on the construction site.

This will ease material management and help save time through quick delivery while reducing the amount of waste to be transported out of the site.

Taurus And Effective Material Management

We, at Taurus, are experts in the field of industrial and commercial site management. Our material management professionals cover various services, including material handling, truck unloading, storage, and retrieval. Furthermore, our expert material managers can operate and utilize complex software like Jovix for material planning.

At Taurus Projects, we strive to provide you with quality services for effective and strategic management, planning, and distribution of material, to your construction site. For more information on our services, visit our website or contact us here today.

Construction sites are perceived as one of the most dangerous places, as they are predisposed to accidents and hazards. People who work at construction sites work in an environment where they have to deal with extensive tools and heavy machinery. Further, due to the nature of their work at these sites, workers are exposed to hazardous materials and circumstances where their lives are prone to danger, resulting in injuries and deaths.

Companies must take precautionary measures to ensure their workers’ safety by identifying common risks and potential hazards and providing plausible solutions to avoid them. Here, we discuss some of the most common construction site risks and ways you can prevent them.

Working At Heights

Workers on construction sites are most prone to fatal injuries due to falls, tripping, or slipping from heights. These include fixed ladders or scaffoldings of over six feet. Workers cannot entirely prevent these, as their work requires them to perform complicated tasks at raised platforms, but they can be avoided or made less dangerous.

Ways To Avoid It:

Companies should ensure their worker’s safety, especially when they are working at heights. Prior planning and strategies should be devised, so all the work is carried out safely, and where possible, working at heights is avoided. Furthermore, workers should be trained to perform elevated platforms; they should identify associated risks and know how to control exposure to them.

Companies should ensure all their workers have fall protection equipment and learn how to use it. For example, to decrease the chances of a fall, they should know how to use a safety net. Similarly, to minimize fatal fall risk, a scaffold with a double guard railing should be provided.

Construction Equipment

Heavy and large construction equipment is a norm for construction sites. However, they pose a serious threat to workers’ lives on site. Every year significant accidents occur due to equipment failures or movement, resulting in several deaths.

Ways To Avoid It

Protective measures against this hazard must be taken by employers to ensure their workers’ safety. The best way to overcome this risk is to make sure that your workers follow all the safety guidelines of a construction site.

Furthermore, workers must be aware of their surroundings while working. They should avoid working close to moving machinery, to prevent such accidents. Finally, workers must use all personal protective equipment (PPE), including high visibility jackets, to ensure they can be identified from afar.

Electricity

Construction sites are abundantly disposed of with bare electrical wiring, which is a cause of several electrical accidents.

Ways To Avoid It

Workers who directly deal with power lines and electric wiring should take all precautionary measures involving the use of insulation and protective equipment. Similarly, other workers must be careful around power lines and maintain as much distance as possible.

Collapsing Trenches And Excavation

This is another construction site risk that entraps workers resulting in serious injuries or even death.

Ways To Avoid It

While building a trench, site managers must plan, consider the best proper support, ensure it is well secured, and regularly inspect it for any flaws. Furthermore, both employers and their employees must follow appropriate safety standards and utilize protective equipment to minimize serious hazards during excavation.

About Taurus Projects

At Taurus projects, we believe that construction site activities must not, in any way, adversely affect people or their environment. We are committed to achieving this and have implemented comprehensive occupational health, safety, and environmental management strategies. These help us to perform within safety guidelines while allowing us to exceptionally execute our duties.