The 5 Biggest Challenges of Contractor Prequalification
For any business, it’s highly useful to have a pool of reliable, pre-approved contractors at your fingertips. It means that you can quickly find the right company for the task when the need arises and keep your operations and projects running smoothly. That is what prequalification is all about, assessing contractors before they are hired. By prequalifying contractors, you’ll have confidence that they meet your criteria, have the right qualification and licenses and are competent to do the job. However, while an extremely useful process, prequalification comes with its own challenges. If you’re struggling with any of the following five problem areas, then it may be time to review your contractor management system.
1. Dealing with Mountains of Paperwork
While you no doubt know that prequalification is well worth the effort, it involves a lot of documentation. If you’re still working with excel spreadsheets and filing cabinets, you’re going to have your work cut out. You have to ensure that all your contractor documentation is logged, verified and safely stored. The solution, of course, is to move on from old-fashioned tools and let technology support your efforts. With the right contractor management platform, you can easily check the status of your contractors, keep on top of expiry dates and demonstrate your due diligence at a moment’s notice.
2. Assessing Different Types of Contractors
If you have a one-size-fits-all approach to prequalification, then you’re bound to be making too much work for yourself and your contractors. You can’t expect one questionnaire to have all the information needed to cover different job types and levels of risk. And, if you do have forms that cover everything, they will take hours to sift through. You need to build a prequalification solution that fits the way you and your contractors do business, evaluating risk and assessing suitability accordingly and offering the flexibility that your business needs.
3. Finding the Time to Verify Documentation
Even if you’ve got a system in place to ensure you’ve got all the right documentation from potential contractors, the job is far from done. By assuming what they’ve sent you is correct, you are taking a huge business risk. The only way to ensure compliance is to double-check everything that you receive. And, that takes time. Third-party contractor management providers can help reduce your workload by verifying documentation for accuracy and ensuring your contractor meets industry and regulatory standards at all times.
4. Getting the Most Out of Technology
There is software to help solve almost every business challenge these days, and contractor management is one of them. However, that means there is also an awful lot of choice. You need to not only select the right solution, but you need to know how to use it effectively. It’s easy to buy into a solution with fancy features and functionality, but there is little point if they are features you rarely use. You need to look for a contractor management solution that helps you to search for contractors, automates alerts and identifies expiring documentation. Software should be easy to implement, easy to use, both for your employees and your contractors, and support should be available when you need it.
5. Creating a Contractor-Friendly Process
If you think you’ve got your prequalification process down to a tee, have you considered what it’s like from the perspective of your contractors? And that means more than making sure that they can use your software. Do they understand your workplace compliance standards? Are you available if they need help? Is it easy for them to communicate with you? Effective prequalification requires support services as well as software and builds the basis for your future relationships with your contractors after you hire them.
How Contractor Management Solves These Challenges
Contractor management providers can not only help you solve the challenges of prequalification, but they can save you time and money and reduce business risk. You’ll spend less time getting your head around technology, sifting through paperwork and juggling all your different contracts, and more time focused on your projects. And you’ll be safe in the knowledge that you have a high standard of qualified, competent and compliant prequalified contractors ready to go when you need them. Get prequalification right, and you will increase job success rates and ensure workplace safety throughout.
For over a decade, Conserve has helped organisations overcome contractor management challenges. We can help you develop a contractor management service that will be not only effective but will make your organisation safer, while minimising your overall risk. Request a demo now or visit the Conserve page for more great content.
For more information, call +61 2 8883 1501, visit www.conserve.com.au or email enquiries@conserve.com.au