All posts by SEO Team

What Is a Common Data Environment in Construction?

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. Construction projects, particularly large-scale ones, generate an incredible amount of data that must be organized, managed, made available to those who need it, and analyzed for decision-making purposes. The larger the project team and the number of separate stakeholder entities involved, the greater the need for a common data environment (CDE). What is a Common Data Environment? A common data environment, or CDE, is a digital information platform that is the central point for data storage and access for a construction project. The concept originated as a central repository for BIM (building information modeling) workflows, but has since evolved to include any information and documents related to the design and construction of a building—estimates, contracts, change orders, reports, specifications, and so on. Post-construction, operational information can also be housed in the CDE. Project participants can access data in the CDE in real time, via computer, cell phone, tablet, or other device, from any location. Data that is proprietary to...

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The Impact of Climate Change on the Construction Industry in 2022

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. Climate Change Risks in the Construction Industry Worldwide, the construction industry generates about half of all carbon emissions, and in the United States, about 40%. That includes the embodied carbon from the production and transportation of building materials and the operational carbon from lighting, HVAC systems. The construction industry is under intense pressure from project owners, investors, and various government entities to reduce the carbon footprint of every new structure. The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) has studied the risks associated with climate change and has categorized them as 1) physical risk or 2) transition risks, which stem from failing to take decisive action in the transition to a lower carbon economy. Physical Risks Climate change is also having an impact on the way construction companies design and build new structures. The increasing number and severity of weather events such as tornadoes and hurricanes, as well as chronic issues such as sea level rise, flooding, and wildfires,...

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Laser Scanning in Construction

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. How Does Laser Scanning in Construction Work? As construction continues to “go digital,” laser scanning in construction is increasingly common. Laser scanning is a general term for the technology that is also referred to as LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) or High Definition Surveying (HDS) technologies. Laser scanning captures and maps buildings and construction sites with distance accuracy down to the pixel level. A laser scanner sends pulses of light to a target and times how long it takes for the reflection to reach the scanner, which tells the scanner the distance to the target. This process is repeated millions of times during a scan, and all of the individual measurements are compiled into a point cloud. Software fills in the gaps between individual measured points and connects individual point clouds through a registration process to create a 3D image of whatever was scanned. Scanning technology is evolving rapidly. Early scanners captured 1,000 data points per second and needed...

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Going Paperless in Construction

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. Drivers of Paperless Construction Digital collaboration and mobility is one of five trends identified by a McKinsey Global Institute study as shaping construction and capital projects. Specifically, the study points to the move of paperless projects, from the office to the workforce. In many ways, the move to a paperless construction industry is the natural consequence of solutions already in place, such as rapid digital mapping, next-generation building and information modeling, advanced analytics, the Internet of Things, and other digital technologies. More and more businesses in all industries have been evolving toward paperless processes. As soon as a digital solution becomes available at reasonable cost, most make the switch readily for the resulting gains in accuracy and productivity. You don’t see many fax machines anymore, do you? Once email became commonplace, businesses were quick to adopt it as the primary vehicle for written communication. More recently, with the introduction of cloud technology, paper record-keeping is on its way to...

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Construction Safety Training Using Immersive Virtual Reality

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. Training professionals in every industry have long sought the best way to train workers on potentially dangerous tasks carried out in hazardous environments. Nowhere is the need for safe training solutions greater than in construction, where the untrained or unwary can encounter significant threats to their health and safety. No classroom training can do an adequate job of preparing workers for the reality of the jobsite. Fortunately, immersive virtual reality can. Safety Training using Immersive Virtual Reality Virtual reality technology has come a long way in recent years. Both hardware and software advances have made it possible to reproduce working environments and tasks with a high degree of realism. As the technology has become more sophisticated, it also has become more affordable, making safety training using immersive virtual reality within the reach of even smaller construction companies. It’s not only safety training that gets a boost from the use of immersive virtual reality. Immersive VR training lets workers get...

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Review of Construction Safety Statistics in 2022

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. Construction Safety Statistics Although construction processes and equipment continue to evolve to make construction work safer, the industry remains one of the most dangerous in the United States. Construction accounts for only 6% of the country’s workforce but 20% of workplace fatalities. Construction safety statistics published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and other organizations paint a rather grim picture. Fatalities and Injuries in the U.S. Construction Industry According to BLS statistics, in 2020, 1,008 workers died in construction accidents—the third highest fatality rate of any industry. Of those deaths, 42 were related to crane operation and more than 300 to falls. Falls alone account for 34% of all deaths on construction job sites. According to OSHA, the top four causes of deaths in construction are falls, being struck by equipment, being caught in or in between objects, and electrocution. Together these four causes account for over 60% of all construction...

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Construction Material Shortage to Remain in 2023

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. The construction industry has experienced shortages of essential building materials, rising prices, and other supply chain issues since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and, in some cases, prior to its outbreak. These essential materials—the ones most heavily monitored and tracked year over year in terms of availability and price—include cement and concrete, steel, insulation materials, drywall, lumber, and HVAC equipment (especially air handlers, rooftop units, and air-cooled chillers). Causes of Supply Chain Issues The first factor that comes to mind, not only in the U.S., but around the world, is the pandemic. Extraction of resources and production of building materials didn’t come to a complete halt but fell off dramatically at the same time that demand was increasing. But with shutdowns and quarantines, transporting materials across borders and even domestically became extremely difficult, creating new supply chain issues or compounding existing backlogs and shortages that still are affecting global supply chains. Don’t underestimate the significance of the fact...

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Best Construction Podcasts

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your construction bond needs. Criteria for a Good Podcast A podcast is an audio series—audio files that are stored on and downloaded from a podcast hosting platform such as Spotify or Apple Podcasts. New episodes become available on a regular basis—typically weekly, biweekly, or monthly. The technology is simple enough and affordable enough for nearly anyone to produce their own podcast. Podcast series generally are created by people with a message, or opinion, or expert knowledge to share. The number of podcasts related to construction is growing exponentially. Quite frankly, some are more informative than others, and you may find that some address subjects that are more relevant to you than others. We’ve curated a list of construction podcasts considered to be among the best because they meet most or all of these criteria: The hosts are knowledgeable about a particular aspect of the construction industry. They focus on the needs and interests of a construction-oriented audience. They tell a compelling story and...

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Performance Bonds for Contractors with Bad Credit

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your performance bond needs. Understanding the purpose of performance bonds and how they work is key to understanding why bad credit will affect performance bonds. What Are Performance Bonds? Performance bonds are a type of construction surety bond commonly required of contractors. Under the federal Miller Act, contractors working on federally funded contracts in excess of $150,000 are legally required to furnish the project owner with a performance bond, as well as a payment bond. Most states have enacted similar legislation (“Little” Miller Acts) requiring performance and payment bonds from contractors working on state-funded projects of $100,000 or more. And private project owners and lenders increasingly are requiring performance bonds and sometimes payment bonds from contractors working on larger projects. The purpose of a performance bond is to protect the project owner financially if the contractor defaults on the contract and is unable to complete the job. One of the main reasons for default is a lack of capital to finish the job,...

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