Why Communication-Focused ERP Apps Are Essential For India’s Construction Future

India’s growth story over the past fifteen years has already captured global attention. Now its construction sector is entering a decisive decade. Highways, metros, airports, industrial corridors and urban infrastructure are reshaping the country’s economic geography at a scale rarely seen before. Capital deployment is accelerating. Projects are growing larger, more complex and more geographically dispersed. Yet one of the weakest links in this expansion remains stubbornly unresolved: how work is communicated on the ground.

Despite the scale of investment, daily execution on most construction projects still runs on unregulated email inboxes, social media chat groups, disconnected task managers, spreadsheets and manual approvals. Drawings move as PDFs across multiple devices. Site updates are shared as photographs that quickly disappear under floods of unrelated messages. The gap between planning and execution continues to widen, not because of engineering limits, but because communication remains scattered, untraceable and dependent on individuals.

This is the failure point that communication-focused ERP applications are now trying to correct. Kailash Anwala, Founder & Managing Director, UniSteps Consulting Pvt highlights how communication-focused ERP applications are now trying to correct the above mentioned challenges.

Why Construction Needs More Than Traditional ERP

For decades, construction ERP systems concentrated on finance. Billing, procurement, inventory and HR functions became more structured. Accounting improved. Audits became cleaner. But the core activity that drives projects forward each day, operational communication, remained largely outside the system.

Decisions migrated to social chat applications. Approvals were routed through cluttered email chains flooded with external noise. Escalations moved through long screenshot threads that were soon buried by newer messages. None of this created a reliable or permanent project record.

The risks of this fragmentation are well established across the industry:

• Critical decisions are lost when people exit projects

• There is no clear accountability of who approved what and when

• Execution slows because messages fail to reach the right stakeholders

• Multiple versions of drawings circulate in parallel

• Senior management works with delayed or partial visibility

• Organisations remain dependent on individual memory rather than institutional memory

As a senior contractor involved in several EPC projects puts it succinctly, “If it is not in the system, it does not exist in a dispute.”

India’s infrastructure, real estate and EPC sectors now require far more than accounting software. They need systems that capture every conversation, instruction, task, deviation and approval inside a structured, auditable and searchable platform. Communication-first ERPs attempt to do precisely this by placing daily communication at the centre of project operations rather than at the margins.

A Market Structurally Ready for Change

Globally, the construction ERP market is projected to grow from roughly USD 4 billion in 2025 to over USD 8.4 billion by 2035. At the same time, more than 54 per cent of new ERP deployments are already cloud-based. The shift is unmistakable: from static office systems to mobile, real-time platforms designed for field execution.

India is particularly well suited to this transition. Its construction model is labour-intensive, geographically dispersed and exposed to unpredictable field conditions. Compliance expectations from clients, lenders and public agencies are rising steadily. MSME contractors, who form the backbone of day-to-day execution, face the greatest pressure to deliver speed and transparency with limited administrative capacity.

Their needs are practical rather than theoretical:

• Real-time visibility into site progress

• Mobile reporting of labour, materials and delays

• Faster approvals without dependence on office hours

• Tighter vendor and subcontractor coordination

• Clear compliance trails demanded by clients and regulators

A communication-focused ERP creates a direct operational bridge between site execution and management oversight, something traditional systems were never designed to provide.

The Persistence of On-Ground Friction

Despite decades of digitisation, several structural challenges remain embedded in project execution.

Projects today often span cities, states and sometimes national borders. Central teams operate with limited real-time insight into what is happening at distant sites. Informal approvals on WhatsApp remain untraceable, creating fertile ground for disputes, rework and financial leakage. Drawing confusion persists because version control is weak and acknowledgements are rarely documented. Vendor coordination continues to break down due to undocumented commitments and unclear responsibility. Meanwhile, high workforce mobility means that when engineers leave, knowledge often leaves with them.

Communication-first ERP platforms attack these weaknesses at the root by integrating chats, emails, task workflows, approvals and documents into a single structured environment with audit trails, role-based access and controlled versioning.

What Changes in Practice

The practical impact becomes clearest in routine site situations.

Consider a delayed material approval. Traditionally, a site engineer sends photographs on a chat group and waits for acknowledgment. The message gets lost among dozens of others. Follow-ups begin. Procurement slows. In a communication-first ERP, the same request becomes a tracked task with attached images. The approving authority is automatically notified. A single tap triggers the purchase workflow. The entire sequence remains recorded.

Or take drawing revisions. In manual circulation, outdated drawings often continue in use simply because not everyone receives the updated version at the same time. The result is expensive rework. In a structured system, only the latest drawing is active. Older versions are locked. Site teams are notified automatically and acknowledgements are logged.

The same logic applies to quality and safety observations. Where informal escalation once buried issues within hours, communication-first ERPs convert them into formal notices tied to responsibility, verification and closure. The full thread remains auditable.

As one quality auditor puts it, “What gets tracked gets fixed. What stays in WhatsApp gets forgotten.”

Technology Adoption Is Converging

Across the sector, adoption trends are now pointing decisively in one direction: mobile-first workflows, integrated communication logs, geo-tagged field reporting, centralised drawing libraries and digital safety and quality checklists. Contractors increasingly demand systems that field workers can use intuitively, not platforms built only for office administration.

Communication-first ERPs respond to this demand by combining the familiarity of chat interfaces with enterprise-grade compliance, access control and data traceability. Adoption becomes practical rather than aspirational.

The Next Phase of Digitisation

Looking ahead, these platforms are likely to evolve into full project operating systems. Artificial intelligence will automate daily site summaries. Predictive alerts will flag schedule slippages early. DPRs and MIS reports will be generated in real time. Vendor ecosystems will integrate directly into workflows. Digital twins will link physical progress with live site data.

At the centre of all these developments will remain one constant: structured communication. No amount of automation can compensate for unclear instructions, lost approvals or fragmented accountability.

From Execution Chaos to Organisational Clarity

India’s construction ecosystem is scaling faster than the informal tools traditionally used to manage it. With larger projects, tighter financing structures and rising compliance expectations, the cost of unclear or scattered communication is increasing sharply.

In this environment, communication-first ERP applications are no longer optional digital enhancements. They are becoming core operational infrastructure. Firms that continue to depend on fragmented emails, informal chat groups and untracked approvals will face rising execution risk, slower delivery and weakening control. Those that formalise daily communication into structured systems will gain speed, accountability, organisational memory and long-term resilience.

As one industry leader observed during a review meeting, “Steel and concrete may create the structure, but communication decides whether it stands on time.”

Communication-focused ERPs are now positioned to shape how India’s next decade of construction is executed, not merely faster, but with far greater clarity and control.

The above information does not belong to Outlook India and is not involved in the creation of this article.