New research raises questions about whether construction businesses’ investment in digital technology is reducing progress claim administration or shifting more of the workload onto subcontractors.
By Ian Moss, marketing leader for Australia and New Zealand at Payapps – an Autodesk company.
Australia’s construction industry is accelerating its digital transformation. Infrastructure Australia’s 2025 Infrastructure Market Capacity report found that 64 per cent of surveyed building and construction firms invested in data and digitalisation over the preceding year.
Yet separate Payapps research involving 754 construction subcontractors across Australia and New Zealand reveals another side of the story: 76 per cent regularly or sometimes re-enter progress claim information across different systems.
While the findings come from different surveys, they raise an important question: who actually benefits from the industry’s technology investment ?
For a builder, a new portal or standardised process may simplify internal reporting. For a subcontractor working across several builders, it can mean learning multiple systems, entering the same information repeatedly and reconciling different versions of a progress claim.
At this year’s Construction Technology Leaders Summit on 29 October, Misty Cronin, head of sales ANZ at Payapps, challenged project leaders to look beyond their own systems: “If you’re trying to solve a two-party process with a one-sided view … you’re going to fall short.”
Her argument was not that the construction industry needs fewer systems. It was that technology must create value for both parties in a shared process.
As Payapps’ State of Progress Claims research highlights, repetitive administration is more than an inconvenience. It signals that digital workflows remain fragmented across the supply chain.
Progress claim management illustrates the challenge well. Information passes between subcontractors, commercial teams and finance, yet each hand-off can trigger another spreadsheet, email or data-entry task.
Even where submissions are digital, assessment changes may be recorded elsewhere, supporting documents may be scattered and approved values may be re-entered into financial systems.
Cronin told the panel that people should not have to act as the integration layer between disconnected applications.
A more collaborative approach gives both parties access to consistent contract breakdowns, visible submissions, documented assessment adjustments and a clear record of decisions. That matters not only for efficiency but also for reducing the uncertainty that can contribute to progress claim disputes .
This is the thinking behind Payapps’ shared progress claim management workflow , which connects subcontractor submissions and assessments, while construction ERP integrations help approved information flow into financial systems.
Rather than asking whether a new platform saves time internally, builders could ask three broader questions: Does it reduce work for subcontractors? Can both parties see and understand the same commercial information? Does it eliminate manual hand-offs rather than create new ones?
As Cronin argued, technology decisions made by main contractors ripple through the businesses that deliver their projects.
For construction leaders, the opportunity is to rethink how digital success is measured. Improving one organisation’s efficiency is valuable, but genuine supply chain integration should create benefits beyond its boundaries.
The industry’s next productivity gain may not come from another platform. It may come from designing the processes between platforms – and between businesses – so everyone in the supply chain benefits.
