Enhancing Operational Efficiency Through Real-Time Construction Data Insights

Construction companies are forced to juggle a complex mix of challenges, including frequent cost overruns, schedule delays and limited visibility across multiple projects. These challenges can lead to a balancing act in which teams must make difficult choices about what to sacrifice: speed, quality or cost. 

Although many companies find themselves in this position, there is a way to make progress without the need for such sacrifices. The solution is to embrace real-time data insights. This enables construction teams to make data-driven decisions and address potential issues before they become unavoidable problems. This article will guide you through how real-time, accessible data and insights can help construction firms enhance both their operations and overall business health. 

Typical Construction Challenges

Construction companies can benefit from technology, and many firms are already on a digital transformation journey. In our 2023 report, How We Build Now, 44% of respondents said that they were “well on the way” with their digital transformation journey. We expect that figure has only increased in the subsequent two years.

However, digital transformation can take many forms, and some approaches are more effective than others. Some companies that have begun to embrace technology are facing challenges in getting the best from it.

Typical issues include:

Manual errors

Many tools that store construction data — from spreadsheets to analytics-specific point solutions — require all data to be entered manually. This leaves them vulnerable to human error, which is nearly impossible to eliminate. Humans aren’t robots, and mistakes are inevitable. 

Separate reporting tools

Companies with a portfolio of tools that perform different tasks with their construction data — from finance to scheduling to project management — often find that their systems don’t talk to one another. This means that data sits in siloes that aren’t automatically updated, raising the risk of using outdated information. Keeping siloed data up to date also requires a lot of manual admin and potential duplication of effort. 

Difficulty identifying risks early

Such data siloes also create another risk: the inability to identify risks. With data locked away in different systems, and no ability to see the bigger picture, companies can miss early warning signs of problems. This can lead to delays, cost overruns and rework. The How We Build Now report found that 28% of respondents said they spent 26–50% of their time on rework, and another one quarter spent 25% of their time on rework. 

How Real-Time Data Insights can Transform Operational Efficiency

The key to making data-driven decisions lies with your company’s data analytics capabilities. Your decisions can only be as good as the data that informs them and the tools that you use to analyse that data. To get the best results from your data analytics software, you need a single source of truth — that is, one centralised environment that hosts an accurate, real-time view of your data. 

With a construction management platform — which acts as a common data environment for your construction data — you gain that single source of truth. All of your data is in one place, enabling data to flow to different applications instead of getting caught up in siloes. 

“We needed a way to track the work that we had, obviously. Procore did that for us. We were able to bring everything that we were looking to track under one umbrella.” — Quotation from a recent case study with Justin Weidner, Vice President of A&R Mechanical Services

Data analytics are the backbone of data-driven decision making. With best-of-breed data analytics capabilities, you gain enhanced visibility into the metrics that inform the choices that your firm makes, helping to improve operational efficiency. This data can come in multiple forms, including:

• Live dashboards that provide instant, at-a-glance updates to stakeholders
• Automated risk flags for high-cost or time-sensitive tasks
• Centralised data hubs that streamline reporting and enable quicker, more accessible insights

Three Core Benefits of Real-Time Data Insights

The ability to turn your construction data into insights using a construction platform brings many benefits to your business, helping you to stay productive, efficient and profitable. Here are the top three benefits of having access to real-time data insights:

1. Executive-Level Clarity

With access to dashboards that provide real-time status updates on performance data for all of your projects, your company’s executives have a quick, easy-to-use data source that gives them portfolio-wide visibility into their project data. This helps them to stay up to date with the current state of each project’s health, and also helps them to detect at-risk projects early. As a result, they’re able to make more timely, strategic interventions. 

2. Financial Transparency and Risk Management

Tracking project costs against budgets helps project managers and construction managers maintain a real-time understanding of the financial health of a project. With the ability to easily monitor costs and variances, the project team can proactively manage budgets and cash flow. This ability also ensures early warnings when costs rise unexpectedly, which helps project managers manage financial risks and reduce the risk of overruns. 

3. Operational Efficiency and Collaboration

Real-time data insights deliver transparency, visibility and the ability to foster a mutual understanding of goals and strategies, which are all elements of effective collaboration. Without effective collaboration, it’s impossible to operate efficiently on construction projects, which involve many different teams that must work together. Having a quick, easy way to retrieve accurate data and insights reduces the risk of mistakes or conflict and helps teams to work with a shared understanding. A single source of truth also brings efficiency to communications with vendors and stakeholders.

“Procore helps us all work on the same page. We’re all going to one place for drawings, documents, submittals, RFIs, daily reports, and tracking productivity in the field. That's a huge time savings for us.” — Quotation from a recent Procore case study with Casey Corbin, Project Manager, Legacy Mechanical

Practical Tips for Implementing Data Analytics

Implementing a construction technology platform that gives you data analytics capabilities is a strategic decision that will bring significant benefits to your organisation. Here are some tips for getting impact from your technology investment as early as possible. 

Conduct a technology audit

It’s important to understand what data you’re already collecting and where it lives. This helps you to consolidate the data collection process and reduce the number of tools and licenses you need after you have a new platform.

Designate clear roles and accountability

New technology means new responsibilities for operating and overseeing it, so companies need to decide who ‘owns’ the new analytics tool and who has a role to play in updating it with data. To do this effectively, you need to educate your users and explain why it’s important. Create a system of accountability or incentives to help your team engage from day one. 

Automate reporting for critical metrics

The ability to automate reports is yet another way in which data analytics helps you to become more efficient. By pulling in data from sources such as accounting software using integrations, your data analytics system can generate up-to-date reports without the need for manual work. You can even automate this to produce reports on a weekly or monthly basis, so you have them available for meetings with minimal effort. 

Implement change management and regular team training

To get the best out of your data analytics platform, you want as many people as possible to engage with it. In a 2024 article, Delivering on construction productivity is no longer optional, McKinsey notes: “These innovations hold significant potential, but cutting corners in their implementation — for instance, if the team implementing the technology has limited frontline change-management experience — adds to the scaling and adoption challenge.”

Organisations need to deliver strategic change management programmes and implement regular team training to upskill staff and to identify areas where the team might need further education and support. Training teams to interpret dashboards and bring insights to meetings so the team can act on them is a great way to get widespread benefits from analytics, but the change management and adoption initiatives are needed first. 

Bridging the gap between today’s challenges and future success

The construction industry has a way to go before it is using technology to its greatest potential. Implementing data analytics is a perfect opportunity for companies to spur on their digital transformation and unlock the operational efficiencies, financial clarity and robust collaboration that will help them succeed long into the future.

By harnessing data analytics and cultivating a data-driven culture, companies can experience benefits that touch every part of the construction lifecycle, from early planning to project completion. There’s no better time than today to start implementing or upgrading data analytics in your firm. 

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