The construction industry is responsible for taking up some of the biggest and most expensive projects on earth. A huge amount of capital, resources, and work goes into these projects, and this means a significant amount of data is generated. Number crunching has always been vital for this industry, considering the scale and capital involved. Though Business Intelligence (BI) has been extensively adopted by most of the sectors, it is in its booming phase for the construction industry.
The construction industry needs interactive visualization of their business data to identify new growth opportunities, optimize processes, maximize margins, offer outstanding customer services, and create space for genuine innovation.
In this blog, let’s walk you through some of the benefits of adopting Business Intelligence in construction:
A: Business pace
When business data is available to every department in real time, one will be able to take quick data-driven decisions. Centralization of data, will make the data accessible on any device through the cloud and hence reduce the administrative work. Cloud solutions have proved to reduce the workload and significantly boost productivity.
BI can be used to refine the existing business processes, automation of tasks, and for better organization and prioritization of work.
B: Leveraging work packages
A work breakdown structure lets you keep a note of the tasks, by adding or removing some of the individual work packages. Task breakdown can be simplified by determining the quantity and type of skills needed with predictive analytics. Once the right people are matched to the right task, there will be clarity on what needs to be done and who will be doing.
C: Risk scans
Construction and engineering space advocate health and safety procedures most vociferously as compared to any other industry as it affects the productivity and lowers team morale if any of the crew members are injured on site.
Keep your workforce away from site disasters, with the combination of predictive and prescriptive analysis. For example, with predictive analytics, you can pinpoint disaster zones to nth degree accuracy using pedometer analytics by measuring the distance covered by the crew during the work hours. Based on the pedometer analytics, the tools and heavy-duty equipment’s can be positioned to reduce fatalities.
D: Deep insights
In the construction industry, data sources are heavily siloed or stored at different locations, making effective data integration a challenging affair. An abundance of data can be an asset, but data mishandling or not integrating the data sources properly will lead to data silos.
Every visualization tile on the dashboard is a doorway for data exploration. Selection of a tile will lead to a report which can be filtered and sorted to know the dataset behind the report, and when you run insights, BI does the data exploration for you.
E: Tailored reporting
Reporting is an essential step to drive business decisions. Reports interactively display data to turn it into actionable information. A report can have multiple levels of interactivity like the ability to drill down, filter, and sort, as well as additional capabilities such as self-service editing, to further explore the data for more insights.
BI gathers and represents data that is ready to be analyzed. Data includes historical information, which is difficult to be traced over time. BI reporting empowers the users with the information to become experts in their area of business.
In the future days to come, BI will radically transform the business of construction. The companies that embrace data analytics and the latest technologies will be able to innovate and stay ahead of their competitors.
