It's no secret that the construction industry faces many project management challenges. Cost overruns are one of the most common results of these challenges, leading construction companies to significantly go over budget more often than they would like to admit.
Disorganized and siled data, data spread across multiple systems, and a general lack of connectivity are common factors among projects with high failure rates.
But by breaking down data silos and leveraging construction analytics, we can improve onsite and offsite collaboration to help complete our projects on time, on budget, and with greater efficiency.
How data and analytics improve collaboration in construction
Construction teams around the world face collaboration challenges that are only exacerbated by the industry's reliance on email, Excel spreadsheets, messaging apps and various paper-based processes.
Technology and construction analytics help connect teams, giving all stakeholders access to project data from anywhere and allowing them to visualize changes in real time. This is key to improving construction collaboration between teams.
The data you collect using a central construction management platform not only helps drive everyone's collaborative efforts, it also helps make your internal and external processes more efficient, promotes transparency, and keeps workers accountable.
1. Facilitate better communication
When everyone understands what needs to happen and when it happens, productivity increases. Teams can see issues as they arise and easily access the information they need to make better, faster decisions to resolve them.
With construction analytics and connected data, all communication happens in one place – the same place where relevant project information is stored. Onsite and offsite workers need to collaborate efficiently and they need to be able to do so from anywhere.
The first step is to use building analytics to facilitate effective conversations across teams.
2. Reduce delays and rework
Mistakes happen, especially during large-scale projects. These errors are not necessarily a reason for extensive and costly delays and rework; the problem is in isolated data.
Inadequate data storage and lack of attention to construction analysis leads to a snowball effect, making it nearly impossible to identify and correct small errors before they turn into significant problems.
By collecting, connecting, and analyzing your project data, you can resolve issues as they occur, rather than discovering them when you're closer to finishing construction. Additionally, access to real-time analytics allows contractors and subcontractors to avoid making these mistakes.
3. Get real-time visibility
While the benefits of construction analytics are most visible during the construction process, they can also increase productivity in the design phase.
Your design team can leverage data and analytics to improve construction collaboration, coordinating tasks to create projects that match your client's vision and expectations.
And these benefits go beyond the design process – other teams get better collaboration with the design department, allowing everyone to plan their activities together, rather than taking a siled approach, risking costly delays and rework, as we discussed above.
4. Mitigate security risks
Collaboration in construction is crucial for better safety planning, which can save your company in the long run. In fact, investing in worker safety can save you money without slowing down your project's progress. And the answer to mitigating safety risks lies in analyzing construction data.
When you bring together all the other benefits of improving your team collaboration, you might notice something interesting: each of them indirectly improves on-site security:
- Better communication and real-time visibility ensures everyone knows what's happening on site, who is working in which areas, and whether there are any potential hazards.
- Identifying and correcting errors as soon as they happen significantly reduces the risk of injury from preventable accidents.
5. Improve operational readiness
Better collaboration leads to better decision making. It also makes it easier to involve the client in the project to get feedback and make necessary changes early in the design and construction process.
You can later share insights and analysis with the customer, improving your operational efficiency and delivery procedure.
Construction data and analytics can also help you reduce disputes during the project and after completion – the data collected serves as a single source of truth and a solid audit trail.
Connect your data and improve your workflows
Data is data, right? Not exactly. Most construction companies have data sets, especially as they continue to work towards digitalization. But most of this data sits in silos and goes unused.
Siled data leads to costly errors and misinformation. For example, when we rely on data that doesn't update in real time and doesn't promote cross-team collaboration (think Excel spreadsheets), everyone only sees a small part of the project, with no way of knowing if the data is up to date. the date.
However, when you connect your data using a central platform, you will find that the real value of your data comes from the building blocks of analysis gained from the relationships between data sets.
