Unlocking the power of data in construction: How data management can transform project outcomes

With new government plans to build 1.5 million more homes, the construction industry is set to see a significant boom in projects. However, with rising costs, workforce difficulties, and shifting regulations, firms need every tool at their disposal to mitigate risk and deliver on time.

It’s no secret that data-driven decision making is taking the business world by storm, with companies across every sector establishing business intelligence functions to turn numbers into strategy.

But what will this look like in construction? And how can leveraging data provide real-world improvements to project delivery? In this guide, we’ll explain the construction industry’s data problem, why it needs fixing, and the tools you’ll need to embrace to move up the data maturity curve.

The construction industry’s data problem

The construction industry is one of the largest sectors that still lags behind the curve in digital transformation; this makes it difficult for strategic leadership to make data-driven decisions.

Most modern construction firms rely on a wide range of digital tools throughout the course of a project. These include:

• Building Information Modeling (BIM)

• Construction Management Systems (CMS)

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

• Project Management tools

However, these proprietary systems rarely communicate with one another, isolating crucial information in separate platforms. This is called siloed data, and it’s one of the biggest challenges for business intelligence teams across all sectors.

Without a unified single source of truth compiling key data from these systems it’s difficult to understand the health of a project or the wider business.

Data from project timelines, procurement details, cost tracking, and more is often locked away, making it impossible to extract actionable insights from the numbers since you can’t see how they interact from a top-down perspective. This leads to inefficiencies, budget overruns, and delays that eat away profit margins and hamper project success.

Lack of real-time insights

Turning raw numbers into real, actionable strategies is a huge missed opportunity for construction professionals who don't have a handle on their data.

Projects are dynamic, with constantly changing variables like labour availability and supply chain disruption. However, many firms still rely on outdated, manually compiled reports, which only highlight issues from the day they’re compiled.

This lack of real-time visibility into every facet of the project leads to project managers struggling to make proactive decisions. Instead, they rely on reactive solutions to problems that could have been nipped in the bud before they became expensive.

Cost overruns and budget uncertainty

The inability to give context to these changing variables with unified financial data often leads to poor cost control and budget forecasting.

Unexpected expenses due to material costs, labour shortages, or unforeseen site issues can creep up, only making their impact apparent at later stages.

Without a transparent view of these costs and how they relate to other factors like project timelines, tracking financial performance across multiple projects manually is inefficient, inaccurate, and expensive.

Compliance challenges and regulatory risks

Ever tightening regulation around worker safety, environmental impact, and financial transparency makes compliance reporting a highly complex task.

Compliance officers often need to manually pull data from fractured sources, chase down project teams, and nag external partners for information that has no guarantee of being in a usable format.

These inconsistencies in data collection and fragmented record-keeping can make meeting compliance massively overcomplicated, increasing the risk of penalties and reputational damage from non-compliance.

Underutilisation of AI and predictive analytics

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can optimise project management, predict risk, and flag issues quicker than a monthly report ever could. However, leveraging these technologies effectively relies on giving them the data they need to actually accomplish these tasks..

AI-driven insights are unreliable without this strong database. For this reason, having clean, integrated data is important for future-proofing your company, not just for unification.

What does unified data management look like?

A unified data platform, like 5Y, connects critical systems, cleanses and standardises information, and provides real-time insights. This unified approach offers multiple advantages, which we take a closer look at in this section.

1. Increased efficiency

With data stored across multiple systems, it’s difficult to access information. This leads to redundant efforts, lots of admin, and wasted time.

A unified approach streamlines these workflows by taking manual data entry out of the equation. It also reduces duplication and allows data to flow seamlessly between each department and system.

With everything housed in a standardised, single source of truth, each team can access their data quicker, boosting productivity and making the whole project run smoother.

2. Enhanced decision-making

Timely and accurate data is the basis for informed data-driven decisions. This is impossible without clear visibility into project progress, budget utilisation, and risk.

By integrating all data into a centralised platform, decision-makers can run whatever reports they need or use real-time dashboards to gain a holistic view of each and every project.

This streamlined reporting and unrivalled transparency allows for problems to be addressed proactively rather than reactively. It also ensures resources are allocated as efficiently as possible based on how far along the timeline each project is.

3. Cost control & financial planning

Every construction professional has seen their fair share of cost overruns. This is usually down to inaccurate budgeting, procurement delays, or unexpected hikes in material prices.

With a unified data management system, finance teams gain real-time insights into spending trends and cost allocation, completely transforming the projection process.

They can track financial performance on a project-by-project or organisation-wide basis, as well as identify patterns and make data-driven decisions to save costs. This new level of financial control makes it significantly easier to stay within budget and allocate resources where they’re most needed.

4. Regulatory compliance

Construction is one of the most highly regulated working environments. Tightening requirements cover everything from worker safety to environmental sustainability and are increasingly asking for complex reports.

A fragmented data landscape makes meeting these requirements difficult, with key compliance metrics often inaccurate and reports manually collated at significant time cost.

There’s also an increasing need to collect difficult data like emissions figures both internally and with site subcontractors who can be slow to cooperate.

A unified system can be set up to consistently record and manage all of this, leading to an easily auditable data lake that can automatically produce reports and streamline compliance. This lets you confidently meet new regulations and avoid costly legal penalties.

5. Risk mitigation

Unexpected disruptions can derail construction projects and lead to massive costs and wasted time. Often, these circumstances appear to be unforeseeable, and leaders simply need to suck it up and deal with the consequences.

But by consolidating data from all sources across the business, patterns that were previously unrecognisable can quickly emerge. Modern tools are then able to foresee these potential risks and recommend action based on the cross-referencing of hundreds of factors.

For example, AI-driven insights can flag the specific impact on project schedules that a procurement delay will cause based on both historical and real-time data. This level of foresight significantly enhances risk management and minimises surprises across a project.

6. Workforce management optimisation

It’s no secret that workforce management represents one of the most challenging areas of construction. Contractors and subcontractors need to be managed across multiple sites, taking into account fluctuating labour demand and compliance with employment laws.

Without real-time workforce data, project managers often struggle to ensure the right people are in the right place at the right time, making inaccurate recommendations based on general tasks.

A unified data management system centralises this workforce information, integrating schedules, contractor certifications, and productivity metrics to gain a clear view of who is needed where and when.

This lets you proactively plan workforce management, reduce the downtime often caused by scheduling conflicts, and mitigate the impact of labour shortages. All of this also carries through to the next project, allowing for the analysis of workforce data to predict future labour demands and allocate resources accordingly.

How 5Y transforms construction data management

5Y’s Unified Data Platform is designed as an all-in-one data management solution that bridges the gap between fragmented data and meaningful business insights.

By providing a data lakehouse to consolidate and clean all data plus powerful tools to leverage it, 5Y lets you streamline operations, reduce cost, and continuously improve project outcomes. The platform offers:

• Seamless integration with existing systems. 5Y works with your existing BIM, CMS, ERP, and project management tools to unify all your data. It’s also built on the Microsoft Azure architecture to ensure seamless interoperability with your wider business and any tools you introduce in the future.

• Faster reporting and decision-making. With 80% of the most common industry reports ready out of the box, 5Y eliminates the need for expensive custom solutions or white-elephant internal builds. From compliance to project health, 5Y removes the inaccuracy and admin from reporting. 

• Data migration and legacy system support. You’ll probably have at least a few legacy systems that can’t support modern analytics, and that’s okay. 5Y offers a data vault to store archived historical information, combining it with real-time insights in one convenient platform.

• AI-Driven predictive insights. With all your data in one place, 5Y can guide you through to the next stage of data maturity. This involves leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to predict and mitigate overruns, risks, and delays.

The future is data-driven, but that doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune to unlock it. 5Y operates on a simple subscription model. That means you get what you pay for and the platform is continuously developed and improved based on the evolving needs of the construction industry.

Download our guide to learn more.