7 Data Sources That Cut Project Costs and Time

Every project, no matter how big or small, is a race against time. The longer it takes, the less profitable it is. And while shortcuts can save time, they can also lead to accidents. Striking the right balance between efficiency, productivity, profitability and ensuring worker safety is always the goal but recent data shows construction projects are exceeding budgets.

In a survey of more than 400 construction professionals, 95% report experiencing unexpected or increased costs over the past year that have led to a project exceeding budget.

When it comes to issues that impact a project going over budget or beyond the timeline, the most common reasons for delays are supply chain snags, the rising cost of materials, labor shortages, permitting delays, equipment failures, and client changes. These issues may appear to be out of your control because they involve third parties or seemingly unexpected changes. Yet those issues can often be identified early enough to take action and prevent them from throwing a project off track.

Hidden Data Sources to Keep Your Project on Track

Based on conversations with medium and large construction companies throughout North America, here are seven hidden data sources that indicate a project may get delayed. If you can spot the following trends within the data early enough, you can finish the project on time. 

1.      Supply chain issues: While some supply delays can take you by surprise, others may be predictable based on past behaviors. The areas to take a closer look at include vendor history, type of product and seasonal snags. A history of supply delays in these areas can help you build a buffer into your project plan. 

2.       Foreman and project manager skills: Before assigning a project manager, look at their past performance based on previous jobs, billing rate, and on-time performance. You may need to add a more experienced project manager during critical milestones to elevate the primary project manager’s skills. This approach shortens learning curves while supporting succession planning, especially since more experienced generations are retiring from the industry.

3.       Subcontractors: Keep track of the performance of your subcontractors including current records on their training, certifications, experience, rates, and project expertise. Given the tight construction labor market, you may find it’s more cost effective to pay more for higher quality workers.

4.       Safety data: A history of incidents by location, worker and equipment can help spot trends (by season, weather, etc) that can be a prompt for toolbox talks and other onsite communications to prevent future accidents.

5.       Client data: When you build a project workflow that includes the client approval process, consider cross-referencing the data with timelines for previous projects in the same industry. This way, you can plan for any potential bottlenecks in the review process.

6.       Site data: This includes survey data, topography, soil tests and project built on similar terrain. By analyzing similar jobs, you can spot potential issues or building delays and any successful workarounds.

7.       Closeout processes: You can streamline this part of the project by factoring in the average permitting process time and approval cycles based on location and type of project. For example, run a query on previous projects by zip code and you can learn a lot about local codes, permit costs and inspectors.

Streamlining the data analysis process

Many site supervisors and project managers don’t have the time or staff to analyze previous projects and cross reference them with current projects to save time and money. However, they do realize they already have a lot of the information they need to make projects more profitable.

What often happens is someone is tasked with pulling together those different sources of data from previous projects and it creates even more work. Along with looking through project files and spreadsheets, they also need to make sense of hand-written forms as 91% of construction companies still use paper for manual processes.

This squandered time of digging through various spreadsheets, apps, paper forms and project records can take upwards of 11 hours a week, according to a recent productivity survey. It is also known as gray work and is counter-productive to the race against time challenge.

As a result, the need to gather the data to streamline the project management and building process is what led to the rise of construction project management platforms over the past decade. Yet learning curves, missing data from the field, and the need to integrate information from various sources of information to get a big picture view adds to the gray work issue.

This isn’t to say it’s time to abandon existing investments in technology. Rather, it’s to make them work more effectively for each project.

You can keep your existing project management platform and get the data you need without creating more work. The key is having the information centralized so it’s quickly accessible by anybody on the project at any given time. And they can easily add to it based on field observations, documenting site conditions, or other project-specific data points. This reduces the risk of inconsistencies that can come from rekeying information and trying to cobble together a report. Additionally, construction specific apps can be a reliable shortcut as long as they don’t hold information in a silo apart from the central project data.

Being able to easily access project data on a centralized work management platform also helps shorten the bidding process and presents more accurate estimates for future projects.

To keep projects moving on time and on budget may require a redirect to centralizing information. Once this is set up, you can get insights that weren’t previously easy to access. By knowing where and when to look at project data, you can avoid delays and run more profitable builds.