Dashpivot article – Power BI in the Construction Industry
Power BI in the Construction Industry
What is the Role of Power BI in the Construction Industry?
Power BI is an extremely powerful visualisation tool that helps solve the major challenges and causes of complications to project managers and anyone involved in experience in the construction industry.
Construction projects involve numerous stakeholders, and they may use different project management tools across different projects, fields, teams, and more, which result in scattered and dispersed data across the platforms. Sometimes project managers and executives make decisions from outdated information due to delays in updating data in the system or lack of a unified visualisation. Manual data entry or collection from workers and employees increases the risk of mistakes and inaccuracies, too. With a lack of a centralised tool, organisations would put more effort into collecting data to identify and monitor KPIs, which also in turn leads to delayed responses and decision-making to problems. The dynamic construction industry faces a number of challenges and with the high demands of the market and limited budget, organisations can’t afford any delays.
The role of Power BI in the construction industry is it transforms raw and unorganised construction data into a unified, comprehensible source of information project managers and executives can utilise to create data-driven and informed decisions. It has the capability to integrate data from multiple project management tools most organisations use nowadays into one consolidated data. Project management tools aid in workflow management, task tracking, project planning, scheduling, resource management and many more and organisations can sync these data to Power BI for analytics, visualisation, and advanced reporting. Many teams may use different project management tools, so having Power BI’s integration capabilities is useful for organisation to centralise everything.
The Need for Data Analytics in the Construction Industry
Despite being one of the oldest industries, construction has been somewhat slower in adopting modern digital solutions.
However, with project complexities increasing, there's a growing realisation that data-driven decision-making can significantly improve project efficiency, cost management, and risk mitigation.
What Common Challenges Does the Construction Industry Face that Power BI Can Help Address?
Scattered Data Across Multiple Projects or Sites
Projects involve a lot of key players with multiple contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and more, and they use different tools and systems for construction management and data collection. Construction projects are not limited to one location, too. Some still even rely on manual data collection like using spreadsheets and physical papers because they don’t utilise digital tools for data input. With these factors, construction data is scattered. With data coming from different platforms and manual input, it is time-consuming to consolidate all that information and create reports for the management and executives. It can also be troublesome if all information is not aligned.
Because data is in a lot of platforms and software, it will be extremely challenging to integrate them. Teams, contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, or anyone use different tools for communication, scheduling, management, budgeting, and procurement. It’s a mess to even think project managers and executives to be opening multiple software and tabs just to view information. This challenge especially disrupts the workflow.
Discrepancies, Inconsistent Data, and Delayed Insights
The construction industry is dynamic and complex, and with using multiple platforms It’s bound to have discrepancies and inconsistent data being disseminated across stakeholders. Even manual input is a factor for inconsistent data collection. Papers could be lost or tampered with. In a fast-paced workplace, penmanship may not be readable or employees might delay their reports. This eventually leads to delayed insights with an added factor of back and forth communication for data clarification. It’ll be so much more convenient if data collection was accessible to everyone in real-time and consolidated data is generated automatically without refreshing the site.
No Real-time Access to Data for Data Analysis
Without real-time access to data, information being relayed to project managers is outdated and without the proper tools for data analysis, employees have to go through the rigorous process of collecting information with back and forth communication to clarify outdated data and then proceed with the actual data analysis. It’s time-consuming. If the organisation could have the proper tools to automatically analyse complex project data effectively with real-time data, things would be more efficient
What are Some Use Cases of Power BI in Construction Projects?
Project and Progress Monitoring / Tracking
It’s a standard practice in the construction industry to have a single dashboard to view the key phases, timelines, and milestones of a project or multiple projects. Since there are multiple stakeholders at play, they need to be able to access information and construction data in real-time without any hassle. Power BI comes into the picture by providing real-time data integrated from multiple platforms and consolidate all information in one unified set.
If the company uses Dashpivot already as the digital tool to collect data for Daily Reports, Weekly or Monthly Progress Reports, Inspection Reports, Meeting Minutes, Change Orders, RFI Logs, Safety Logs, Punch lists, Photographic Documentation, or more, organisations can integrate data from Dashpivot to PowerBI by using Flowsite.
Financial Oversight
Trying to stay on budget is critical in the construction industry, and the biggest challenge is cost overruns. Power BI has the capability to visualise these variances and displays comparison between the actual spending against the budget. Aside from this benefit, organisations are able to narrow down financial data across projects and determine which projects are profitable and underperforming. Additionally, with Power BI, organisations can manage resources like labour, materials, and equipment properly. There’s proper resource allocation and utilisation with Power BI’s capability to track them. Organisations can also use Power BI to display in dashboards the status of receivables, payables, and overall cash flow.
With organisations having different contractors using multiple platforms to track the finances, Power BI’s flexible integration can be extremely useful in migrating data to a singular dashboard. If the organisation is actively using Dashpivot for expense tracking and financial reporting documents, it’s easier to migrate construction and financial data into PowerBI by using Flowsite.
Workforce Metrics
Every organisation tracks their workforce metrics, attendance, working hours, team performance, and more. The construction industry particularly deals with varied work schedules due to factors like type of project, location, company policies, and also specific job roles. There are standard hours, overtime hours, shifts, project-specific hours, regional variations, and more. It’s also pretty common for employees and workers to extend working hours, especially on large projects with critical deadlines.
With PowerBI, organisations can analyse team performance, create attendance dashboards from all employees across different projects, visualise workforce skills set in order to optimise task delegation, and many more.
If the organisation already uses Dashpivot for attendance, recruitment documents, workforce scheduling, payroll documents, training documents, and other similar documents, it’s much easier to migrate to PowerBI and visualise all data into one consolidated view by using Flowsite.
Compliance
Construction companies should always follow regulations and standards. Regulatory bodies mandate regular complance and audits, and will issue certifications indicating that the project is aligned with the local regulations and industry standards. Construction of buildings, homes, and establishments really requires strict compliance checks.
With PowerBI, organisations can have a visual understanding on safety incident reports, how often they occur, the common location they occur, and other relevant information. It’s also much easier to understand data when they are conveniently visualised comprehensively through dashboards and charts. Organisations can also gauge whether the training, seminars, and compliance training sessions are effective and impactful on site.
If the organisation already uses Dashpivot to collect safety incident reports, attendance in training and seminars, and others, it’s easier to generate these dashboards and charts for visualisation in PowerBi by using Flowsite.
How Does Flowsite Migrate Data from Dashpivot to PowerBI?
With all the Power BI use cases mentioned above, maybe you’re wondering how you can optimise your organisation’s construction management by using Dashpivot and Flowsite.
Flowsite is an integrations platform that allows you and your team to connect multiple tools without using no code for integrations. This convenience eliminates the hassle of manual data entry and outdated or inconsistent data. Using digital tools to streamline your data management like Dashpivot is already a game changer for your organisation, so it’s not a question that utilising Flowsite’s PowerBI integrations will seamlessly streamline construction management added with the advanced reporting, analytics, and insights.
If you’re already using Dashpivot for your construction data entry and management on site, it’s much easier to migrate Dashpivot data to PowerBI by using Flowsite. All you and your team should do is set triggers and actions to automate data entry into PowerBI and in almost real-time, you can sync data and improve your management workflow.
Without using code and even as someone without coding background, you can easily transfer your construction data in Dashpivot to PowerBI. Let’s take for example, data from Dashpivot like your organisation’s daily/weekly/monthly reports, inspection reports, logs, and lists can be loaded to PowerBI for data analysis and advanced visualisation. Even your expense tracking and financial reporting documents already in Dashpivot can be transferred to PowerBI through Flowsite. Similarly with attendance, workforce scheduling, payroll documents, and more.
Nobody wants the hassle of manual entry to PowerBI when you already have collected data in Dashpivot and a flexible digital tool with Power BI integrations, Flowsite. Take note, to use Flowsite, your team must already be using Dashpivot, which also on its own is already a flexible digital tool to streamline data collection. Utilise the convenience Flowsite offers in order to create customisable dashboards and advanced analytics in PowerBI.
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