Dashpivot article – Power BI for Construction Management
PowerBI for Construction Management
What is Construction Management?
In the construction industry and in all construction projects or sites, the project managers and owners set goals that are aligned with the provided budgets and time constrains.
A construction or project manager is in charge of making sure that all aspects of the project or site are aligned with those goals, while at the same time dealing with various challenges and external or internal factors. These challenges could be delays, problems with compliance, legal requirements, over-the-budget, labour shortages, and more.
Construction management is the process of making sure everything is in place. It is the process of planning, coordinating, and supervising the projects ensuring they are aligned with the budget, according to schedule, and meeting industry standards and compliance requirements.
How is Power BI Relevant to Construction Management?
Construction management deals with managing resources and schedules, overseeing costs, managing risks, and communicating with stakeholders like clients, engineers, architects, owners, and contractors.
Traditional methods for construction management use paper-based documentation, physical drawings and blueprints, manual scheduling, real-life communication, using spreadsheets for budget tracking and cost estimation, on-site supervision, and some organisations may even use digital tools now to fully digitise the entire construction management.
These methods may have been effective for the past years, but with how fast-paced the construction industry has been with tight deadlines and overwhelming demands, Power BI can step in to make things a lot easier.
What Power BI Features Aid in Construction Management?
Power BI has been a game-changer for the construction industry for having features that aid in construction management. They significantly improve the construction management process and make it easier for projects to stay aligned with the budgets and schedules.
Interactive Dashboards, Data Visualisation, Customised Templates, Centralised Reporting
Dashboards, charts, graphs, maps, and matrices can be used to visualise construction data, which makes it easier to have a collection and summarised view of all data across one or multiple projects. Organisations can also make use of pre-built templates that were specially built for construction projects. It’s easier to emphasise and highlight specific data to study patterns and trends to track project performance.
Real-Time Reporting, Data Integration With Collaboration and Scheduling Tools, Collaboration Tools
Organisations may use collaboration and scheduling tools across projects, teams, and sites. With Power BI’s flexible integration capabilities, organisations can connect multiple data sources from project management and scheduling tools and combine them into one single dashboard. It’s made easier to collaborate with stakeholders by simple sharing the dashboards, charts, graphs, and other reports to collaboration tools.
Forecasting, Predictive Analytics
Power BI is a helpful tool for sharing forecasts about costs, risks, and timelines. It has the machine learning capabilities to identify possible delays and budget overruns, which saves a lot of time rather than manually doing it.
Scalability, Flexibility, Accessibility
Power BI can fully adjust to any type of project, whether small, big, single-site, or multi-site projects. With the flexible system and feature to adjust metrics and data sources, organisations don’t have to worry about complicated data as projects evolve.
Power BI can also be easily accessible using mobile phones or tablets. Employees and workers can seamless view dashboards, charts, and other data on-the-go. Most especially when they’re on site, they can access, update, and share directly.
Risk Management, Compliance
It’s made easier with Power BI to manage risks as risk and near miss reports can be used as the source of data to analyse patterns and trends. With those information, construction and project managers can monitor safety metrics and create compliance or audit reports.
Data Security and Safety
Not everyone must have access to all data in the organisation. Power BI has the feature to layer permissions and access controls across projects and project data. It could be so that certain teams have customised views of dashboards. This is also especially helpful to only allow data relevant to certain teams.
What Are the Common Challenges in Construction Management?
Managing construction projects is a handful, as more often than not, there are a lot of factors at play that cause delays and over-budgeting. The industry is complex and dynamic, and there will always be unforseen issues, risks, miscommunication, changing regulatory demands, financial setbacks, weather-related concerns, unexpeceted delays, and more. Construction managers need to always be on their feet, decisive, and make adaptive strategies to maintain harmony between stakeholders, keep the projets on track, while at the same time adhering to industry standards. Power BI can help address and actively mitigate some of the challenges laid out below.
Project Delays
This is pretty common in the construction industry and mostly caused by weather conditions, labour shortages, late material delivery, and more. It’s important to be able to keep track of the adjusting schedules in real-time by using Power BI so that project managers and other stakeholders can develop informed decisions to still meet final deadlines despite the delays.
Budget Overruns
Oftentimes there will unexpected costs, inefficiencies, and inaccurate estimates on site. To be able to visualise costs in real-time, organisations must use digital tools that aid them in having a full view of all costs across all projects and sites. Construction projects are always in a tight budget, so it’s important that all resources are maximised. With Power BI, stakeholders can see which projects are going beyond the budget or which ones are not earning as much as they thought they would.
Gaps in Communication
With multiple projects and sites, of course there are numerous contractors, engineers, architects, clients, and stakeholders at play. Back and forth communication in real life, emails, or calls can be bothersome, especially if data are outdated. Fragmented and delayed information can create inefficiencies in reports. Power BI comes into play by using its accessibility, flexibility, and scalability features. With employees being able to access Power BI using their mobile phones and tablets, they can view and edit dashboards pretty easily and upload data in real time. These dashboards are also available for stakeholders to view so that data is delivered in real time with no issues.
Unforeseen Risks
With Power BI collecting regular data from projects, it’ll have enough information to conduct predictive analysis and forecasting from trends and patterns. This feature in Power BI is extremely functional for predicting risks, which helps stakeholders develop solutions in mitigating them effectively.
What Are the Benefits of Power BI for Construction Teams?
With Power BI, constructions managers can actually generate better decisions and solutions to keep the projects in schedule and within the budget. Teams can have instant access to project data by using a personal computer, and if they’re on site they can use their mobile phones and tablets.
Construction managers can easily monitor construction progress without any of the tedious manual scheduling. Power BI can also easily assist in tracking expenses by using the dashboards and customisable reports. Power BI’s features overall fosters collaboration between stakeholders and teams because it’s easy and user-friendly.
How Can Power BI Be Implemented in Construction Processes if You’re Already Using Dashpivot?
If you’re already using Dashpivot for your construction processes and data entry, then it’ll be much easier for you to transfer data into Power BI for data analytics, dashboards, charts, and reports.
To begin, Dashpivot is the information management system that supersedes physical papers, spreadsheets, word documents, PDFs, and other fixed folders. Dashpivot is especially helpful as the medium of communication between office and site workers. You can create forms and documents using Dashpivot’s drag-and-drop form feature, and easily access those documents in your mobile phone or tablets. When you need to fill out forms on site, just simply get your mobile phones and tablets, and type the necessary data. Information is saved in real-time, and even when you’re offline, data is automatically synced once you’re connected to the internet.
Create your customised forms and documents or use the public library. You can add photos, videos, and attachments to support claims or as photographic evidence. Attach location tags on photos to emphasise a location. You can add tables, dropdowns, e-signatures, and many more too. All files are stored in a centralised database. Dashpivot also offers a flexible folder structure where you can layer permissions to certain employees only. It’s easy, user-friendly, and secure.
With all that construction data collected via Dashpivot, you can easily transfer them to Power BI for analytics, dashboards, charts, and graphs to create visual and interactive reports to be used across the organisation. How can Dashpivot be connected to Power BI then?
How Can Flowsite Transfer Data from Dashpivot to Power BI?
You and your team don’t have to manually input data from Dashpivot to Power BI when there’s already Flowsite for it. Set triggers and actions in Flowsite to simply automate the entire process. And it’s not only Power BI, Flowsite integrations are flexible that you can change the resulting software into Excel Desktop, Sharepoint, Xero, QuickBooks, and Dataverse too.
With zero code, Flowsite’s PowerBI integration allows you to transfer data from Dashpivot to Power BI in almost real-time. It could be your site diaries, daily reports, inspections, pre-starts, and many more. You can get even more accurate reporting and insights just by automation, no manual and tedious steps. You can analyse product and cost quantities from your site diary reports, create dashboards and reports from employee and site attendance sheets, monitor critical KPIs, and more.
Site diary template
Complete and organise your daily diaries more efficiently.
Construction Change Order template
Manage change order completion and approval automation with this smart template.
Delay Analysis Report template
Detail those site delay events with this flexible template.
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