As E&C companies attempt to collect increasingly complex data for each project, more companies will experience growing pains. Many of these pains stem from establishing best practices for data accuracy and accessibility across organizations to drive smart decision making.

Siloed data sources lead to data duplication in each tool, and the subsequent inefficiency and increased risk of errors. Custom-built IT integrations to replicate design, operations, field, and finance data often involve long lead times, invasive process changes for staff, and high upfront capital investment with no guarantee of success. Cautionary tales are all too common among E&C companies, as McKinsey’s 2019 “Decoding digital transformation in construction” explains:

“After spending five years and countless sums on trialing new software platforms and ways of working, the executive team at a large contractor was nearly ready to call an end to its digital-transformation program. Dozens of attempts to streamline projects with digital solutions, such as 5D BIM, had failed to deliver. A few had succeeded in the pilot phase, but the company had struggled to apply those solutions at scale. Site and office workers grumbled about having to adopt yet more new technologies—before abandoning them and returning to their old ways of working. Overall, projects hit delays and ran over budget as frequently as before, and productivity had barely budged upward.”

An FMI and Plan Grid survey found that construction workers lose almost two full working days every week searching for project information and solving avoidable issues. Paper-based processes usually require data to be entered manually and require staff to enter that data. And even the most meticulous data-entry team members are prone to human error like typos now and then.

Despite being digital, spreadsheets don’t fare much better than paper processes when it comes to efficiency and accuracy. Manipulating data in spreadsheets is still a manual process subject to human error, and compiling data sources increases potential for error and further wastes resources.

This myth was once true, and some vendors still do quote integration approaches that are not feasible for many E&C firm budgets. But today, integration solutions once available only to enterprises atop the ENR 500 are now available to small and mid-sized firms. Recent breakthroughs in virtualization, iPaaS, and cloud computing have contributed to their lower costs and broader availability.

Virtualization
As defined by Tech Target, data virtualization is an approach to data management that allows an application to retrieve and manipulate data without requiring technical details, like data format or its physical location. As this technology has matured, it has driven total integration costs down.

Integration Platform as a Solution (iPaaS)
Gartner defines iPaaS as a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution, and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on-prem and cloud-based processes, services, applications, and data within individual or across multiple organizations.

iPaaS is ideal for E&C firms. Collaborating and sharing information across multidisciplinary teams including owners, architects, consultants, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers using different systems is the cornerstone of E&C work.

Construction organizations typically collaborate with teams across multiple cloud platforms, so when considering iPaaS, look for a cloud-agnostic solution. Some solutions offer packages with varying costs based on the number and/or complexity of flows (data sources) needed. Custom email alerts may also prove helpful, for example, if an error occurs or if a batch is completed.

Cloud Computing
Collecting servers in a single room or rack is no longer necessary. Geographic isolation of data sources is actually a business continuity / disaster recovery best practice. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud were growing in popularity even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sharp increase of remote work and video conferencing accelerated their growth.

E&C firms are deploying more hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud arrangements. Essentially, hybrid cloud refers to the combination of private and public cloud infrastructure, and some or many from an organization’s own data center. Multi-cloud configurations use multiple cloud providers to meet different technical or business requirements. The reason cloud computing, sometimes referred to as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), is so popular is that it allows for fast scalability, broad availability, and low total cost of ownership vs. managing everything in company-owned data centers.

In the McKinsey study, “Reinventing Construction, a Route to Higher Productivity,” global construction sector labor-productivity growth averaged 1 percent per year over the past two decades while total world economy growth was 2.8 percent, and manufacturing growth was 3.6 percent.

The study mentions that on-site productivity can increase by as much as 50 percent by implementing a cloud-based control tower that rapidly assembles accurate data in near real time that is both backward-looking and predictive. In other words, proper data management is key to success.

One way to increase productivity is for owners and contractors to get on the same page on well-defined key performance indicators (KPIs), with both parties having access to a single source of data truth.

Cloud computing has helped create the foundation for as-a-service models like software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is now growing in popularity because it fills a hole for engineering and construction firms. Like most as-a-service models, it eliminates the need for long, capital-intensive implementations. The focus shifts to subscription-based tech to reduce upfront costs while increasing implementation speed and enhancing flexibility for construction firms. iPaaS also provides access to the newest technologies while removing the barrier of maintenance. As-a-service providers assume responsibility for building, maintaining, and updating the technology infrastructure.

With iPaaS, accurate, actionable construction data integrated from multiple sources provides continuous value to users. Sources may include owners, architects, consultants, engineers, contractors, sub-contractors, and suppliers. iPaaS eliminates data silos and opens the door for automating processes that increase productivity, safety, and efficiency. Users continue to use the tools and interfaces they are already accustomed to, thereby increasing productivity, efficiency, and user acceptance.

Pro Football Hall of Fame member Al Davis said “Speed kills. You can’t teach speed. Everything else in the game can be taught, but speed is a gift from God.” In construction, speed is also crucial. Fortunately, speed can be increased exponentially – without divine intervention – through integration.

In construction estimating, for example, speed is a critical factor in winning bids. Companies with easy access to their past estimates and the ability to drill down into granular details can respond quickly to bid opportunities, confident that their estimates will be competitive while ensuring a healthy profit margin. Without an estimate history as part of an integrated solution, the bid process can be painful. As deadlines loom, best guesses may be made. And in those cases where guesstimates are used, organizations wind up wondering whether or not they underestimated true job cost. As Tom Porter wrote in the book Profit, Risk and Leadership, “It has been my experience that one bad job can wipe out the fees associated with ten or more normal, good jobs.”

A: No. While you may encounter firms with a vested interest in recommending that your organization standardize with their proprietary software, options like iPaaS allow you to achieve interoperability without starting over. Interoperability involves one piece of software exchanging information with another. You may become less reliant on spreadsheets, but you definitely do not need to start from scratch.