How to Manage Project Risk with Construction Data Analytics

July 16, 2021

Jadie Fanganello

The phrase ‘construction data analytics’ may be enough to make your eyes glaze over. But every day on construction sites, teams are coordinating hundreds of subcontractors, managing thousands of open issues, and navigating constant onsite changes. As construction projects continue to grow in complexity, teams need the right insights to minimize risk and improve quality and safety initiatives.

Furthermore, the digitization of construction processes and the use of mobile devices on jobsites means more data is being captured than ever before. But 95% of that data is going unused by construction and engineering firms, according to FMI.

Data analytics are no longer a nice to have – they are essential to providing the right insights to improve quality and reduce risk. When teams are equipped with the right information and data, they can improve decision making and project outcomes. It’s the reason we built powerful data analytics capabilities into our Insight product for both Autodesk Construction Cloud unified platform and BIM 360.

Let’s explore four capabilities within Insight that empowers teams to leverage insights to minimize risks.

1. Dashboards

Within Insight, anyone on the project can view a summary of critical and actionable information through preset and customizable dashboards. These dashboards can be easily configured by adding or removing cards from the Card Library including third party partner cards, as well as dragging and dropping cards to customize views. Additionally, users can share any custom dashboards with other team members based on role, company, or specific users.

Dashboards are created on both a project and cross project level. From within a project, you can see present dashboards for Quality, Safety, Project Controls, Design, and Risk (if your project leverages Construction IQ).

From the Executive Overview view within Insight, executives can view cross project dashboards to make more informed business decisions and gain visibility into overall risk assessment. Through these dashboards, executives can view risk levels of individual projects by location as well as drill down to see patterns of risk over time. By analyzing patterns, executives can optimize processes across similar projects.

These dashboards allow you to easily visualize project progress and determine which areas of the project may need the most attention.

“The ability to identify risks across projects enables us to prioritize opportunities for improvement and reduce risk to future projects.” – Anthony Colonna, Senior Vice President, Skanska

Build - Customize Dashboard Mockup

2. Reports

Reporting is a necessary but often time-consuming project activity. Within Insight, we aim to make reporting easier. By having a centralized place to create, schedule, and share reports, teams save a lot of time and always know where to find the most current information.

Within the Reports tool you will find a series of reporting options including Issue, RFI, and Submittal summary and detail reports. Reports are easily customizable and can be grouped by or filtered to fit your specific needs. Finally, these reports can be scheduled on a reoccurring basis and shared with other team members based on user, company, or role.

“The reporting and dashboarding features in Construction IQ provide clear and concise feedback on the various project critical data streams. This information enables our project management teams to make the right decisions more rapidly and effectively,” says Michael Murphy, Digital Construction Operations Manager at BAM Ireland. “With these features, we’re having less reactive conversations with more emphasis on KPIs that can drive continual improvement. The simple visualization of the challenge or the issue alone helps us bring that focus.”

Build - Reports Mockup

3. Data Connector

Through a single click, Data Connector allows teams to quickly extract project data from both the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform or BIM 360 for customized use in other robust business intelligence tools. You can also easily schedule extractions and sync them directly to Power BI through the Power BI Connector. And to make this a full circle connection, you can even use the Power BI partner card to then view those Power BI dashboards directly within an Insight dashboard and share it with the rest of the project team.

We also created easy to set up Power BI templates so that you can quickly start leveraging your data and customizing dashboards to see exactly what you want.

The Data Connector saves teams time and money by giving them a tool to extract data without needing expensive APIs or custom coding in addition to improving data visualizations to inform better business decisions.

BIM 360 - RFI Dashboard Mockup

4. Construction IQ

Construction IQ is a machine learning based capability that delivers risk analysis of quality, safety, design, and project controls data from both Autodesk Construction Cloud platform and BIM 360 projects. Construction IQ moves beyond the traditional concept of static data and takes prediction to the next level with assistive, action-based intelligence. The capability allows users to:

Better manage project risk and outcomes by identifying high risk issues that have the potential to impact cost, schedule, quality, and safety
Evaluate subcontractor performance and predict potential risks on a day-to-day basis and for future projects
Help project leaders understand high risk quality problems and actions to mitigate that risk
Help design teams identify issues that are at higher risk to turn into costly RFIs downstream during construction
Give project leaders visibility into RFI risk to prioritize and manage RFIs that could add significant cost and schedule impacts
Help safety managers understand leading indicators to potential behavioral and environmental hazards and take proactive measure before incidents happen
Help construction executives identify risks across projects and proactively improve project outcomes

Most importantly, you do not have to do any extra work to get the benefit of Construction IQ. All data captured during construction is continuously and automatically analyzed.

Monitor - Risk construction iq