Why Every AEC Firm Needs Business Intelligence

While the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector accounts for $12 trillion in annual business, it is an industry that is prone to cost overruns. 72% of AEC firms have seen projects go over budget by as much as 50%, impacting the company, the customer, stakeholders, and future business.

Inefficiencies in any organization, big-project or otherwise, drive up costs, eat away at profits, increase risks of losing future revenue, and of course, cause frustration for workers and managers alike.

Business intelligence (BI) is a means of gaining efficiencies back, maintaining trust with customers, and easing project and program managers’ frustrations. But what exactly is BI? How is it gathered and disseminated, what are its benefits, and what platforms are available to make it easier to use? Read on to find out!

Defining BI and its Benefits

Business intelligence is the assembling of information produced by projects typically sourced from various construction and project management applications. By sorting and analyzing this vast amount of data, enterprises can decipher critical trends that drive informed business decisions.

The trend for cloud-level collaboration in AEC is underway “despite the tremendous challenges construction companies face to connect huge volumes of data and people,” according to a recent article by Geospatial World.  There are significant efficiency gains and benefits with the rapid increase in integrations between cloud-hosted Geospatial and BIM solutions (GEOBIM).

General benefits of good BI in AEC include making faster decisions, ensuring everyone is working from the same playbook, and eliminating duplication of effort. Further benefits include spotting areas where project efficiencies are gained, and the ability to bid accurately for new business. Centralized project data also allows for detecting consistent issues on projects and finding new ways to fix them. Logistics, local economic conditions, weather patterns, construction needs can be easily accounted for and factored into project planning, creating more predictable and manageable projects.

Building Intelligently With BI

AEC giants like Swinerton and Flatiron Construction use cloud-hosted data lakes to keep and maintain all their project data, which provides them with massive resources to draw from for their BI needs. These companies gather their project data in a unified way effectively and quickly with LoadSpring Cloud Platform. Automated systems collect worldwide production data in their cloud storage, accessible via the platform-native tool LoadSpringInsight and off-the-shelf BI software packages.  

These data structures allow companies to learn from past projects, shore up inefficiencies, and better predict when and where things may go wrong to mitigate risk. Companies that invest in digitization such as data lakes, BI, and analytics can save upward of 20% of project costs over the project lifecycle. In other words, investing in the right technology now helps prevent cost overruns in the future, increasing competitive advantage and setting the stage for ever-increasing efficiency over time.

Getting Started With BI Is Easier Than You Think

Terms like analytics, data lakes, business intelligence, and cloud hosting might sound like a word salad of confusing terminology; the reality is much simpler than that. Harnessing your organization’s data to make it work for you—that’s what BI is all about. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Partnering with the right company is critical to doing BI right. LoadSpring meets your BI needs with a turnkey operation with benefits that preventing cost overruns. Leave the heavy lifting to the experts.

20+ years of cloud hosting for big project organizations has led to a platform that unifies and simplifies. We’ve tackled the complex IT problems so you can focus on your core business. LoadSpring and LoadSpring Cloud Platform bring you:

• Unification. Your data is stored safely, efficiently for easy access in the cloud. Data from global project worksites integrate seamlessly together and where the data feed to your custom dashboards.
• Visualization. LoadSpring Cloud Platform has built-in BI and data analytics that allow you to easily visualize, track, and manage your project and corporate KPIs with ease. LoadSpring hosts world-class BI applications so you can fine-tune your experience to your precision business needs.
• Security. Your data and cloud-hosted software are protected under many layers of cloud security measures. They’re easily accessible to you and impenetrable to security breaches and attacks. LoadSpring’s support team is available 24/7/365, so your business has what it needs to keep operating at peak efficiency when you need it.

You can expect more, get more, and do more with LoadSpring and LoadSpring Cloud Platform. Get rolling on your BI initiative right away by contacting us for your cloud BI solutions today.