THE HIDDEN COSTS OF DISCONNECTED DATA SYSTEMS AND HOW IT HURTS PROFITABILITY, EFFICIENCY, AND ACCURACY

Construction companies produce vast amounts of data each day—from construction bids, project details, and on-site labor to accounting and other operational information.  Using this data can help you gain more insight into specific areas of your construction business and overall performance so you can make informed decisions that drive profitability. 

Harnessing data allows you to further connect teams and departments within your business, increasing collaboration, efficiency, and productivity. Implementing a data-driven approach with workflow automation also leads to fewer errors and reduced risk.  

However, many construction companies aren’t fully leveraging their data capabilities. If your construction business has disconnected data systems, your staff may only see part of your data’s story. Or basing critical decisions on inaccurate information.  

How do you avoid this problem so you can take advantage of what your data offers? By using construction API and software integrations to combine and better manage data. Our construction software connects your on-site and back-office data, integrating it seamlessly with your existing systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). We help you automate previously time-consuming tasks, which not only improves speed but reduces errors from manual entry.  

What Construction Data to Collect and Analyze 

Data is created at every phase of your construction projects and within your business itself. The construction data you decide to collect and analyze depends on your company’s needs and goals. For instance, if you’re interested in boosting efficiency and project profitability, you’ll need to analyze construction project expenses, labor costs, and other project management information.  

Consider the following types of construction data, which significantly impact your business. 

Planning and Pre-construction Data 

Tracking previous construction project bids and outcomes is essential for generating more accurate estimates in the future. Comparing your past project bids with your actual expenses, like the cost of labor and building materials, along with the number of change orders and the timeline of your past projects, helps you develop the plan, scope, and budget for new projects to ensure you turn a profit.  

On-Site Data 

Collecting field data during the execution phase of your project is critical to improving efficiency. You’ll want to monitor and optimize the scheduling of your crew teams and trades between project sites to reduce time waste and project delays. You can also analyze field productivity using labor data from digital timesheets and construction task completion rates to keep projects running on time.  

You may also want to monitor your construction equipment fleet for machine health and to keep track of maintenance, so heavy machinery is available when needed. Or consider tracking worker safety incidents, which can help your construction company identify and mitigate on-site risks to prevent workflow disruptions.  

Back-Office Operational Data 

Your back-office employees play a key role in your construction projects, managing project finances, accounts payable, and payroll responsibilities that run your operations. Tracking project management and financial data enables your staff to create project progress reports for stakeholders or financial statements for quarterly board meetings. Use this data to optimize your projects’ timeline and budget.  

By collecting and analyzing your construction data you can more easily identify areas that need improvement, fix bottlenecks, and enhance your existing processes to improve worker productivity and construction project performance outcomes. 

Problems of Disconnected Data Systems 

Even if your construction company collects data, it doesn’t mean you can easily access it or see a complete picture of your data. Business data is often siloed, or isolated, in different platforms and sources. Your construction data may be located on separate hard drives or servers in multiple offices, cloud-based data storage systems, specific point solutions, or a combination of all these storage types. Disconnected data systems can lead to several problems, including lack of visibility, greater inefficiencies, and being more prone to errors.  

If your data systems aren’t fully integrated, you’re simply not seeing a full view of your data. When data from your accounting or ERP software can’t communicate with data from other sources, you may be basing your business decisions on incomplete or inaccurate data. In addition, having data siloed by department or team limits data visibility and collaboration, preventing staff from seeing or sharing information that impacts company-wide performance and profitability. 

Integrating data comes with its challenges. Manually integrating your data from various sources and platforms is both time-consuming and prone to data entry errors. On top of this, your construction company may need to incorporate unstructured data, like information from emails, apps, and mobile devices, that are in different formats or structures from your quantitative data. To avoid mistakes and speed up your integration process, consider using construction software integration tools that automatically connect your data sources. 

Advantages of Integrating Data and Connecting Your Teams 

Construction application programming interface (API) acts as a translator between different software applications, allowing your existing data to talk to one another. Say, for example, you want your project management software to communicate with your accounting or ERP software. Having API construction software allows each program to communicate information for the two systems to understand each other. 

When you need your software systems to not only share data but also connect and work together to manage your construction projects’ labor, payroll, customer, and financial aspects, construction software integrations are key. Integrations allow your teams to share data between different software platforms and departments and work more collaboratively. For instance, back-office personnel can easily access information from our field reports or document flow products and see how they align with your accounting records or CRM integrations.  

Offers more transparency 

Our integration features promote greater data transparency and connection between what’s happening in the field and your back-office decisions. Project managers, payroll administrators, accountants, and other key members of your company can more easily access and organize real-time field data that impacts their roles and responsibilities. It cuts down on the time it takes for your back-office staff to receive and use relevant data, so they can more quickly generate insights that move your company forward. 

Consolidate data and generate reports 

Data benefits your business the most when you get accurate information in front of the right people at the right time. Using data drop to scrape, collect, and consolidate your data does just this. Our construction accounting integration software draws financial data from various locations into a single database. From there, your finance manager or controller can quickly analyze and generate financial reports using business intelligence tools to share with your CFO and others. Allowing your company to run cost tracking analysis, explore project variance, or forecast future costs with ease. 

Streamline tasks 

Integrated data can also help you automate and streamline tasks, saving your staff time and reducing human error. Take our remote payroll solutions for example. Our completely digital payroll process speeds up your processing and approval workflows by up to 70% while reducing human error and payroll fraud.  

You can easily automate role-based approval paths for superintendents and payroll administrators and set up passive approval so CFOs and controllers can access data without holding up the payroll process. All of this helps your construction company stay in compliance by more easily finding discrepancies, reducing payroll errors, and lowering payroll processing time.  

Integrate Your Construction Data Systems with hh2 

Construction data can increase your accuracy, efficiency, and profitability when it’s accessible and connected with all your systems. hh2 helps you centralize and integrate your data systems, so your most useful construction information gets to the right staffers.  

With over 20 years in the construction industry, we understand which data is crucial for your company’s success. hh2’s software makes sharing and using construction data with your integrated CRM, accounting, or project management platforms simple. Our products are specifically designed to connect your field and back office, solve problems, and speed up your construction workflows.