A typical construction involves more than a dozen subcontractors working at a site that changes (physically) every week. No other industry has a manufacturing process where the environment and people are so dynamic. These conditions create unique process management challenges, but the goal remains the same. If you want to maximize profits and minimize risks, you need to know exactly what’s happening at your construction site at any given moment – and that means having access to data to fuel process management.

The industry already uses tools to achieve this – linked schedules, aided by Gantt charts. However, in reality, each activity block shows a lot of work over a very long period, making it challenging to have real control over the project. As an experienced project director told me the other day, “Having two weeks locked in your Gantt for coating the seventh floor means you’ll only realize it’s too late when those two weeks are over.” Schedules alone are generic instruments – it’s quite common to look at the construction site spreadsheet and see extensive green lines, and then as the deadline approaches, you realize that the green only seemed green, and there are still many activities waiting to be done.

This means that the first step to true control is a detailed execution plan. A modern framework that can assist us in this creation is BIM (Building Information Model). Combining existing Gantts with BIM’s native elements can transform the project program into a highly detailed execution plan. Therefore, the “Coating 7th floor” activity can now be expanded into dozens of smaller tasks for each wall or square meter.

Next, we need an appropriate measurement solution. To truly reap the benefits, a detailed execution plan must be complemented with more detailed and frequent monitoring. With managers already at odds with current data collection methods, doing the activity manually is not really an option.

At Allie, we have tasked ourselves with addressing data process management in construction and using technology to close the project control gap. We believe that managers should manage, and technology should handle the massive task of tracking processes.

However, as noted, our vision also presents a new challenge – processing all this data and achieving the real goal, which is obviously to improve the process. Key insights for the construction team are extracted from this data (such as what is on schedule and what has been missed) to create actionable triggers that can be implemented immediately to make daily decisions, control processes, and adapt scheduling.

With information from Buildots.