Construction is a complex industry requiring interactions among diverse participants to plan and execute a project. As the industry’s information handling transitioned away from paper, the amount of raw data in digital form exploded. A mixer-load of concrete or a shipment of structural steel still was just one material item. But where in the past it would simply generate a line-item in a project management file, now every step in the material’s journey through the construction cycle – as well as its cost and how much a company might be using and paying at its various operating locations – left a digital trail. Construction providers had difficulty figuring out how to transform the growing data torrent from a problem to be managed into an opportunity to improve their business. The concurrent proliferation of task-oriented software worsened data fragmentation and incompatibility.

Graham Construction is currently in year two of an initiative to create a new data platform aimed at transforming data into an enterprise-level asset that will improve the company’s efficiency and deliver better outcomes for project owners. “Data is a by-product of the business process,” explains Annette Cooper, Director of Data and Analytics in Graham’s IT and Enterprise Applications Department. “Because data is everywhere and growing so quickly, you have to figure out what’s important and then figure out what to do with what’s important. To really understand what’s driving productivity, what’s driving safety, you need data from multiple sources, make sure it’s all correct, and make sense of it.”

Keep reading this article on GrahamBuilds.com