𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

The construction industry has earned its reputation as a slow adopter of technology. But today’s organisations – especially those working in capital construction – recognise the growing evidence that tech adoptions deliver significant productivity gains. The construction technology market is keeping pace with the shift: in 2024, contech investors closed 604 deals – an 8.24 per cent increase over 2023, with the average cost of each deal falling by 22 per cent compared with the year before.

Leading firms are turning to technology to stay ahead in the face of a clear trend: increasing project complexity. Last year, the United States averaged four megaprojects per month, coupled with a constant trend in declining productivity for the industry overall. Advanced software tools continue to deliver a solution for maintaining communication and consistency across stakeholders and teams, improving resource visibility, augmenting performance and sustaining performance in a complex capital construction market.

But even the most forward-looking technology investments fall short without scalable strategic planning. Companies that adopt tech successfully say these four approaches represent the future of construction management and are table stakes for any team aiming to take full advantage of its technology investments.

Process standardisation

Fragmented processes prime an organisation for errors, inefficiency and missed opportunities. By standardising processes, organisations bring long-overdue stability and consistency to their teams and enable accurate and higher-quality project information.

The key to making the most of a standardisation initiative is sweeping, strategic change. Companies can’t just standardise their time-management platform and expect to generate results. Effective standardisation may start with tools and technologies, but it should also be supported by training processes and leadership support to ensure each department and project follows a similar playbook from one opportunity to the next. Beyond its practical benefits, a cultural approach to standardisation helps promote buy-in and commitment across the board. Teams succeed when they understand what the company stands for and what the future holds on the other side of the standardisation initiative.

With a unified approach, teams reduce errors, boost productivity and ensure quality throughout the build cycle. A centralised platform provides a foundation for standardisation across projects and teams. By standardising project data, organisations can realise the benefits of becoming a proactive, data-driven organisation.

Stay ahead with real-time insights

Standardisation leads to another key benefit: high quality data, better resource management and greater project success. When information stagnates in spreadsheets and siloed systems, organisations struggle to share insights from project to project and team to team. By standardising data structures, organisations create more useful insights they can reference for future estimates, schedules and more. Better data gives construction project managers and project controls teams the means to identify at-risk items early and take action to solve those challenges before they escalate into obstacles.

Similarly, real-time data can help teams identify strengths and weaknesses based on the collective experience of dozens of projects and thousands of working hours. Leaders can analyse specific cost and component details and use accurate reports to share findings with stakeholders. When real-time insights draw from the latest analytics, it becomes possible to ensure alignment from the field to the owner through shared per cent-complete tracking, trend analysis and performance reporting.

Empower innovation with useful tech

Helping teams understand – and experience – the benefits of change proves time and again to be the lynchpin for successful tech adoption. For construction teams, integration (the ability to move data seamlessly between workflows) and automation (the ability to remove repeatable tasks from someone’s workday) consistently prove to be the driving forces behind success.

Once redundant tasks are out of the way, teams have the time and resources required for more mentally taxing work, including innovation and problem-solving. Meanwhile, integrated technologies sync data sources from the field to the office to remove bias, improve collaboration and flag risk before they evolve into rework.

At their core, improved construction management tools such as InEight help contributors reduce the time needed to solve problems and find resources by placing critical details front-and-centre and providing a clear path to access anything deeper. “As a senior leader in a company, you can go from one project to the next, and talking the same language has a huge benefit,” says Justin Terminella, VP of Kiewit Industrial. “Previously, it was common to look at something like a visualisation of an earned value report and not be able to easily understand what green versus red meant – every single time you went to a project, it was a debate on what the right one should be. Now that we’ve standardised through InEight, that isn’t a problem anymore.”

“As a senior leader in a company, you can go from one project to the next, and talking the same language has a huge benefit. Previously, it was common to look at something like a visualisation of an earned value report and not be able to easily understand what green versus red meant – every single time you went to a project, it was a debate on what the right one should be. Now that we’ve standardised through InEight, that isn’t a problem anymore.” – Justin Terminella, VP, Kiewit Industrial

Do more with your data

As organisations push themselves towards a more insights-driven future, the quality of their efforts is defined by the size and health of their data assets. Design files, schedules, change orders, environmental sensors, emails and compliance reports provide limited immediate value on their own. But when they’re combined with similar assets across projects and regions and over thousands of working hours, consolidated data delivers predictability, cause and effect and risk identification that organisations can apply to the next generation of construction management.

Most organisations face a significant challenge when consolidating data. Platforms such as InEight specialise in bringing structure to data and helping teams transform their resources into actionable insights. “The increased sharing of information helps us work dynamically and efficiently,” says Aidhean Camson, VP, Global Program Controls AECOM. “My inspector can work from a tablet to verify the quantities claimed by the contractor, verify the percentage completion and share that information against the schedule of values and activities. When we consolidate that information at the end of the month, there’s no debate.”

“The increased sharing of information helps us work dynamically and efficiently. My inspector can work from a tablet to verify the quantities claimed by the contractor, verify the percentage completion and share that information against the schedule of values and activities. When we consolidate that information at the end of the month, there’s no debate.” – Aidhean Camson, VP, Global Program Controls, AECOM

The contech transition is here. The organisations staying ahead of change ask themselves how to optimise their technology dollars and find the ideal platform for improving their existing workflows and maximising their investment. Learn more about how InEight’s field-tested construction project controls platform is guiding teams into a new era of productivity at InEight.com.