Technology

3 ways data automation can enhance construction

Data automation is upgrading construction finance. Learn the key ways it can help your business.

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The task of gathering and preparing big data for meaningful analysis is easier said than done. It’s estimated that data scientists spend up to 80% of their precious time on "data wrangling"– that’s the process of sorting, labeling, and transforming raw information into the right digital formats for analysis.

Construction isn’t much different. Ask any member of your accounting team, and they’ll tell you about the enormous amount of time your company is spending on sorting data into spreadsheets. It’s not an arbitrary bulk of information either. Your most essential billing and financial datasets are moving through a slow, error-prone process of spreadsheet entry. At best, it’s tedious and costs your company time. At worst, a single misplaced zero can cause you to pay 200k on what should’ve been a 20k cost. 

This is where data automation comes in. Data automation greatly accelerates tedious preparation steps like entering new project data into software like Viewpoint or Sage. It can also completely automate your AP processes. This frees up valuable time to work on more sophisticated tasks such as defining business-critical objectives and interpreting the results of data analysis. Moreover, automation can exponentially boost the speed and scope of the analysis itself, generating more financial and project visibility at every level.

It’s time to take a serious look at how data automation can fit into your construction business. Here are a few of the ways that automation can help with each step of your project.

Collection

Construction companies spend hours and hours moving data from one place to another. Whether it’s pulling a budget out into a spreadsheet or moving project data into your ERP, time is spent far more on moving data than analyzing it.

Data automation can reclaim that time for your business. The right financial automation platform can connect to all of your data sources and pull them into the platform for use. Moreover, it’s not a one-way street. Data automation tools can push information from one source into another. Here are a few examples of what data automation can do in just a few clicks:

  • Instantly create budgets by moving data from your ERP into spreadsheets.
  • Extract data from your CRM to set up upcoming projects in all your software.
  • Move RFI data from a contractor’s PM software to an architect’s PM software.
  • Combine troves of Excel reports across IT, finance, and the field.
  • Synchronize spending on corporate cards for instant allocation.

Transformation

Sometimes, data isn’t straightforward. After all, you can’t create a forecast just by putting all of your project data side by side. When it comes to formatting the information you already have, data automation can do the work for you. Automation can dramatically accelerate the cleaning, sorting, and warehousing of raw data. The right financial automation platform can help you organize and transform your construction data by:

  • Automatically labeling your data, as well as training and validating machine learning models.
  • Enabling and scheduling the bulk migration of data from legacy systems to the target database format, such as SQL.
  • Checking for typographical errors and missing data values in your financial documents, detecting invalid content and formats, and automatically transforming the data into the proper format.

Analysis

At present, data analysis persists as a complex endeavor that cannot be entirely outsourced to machines. Responsibilities such as creating and validating data models, assessing business value, and deriving meaningful insights from the results of analysis still require human intervention. This is especially important when it comes to layering the intelligence gained through years of experience in the construction industry.

However, analysis also involves plenty of tedious, repetitive tasks well suited to the algorithmic operations of data automation. In fact, financial automation can easily augment and surpass the capabilities of human analysts in these areas:

  • Financial automation software can be used to generate charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports for visual illustrations of data that drive insights.
  • AI analysis can be used to process massive amounts of information and detect any trends and patterns in your finances so it’s easy to identify when things are ‘out of the norm’.
  • By assisting with the heavy lifting of data science, financial automation platforms can help your business test for different forecasts and project scenarios, allowing for even greater insights.
  • Utilize historical data to comb over decades of financial reports to discover meaningful cost patterns and forecast the best strategies for increasing revenue in the upcoming year.

Unite your data onto one platform

This article only touches on the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible with data automation. The benefits of data automation are as vast as they are potent. That’s why it’s important to invest in a platform that can bring the best of it to your business. For the construction industry, that platform is Briq. 

Briq is a financial automation platform made to help construction companies run a better business. Our platform provides all the benefits we’ve listed here and more in order to provide the best construction finance tool. If you’d like to learn more about what Briq can achieve for your business, speak with our experts and get a live Briq demo at briq.com/demo.