For your construction company to thrive, you need accurate data to make effective decisions. Data insights will enable you to know the projects that were most successful in the past. Using the right business intelligence tools will also enable you to analyze your present projects and make profitable decisions on future bids. Now let’s see how using the right Business Intelligence tools can help you make proactive and strategic business decisions.

Analyze the Successes and Failures of the Past

Analyzing past data helps you understand the profitability of previous projects. Using the right tools will make it easy to pull out relevant data from your database, analyze, and interpret it. For example, if you are a sub-contracting firm, a Business Intelligence tool like Caliper BI can integrate with Sage 300 CRE.

Use Dashboards to Answer Vital Questions

You may currently have a large volume of data collected from your projects over the last few years. But how can you get this data to work together and answer important questions?

The key is to master the use of dashboards. BI software uses a dashboard to bring all your data into a central location. It integrates with all your systems and gives you instant visualization for quick and effective business decisions.

For instance, on your construction project dashboard, you can select a date range for past projects. Then, you can view profit per state, county, or job type. You can also see a display of revenue earned by the regional managers and similar metrics.

Dashboards enable you to customize the data you need to see and how you want to view them. In addition to showing previous profits and revenues, they can also serve as an early warning system for current projects.

Manage Your Present Projects Efficiently

BI tools give you the power to track the progress and profitability of your projects in real-time. They help you see what’s working and what’s not. With the insights you receive from your BI tool dashboard, you can allocate resources more profitably on large projects. This can lead to impressive cost savings.

Effective resource management is one of the key benefits of having a construction BI tool. It brings together factors like budgets, project timelines, personnel expertise, and geolocation to determine where your team members are and what work they are doing.

You will have the facts and figures needed to know when your team members will complete a project and how to engage them in another. So, you won’t have to keep paying them for coming to work without any productive input. With your BI tool, you can easily visualize spikes, delays, and resource capacity issues as they are about to occur. On your resource dashboard, you can quickly see vital metrics like:

• Job hours by team members
• Average wait time per project manager
• Percentage of time each team member spent traveling
• The total number of hours spent on each job type

Without the type of dashboard provided by a BI tool, it will be difficult to interpret all the data in your silos and act fast to prevent unnecessary inefficiencies and losses.

Predict Future Success With Precision

Your success in the construction business will be enhanced when you have answers to important questions about your projects. Using a BI tool can help you determine:

• Production revenue
• Probability of winning a bid
• Your revenue spread from January to December in the previous year

Your BI tool should help with forecasting, giving you fact-based estimates that you can use for planning and evaluating new leads.

Use Your BI Tool to Score Leads

When you feed the right data into your BI tool, you can get insights into your project leads. For instance, you can use it to score leads based on location, services, and profitability. If you’ve executed a similar job in the past, you can use your BI tool to determine exactly how much the job costs and the profit margins. Thus, if you don’t usually make the desired profit on such jobs, you can decline the offer and concentrate on jobs that will give you higher margins.

While using your BI tool to collect and chart your previous and current projects, you can develop the profile for an ideal prospect or customer. This can help you know when your chances of winning a bid are relatively high. Prioritizing new project opportunities enables you to concentrate on those that can help you achieve your company’s strategic goals.

Which Construction BI Tool Should I Use?

Now you know that a BI tool can help you create dashboards for analyzing your past achievements. And you can produce reports for managing your resource allocation and forecasts for predicting the profitability of bids. But which one should you choose?

• Caliper BI is a smart choice. It gives you a competitive advantage and enables you to analyze your past, manage your current resources, and predict your future. It offers seamless integration with Sage 300 CRE. You can use its suite of pre-built dashboards designed in line with industry best practices. You can also utilize the robust selection and drill-down features to get answers to key questions about industry metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This BI tool has modules for financials, construction, service, and labor.
• Sage 100 Contractor Liberty Reports works as an add-in for Microsoft Excel and it integrates with Sage 100 Contractor data. It comes with customizable report templates and increases your capability to create reports that give you exact answers to any questions you want from your data.
  
  

Request a Demo Today

To see how Caliper BI and Sage Liberty Reports can provide insightful business intelligence and analytics, contact us today. We will schedule a free virtual consultation for you and help you understand how to optimally use these tools.