Data Integration in Construction; 2024 Ultimate Guide

Some major issues the construction industry faces include data fragmentation, ineffective document and construction project management, poor adoption, and numerous other inefficiencies. The cost of ignoring these issues to the world economy is enormous—$1.6 trillion annually!

We know that the Data Revolution is altering the organizational dynamics of numerous businesses by enhancing administrative capabilities, increasing productivity, and improving decision-making. Like many others, the construction sector deals with massive volumes of heterogeneous data from various sources that are growing exponentially.

However, compared to other industries, the adoption of new data integration in construction that can assist with the storing, processing, combining, transforming, and managing of these datasets is still in its infancy. Consider the potential disruption that could arise from giving all parties involved—engineers, consultants, architects, manufacturers, clients, owners, operators, subcontractors, and suppliers—access to dependable, up-to-date data. What does it all imply, given how frequently “Data sources,” “Integration,” and even “Revolution” are mentioned?

Several computer procedures known as data integration were created to retrieve, combine, and blend data from several sources into a single dataset. The idea is to take all of this scattered data and transform it into something useful and applicable. As speed, energy efficiency in buildings, and dependability become more important factors for both customers and organizations, the requirement for sharing and data integration in construction will increase. To enable user and business applications to meet all informational and data management needs, consistent data supply and access is the aim.

What is Data Integration?

Ever since the construction sector embraced digitalization, project managers have been inundated with data. While some are used, a significant portion is not used effectively. To put it simply, this gathered data are stored in several silos. They are ineffectual because they are disjointed and difficult for the different stakeholders to access. All of this data needs to be gathered in order to transform scattered information into something practical and actionable. Data exchange and integration are becoming more important as companies and consumers demand speed, efficiency, and dependability.

This gets us to the current setup. As of right now, the construction sector uses Excel exclusively. Spreadsheets are great because they are very adaptable, can handle nearly any type of task, and provide you with control over the project data you enter. The list is endless and includes things like quality checks, cost estimates, daily work permits, weekly or daily work schedules, and progress tracking. On the job site, a project tracking spreadsheet is updated every single day.

Is that effective and efficient then? Based on industry statistics, the answer is a resounding and straightforward no. Because of our antiquated and subpar construction management tools and procedures, we are continually wasting time and money on building projects all over the world. Nothing is making it possible to transmit information in real time, not even with a live working document. This is a result of the fact that filtered data eventually begins to flow in and fill the sheet when it is finally time to make it “Ready.”

This leads us to our second query: Is the data trustworthy? The short response is no. Because each phase requires manual data entry, human error is possible. Even worse, there is constant update latency throughout the procedure, which results in faulty data being sent at the incorrect moment.

Suggested article to read: Data Management in Construction; 2024 Ultimate Guide

How Data Integration in Construction Works

Data integration in construction is the process of combining data from several sources into a single, comprehensible format through a number of stages and procedures. An outline of a standard data integration in construction procedure is provided below:

1. Data Source Identification

The first step is identifying the various data sources that need to be integrated, such as databases, spreadsheets, cloud services, APIs, legacy systems and others.

2. Data Extraction

Next, using tools or procedures that may include database queries, file retrievals from remote places, or API requests, data is taken from the sources that have been identified.

3. Data Mapping

To represent similar information, several data sources may employ various terminologies, codes, or structures. Proper data alignment during integration is ensured by developing a mapping schema that outlines how data pieces from various systems correspond to one another.

4. Data Validation and Quality Assurance

To guarantee accuracy and quality, validation entails looking for mistakes, inconsistencies, and problems with data integrity. Procedures for quality assurance are put in place to keep data reliable and accurate.

5. Data Transformation

In order to guarantee consistency, accuracy, and compatibility, the extracted data is now transformed and organized into a common format. Data normalization, data enrichment, and data cleansing may fall under this category.

6. Data Loading

Data loading is where the transformed data is loaded into a data warehouse or any other desired destination for further analysis or reporting. Depending on the needs, either batch loading or real-time loading can be used to complete the loading process.

7. Data Synchronization

Data synchronization, whether through recurring updates or real-time synchronization in the event that prompt integration of newly accessible data is necessary, helps guarantee that data integration in construction is maintained current throughout time.

8. Data Governance and Security

Data governance procedures ensure that data is handled in accordance with laws and privacy requirements when integrating sensitive or regulated data. To protect data during integration and storage, further security precautions are taken.

9. Management of Metadata

By offering details about the data integration in construction, metadata improves the data’s discoverability and usability, making it easier for users to comprehend the context, source, and meaning of the data.

10. Data Access and Analysis

After data integration in construction, BI software, reporting tools, and analytics platforms are just a few of the tools that may be used to access and analyze the data sets. The insights gleaned from this analysis inform business strategy and decision-making.

In general, data integration in construction entails a blend of technical procedures, instruments, and tactics to guarantee that information from many sources is coherent, precise, and accessible for significant examination and judgment.

Suggested article to read: Construction Data Management; 2024 Guide

Data Integration in Construction Techniques: How do they Work?

A data pipeline that comprehends the meaning and structure of the data, as well as the route it will follow via the technological systems, is necessary for transferring data across systems. The particular methods for data integration in construction are dependent upon:

• The amount, speed, and diversity of the data that needs to be combined.
• The features of the data’s origins and destinations.
• The resources and time that are at hand.
• The minimal requirements for performance.

Data ingestion in construction, or the routine process of ingesting data from one system into another, is a typical and reasonably simple step for data integration in construction. To prepare data for usage, data integration also entails cleaning, organizing, and enhancing it.

Occasionally, an extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) process is used to clean the data before it is saved. In other cases, it makes more sense to save the data initially, and then do ELT (extract, load, transform) to get it ready for use. In still other situations, data is changed and standardized without being moved from its current location of storage.

The procedures vary depending on a number of factors, including the kind and quantity of data, how it will be used, and how it will be preserved. The following are the most popular methods for data integration in construction:

• Manual Data Integration: To move and manipulate data in accordance with business requirements, engineers manually build code.
• Application-based data integration in construction involves the direct linking of apps and the movement and transformation of data in response to event triggers.
• Common Data Storage: To provide a single source, data is extracted from sources and kept in a data lake or data warehouse.
• Data virtualization is the process of combining data from several sources into a virtual database that end users may access.
• Software is used to move data between systems in middleware data integration in construction.

Suggested article to read: Common Data Environment (CDE); Ultimate Guide 2024

Why is Data Integration in Construction Essential?

Let’s provide a few statistics now.

• The amount of project data available has doubled during the past three years. [FMI + Autodesk]
• Non-standard data input, according to 41% of contractors, results in inconsistent, erroneous, incomplete, and useless data. [Dodge + Autodesk Report]

This highlights the need for data integration in construction. The data needs to be precise and easily available to decision-makers in order to yield the anticipated return on investment. By integrating many solutions, system problems are fixed and collaboration and productivity are increased. By data integration in construction., managers can easily oversee their workflows from start to finish.

Therefore, it is crucial that the integration functions well for you. A thorough investigation to comprehend and collaborate with your teams efficiently, attention to the information at hand, and adoption of appropriate procedures will enable you to do this. Click here to learn more about the significance of integration.

By integrating data in construction, a project manager can:

• Synchronize numerous data sources to cut down on hours wasted on manual entry.
• Minimize data loss.
• Increase inter-department collaboration.
• Gain instant access to key project information.

How will Integration Boost Construction in the Digital Age?

• According to a survey of CEOs, only 16% of them think their companies have completely integrated tools and systems. [KPMG]
• In the next three years, wearable technology is anticipated to be used by 33% of contractors. [US Chamber of Commerce + USG]
• 90.9% of businesses say they use cell phones on a daily basis for work. [JB Information]

No one can deny that costs are soaring. The industry needs to make cost reductions, whether it be in manufacturing expenses or mistake costs. Here’s where automated workflows can boost efficiency and productivity. Applications can be integrated to maintain schedules, cut down on human error, and save money.

Suggested article to read: Common Data Environment in Construction; Guide to 2024

Benefits of Data Integration in Construction

Your construction projects can benefit greatly from data integration, which can lead to increased data value, better data analysis, and improved data quality. Data integration can enhance data validation, verification, and cleaning while lowering data duplication, inconsistency, and correctness. Moreover, it can facilitate data visualization, dashboards, and insights while enabling more thorough, accurate, and rapid data analysis. It can also help you realize the full value of your data and open up new avenues for cooperation, innovation, and optimization.

1. Increase the Effectiveness of Operations

The amount of time it takes for construction experts to collect, process, and prepare data is reduced by proper data integration in construction. The manual collection of data is eliminated with a single and streamlined view. Choosing the appropriate automation technologies enhances your workforce’s overall productivity and resource allocation.

2. Enhances General Business Performance

To guarantee that your business has access to all necessary information, data integration in construction combines different kinds of data. Having access to linked data lowers potential conflicts across data sets, streamlines operations, and spares staff from having to enter into several accounts.

The process of making decisions is greatly aided by the more thorough and dependable performance analysis that data integration in construction gives your company.

3. Minimize Data Errors

Error risk is reduced by data integration in construction since it eliminates manual data activities. Additionally, higher accuracy and data synchronization are ensured with a more ordered data collection when you intentionally use the appropriate cloud-based construction management software.

These software programs are jam-packed with advanced capabilities that assist you in identifying problems with your data and resolving them quickly.

4. Offers More Insightful Information

The value of the data in your organization increases with successful data integration. Deploying a centralized system enhances the ability to identify quality problems and promote fixes. You will obtain more accurate and relevant data when everything is routinely reviewed and enhanced.

5. Enhanced Quality of the Data

Data integration in construction assists in enhancing the quality of data by detecting and resolving mistakes, inconsistencies, and redundancies through data transformation and cleansing procedures. Reliable and accurate data gives decision-makers confidence.

6. Quicker Access to Insights

Data integration in construction makes it possible to obtain data for analysis more quickly. This speed is essential for making decisions quickly and reacting to new opportunities, client requests, and market trends.

7. Enhanced Understanding of Business

An essential component of any business intelligence project is data integration in construction. For BI tools to produce insightful analysis and visualizations that support strategic efforts, integrated data is a prerequisite.

8. Innovation Powered by Data

When enterprise data is dispersed across many systems, it may not be possible to see patterns, trends, and opportunities that integrated data may reveal. This makes it possible for businesses to innovate and produce brand-new goods or services.

Suggested article to read: Data Visualizations for Construction; Ultimate Guide for 2024

Pro Tips for Data Integration in Construction

For those who lack technical expertise in data integration, we have put together a few fundamental guidelines for you to follow when choosing an appropriate data format.

• Change Data Capture: Before incorporating newly discovered data into your already-existing data, you can begin by identifying changes in the data inside your databases.
• Data Replication: This technique entails copying every piece of information from one database to another that already exists. Make sure everything is in sync so that it can be accessed and used on time by other stakeholders.
• Data Virtualization: This refers to combining construction data from multiple systems to achieve a more streamlined view instead of loading all the data to a new storehouse.
• Extract, Transform, and Load: ETL, this method is obviously the opposite of ELT. In order to integrate and load datasets into your present database, this process entails gathering copies of the datasets from several sources.
• Streaming Data Integration: Consistently integrating and feeding various data sources into databases, this real-time data integration technique

Data Integration in Construction Use Cases

To meet a variety of business goals and issues, data integration in construction is employed in a wide range of businesses and scenarios. Typical use cases for data integration consist of:

• Data Warehousing: To establish a consolidated data repository for analytics and simple reporting, data integration is utilized during the building process of a data warehouse.
• Data Lake Development: Structured, unstructured, and semistructured data are frequently combined in big data environments. It is simpler to extract value from this data by running advanced analytics on it, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), after it is moved from isolated on-premises systems into data lakes (ML).
• Customer 360° View: Organizations can develop a single image of each client by combining customer data from several sources, including marketing databases, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and support platforms. Businesses can find possibilities for cross-selling and upselling, better focus their marketing campaigns, and provide better customer service with the aid of well-integrated customer data.
• Business Intelligence and Reporting: Creating thorough BI reports and dashboards that offer insights into numerous areas of a business’s performance, including sales, marketing, finance, and operations, requires data integration.
• Processing Internet of Things (IoT) Data: By integrating data from IoT devices, businesses may keep an eye on and manage linked devices, examine sensor data, and set up automated workflows based on real-time insights.

Three Major Barriers to Adoption

Data security, which needs encryption, authentication, and backup to prevent data from illegal access, misuse, or loss, might be one of the issues associated with data integration. Furthermore, data integration may complicate data governance policies and procedures. Furthermore, in order to guarantee data compatibility and interoperability, you might have to deal with various data sources, formats, and systems. Ensuring that your data complies with applicable laws, rules, and standards is crucial.

There are still obstacles even though data integration and the software solutions made for it seem promising. And in order for you to become aware of this truth, we want to share it with you. You should be aware that the full extent of this technology’s potential to revolutionize the construction industry is still unknown when you evaluate it or potentially implement collaborative online scheduling software.

The following are some obstacles preventing the construction industry from widely implementing data integration solutions:

• High Costs: All business owners who operate small to large enterprises will require highly streamlined and sophisticated platforms. Investments in these platforms must be affordable. Investing in technology is difficult because the industry is actually low-margin.

The fact that software solutions are worth the investment is constant, even with their hefty implementation costs. Here’s where you should use common sense and study to choose which technology will best suit your demands at a reasonable cost.

• Data Sharing: The majority of construction companies nowadays keep their data locked in silos and aren’t always eager to use it. The fact that so many parties are engaged and that the information is stored in different forms may be the cause of this persistent reluctance. This consequently makes it quite challenging to obtain accurate and up-to-date information.
• Effective Data Gathering: The construction sector still needs to do industry-specific integrations, assessments, and data collection. To use integration solutions, all industry experts—including project managers and corporate executives—should be able to understand and apply any piece of data contained in dynamic databases.

The building industry of today is a different type of beast, with shorter lead times, flexible plans, multiple stakeholders, challenging urban settings, and more. The construction industry may gain a lot from the chance to digitize and integrate data, including worker safety, more thorough risk reduction and risk management, and more.

Conclusion

The process of integrating and harmonizing data from several sources into a single, comprehensible format that may be utilized for a range of operational, analytical, and decision-making objectives is known as data integration in construction.

Organizations generally cannot operate in the modern digital environment without collecting data from a variety of sources, such as databases, apps, spreadsheets, cloud services, APIs, and others. Most of the time, this data is kept in disparate locations and formats with variable quality, which creates data silos and discrepancies.

By combining data from many sources, putting it into a standardized structure, and making it available for analysis and decision-making, the data integration process seeks to address these issues. Organizations can improve decision-making, expedite processes, and gain a competitive edge by using data integration in construction.

New problems and solutions are presented to the construction sector on a daily basis. If inadequate documentation, poor project management, gaps in data management, and a sluggish adoption of technology represent one side of the story, the other discusses big data and data data integration in construction and how they will transform the way the industry operates today.

Without a doubt, the absence of data integration in construction has resulted in mistakes and inefficiencies in building projects, which have cost money and time. But there is cause for optimism. Better data integration for building is now possible thanks to the development of new technologies.

Resources:

IBM | StreamSets | LinkedIn | ProCrewSchedule | ProNovos | VisiLean | CalcTree

For all the pictures: Freepik