“Hey Barry - what is a data warehouse?”
We get this question from time-to-time, and we’re always happy to explain this.
Data warehousing is absolutely critical to a long-term, scalable data strategy. And if you care about having powerful project health reports or other dashboards, you’ll need it.
But for anyone who doesn’t have time to read the full article, here’s the main takeaway: a data warehouse is the essential IT infrastructure that allows you to store historical and current project data which allows for streamlined access for reporting & analytics.
If you’re a GC, specialty contractor, or owner, and you want to analyze your projects over a specified period of time OR if you just want real-time project health dashboards, the reality is you can’t do that easily without a data warehousing system in place. You probably don’t have that much time to do a deep dive into data warehousing, so we’ve done the legwork and boiled it down to the main takeaways for you. Read on to learn more about the concept of data warehousing, why it is a critical component to add to your company strategy, and the benefits & challenges of data warehousing in construction.
A data warehouse is a system that stores current and historical data from multiple data sources in an organized way, making it easier to analyze and generate reports. It supports various functions including real-time performance tracking, historical analytics, AI / ML applications and other data-driven tasks.
A huge benefit of a data warehouse is aggregating data from many software applications or systems, allowing teams to have a comprehensive view of their information that otherwise could not have been easily accessed. The process of pulling data from various data silos is otherwise known as extracting, transforming, and loading (typically referred to as “ETL”).
Check out the below graphic for a quick visual of how it works with some of the most common construction software:
There are numerous benefits to data warehousing for a construction company, whether you’re a GC, specialty contractor, or developer/owner. I’ve outlined the most important ones below:
- Combining siloed data to get a complete picture of your projects: Construction software typically don’t speak to each other well. Your Procore data may not perfectly map to your Sage 300 CRE data, or your Autodesk Construction Cloud data may not perfectly match to your Procore data. Building the relationships between your various siloed datasets is only possible if you aggregate everything in a data warehouse. Doing so enables your teams to build real-time dashboards and other powerful analytics.
- Historical analytics to observe trends and capture patterns: Static reporting and analysis is typically provided within point solutions in construction, but the ability to go back in time and analyze your historical project data is much more difficult without a data warehouse in place. If you wanted to analyze RFI completion rates, safety metrics, daily log compliance, or other KPIs, you’d likely need data warehousing.
- Ensuring data quality for operational excellence: You can’t fix what you can’t measure. Generally, teams won’t know where the operational gaps are in their processes until they see the data. Having a data warehouse will force your team to get a strong understanding of data cleanliness and flag areas where there can be operational improvements. Maybe it’s poor data entry in specific change order fields on Procore, or maybe it’s not having consistent milestone coding in your P6 schedules. You won’t know unless you start to see all your information in one place via a data warehouse.
- Leveraging historical performance on past projects to differentiate yourself on new project bids: Having a data warehouse means you are well ahead of the curve in construction. You can showcase your data-driven approach to managing projects as a way to differentiate yourself in new bids. Companies like Suffolk Construction do this successfully and have significantly grown their top-line.
You’re probably wondering what it takes to get a data warehouse set up. It does come with a certain set of challenges, and we’ve outlined some of the biggest ones for you:
- You need to have data pipelines to systematically extract data from your software: This is an essential part of a long-term, scalable data strategy. Whether it’s a project management software, scheduling software, ERP system, safety software, HRIS system, or something else, getting data out requires data pipelines. You can either build this in-house with a robust data engineering team (look at Suffolk Construction as a great example), or you can leverage a cost-effective data platform solution in Kroo.
- Establishing the appropriate data mapping and relationships: It’s one thing to bring in data via data pipelines, and it’s another challenge to map your data tables effectively to create parity across your data for consistency in your reporting & analytics. This is pretty time-intensive and labor-intensive without the use of efficient technology.
- Variable compute costs driven by data volume: Having a data warehouse requires you to pick a cloud provider, and there will be ongoing usage costs associated with this. More volume of data = increasing variable compute costs. Whether you pick Microsoft Azure, AWS Cloud, or something else, you will have to balance compute, cost, and scalability. If you host your own data warehouse, you’ll be responsible for those costs. Otherwise, you can look to third-party solutions like Kroo to fully manage the warehouse on your behalf so you don’t need to worry about compute, performance, and the associated variable costs. We’ll handle all that for you at a fixed price.
- Ongoing performance maintenance to optimize for scalability: There are an infinite number of ways to manage your data warehouse to find the right balance of performance and scalability. Figuring this out can be a hassle, especially if your team has a bunch of other initiatives to handle. Either your data engineering team can handle this and sacrifice crucial time to handle this ongoing warehouse maintenance, or you can rely on third-party solutions like Kroo who can fully manage this balance on your behalf.
Not everyone is in a position to take this on internally by hiring a robust data engineering team. The large contractors can pull this off, but the rest of the construction industry may not have the same resources. At Kroo, we want to democratize data capabilities and empower every GC, specialty contractor, and owner/developer to have data warehousing infrastructure because everyone deserves it.
Our modern approach to data management means our construction customers benefit from a turnkey experience. We provide a wide range of existing data pipelines for various software used in construction and connect those pipelines to a data warehouse that we manage for our customers. It doesn’t get any easier than that, and we do it all for a fraction of the cost of building internally with a large data engineering team.
We’re excited that we already work with leading ENR contractors with their data management capabilities. Check out our website for case studies and more information on our capabilities, and feel free to schedule a time with me using the below button.
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