Industry-leading contractors got ahead by having a data strategy. It’s your turn now in 2025.

Barry Chiu

CEO & Co-Founder

January 13, 2025

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5 min read

If you are reading this article, consider this your sign to develop your data strategy in 2025.

Construction is an incredibly complex and competitive industry, and the margin for error is very slim. The unfortunate reality is more than 90% of projects face cost overruns and the average project schedule delay is 20 months. The cost of inefficiencies is staggering, and it can tank your project performance pretty quickly.

If you’re in the industry, you know what I’m talking about.

Maybe you’re thinking about those change orders, missed project milestones, BIM clashes, delayed RFI responses, or something else. Yet, many contractors are actually sitting on an untapped goldmine—their project data.

The construction industry generates billions of bytes of data from project budgets, schedules, daily logs, RFIs, safety reports, and more. But this data continues to be siloed, unstructured, and underutilized. However, with the rise of digital tools and cloud-based data platforms like Kroo, contractors can now optimize their data capabilities and gain a significant competitive edge to grow their businesses.

Make 2025 the year to develop your data capabilities. Read below for some inspiration for why this might make sense for your team.

Industry-leading contractors are where they are for a reason. They believe in data.

There’s a reason why the largest contractors in the industry such as Suffolk Construction, Turner Construction, DPR, and Gilbane have grown to the billion-dollar behemoths that they are today. They all proactively got ahead by establishing a data strategy to:

• Enhance decision-making: Real-time dashboards and predictive analytics can identify potential issues before they escalate.
• Improve efficiency: Automated workflows to reduce wasted hours of manual processes with exporting and analyzing data repeatedly.
• Protect profit margins: Data-driven insights into your project budgets and schedules can minimize risks of rework and flag inefficient SOPs.
• Mitigate risks: Tracking safety and compliance data help prevent costly incidents.

Developing your data strategy requires several considerations.
Modern-day tools now make this achievable.

A robust data strategy requires thoughtful planning and strategic buy-in. And fortunately, the industry can benefit from investing in the right tools. Here are the key considerations:

• Centralize your project data across various software solutions: You can’t analyze your project data unless you centralize everything in one single source of truth. Construction data is typically siloed across multiple systems such as project management software, scheduling software, ERPs, safety tools, and more. To have a comprehensive view of your project performance, you need to combine everything.
• Foster a data-driven culture across the company: The culture typically starts from the top-down. It’s important to have the executive team bought in and excited about leveraging data better to lead by example. An effective way to get executives on board is to leverage real-time dashboards to show ROI on your data.
• Be open to process improvements in pursuit of optimizing data quality: Part of developing a data strategy means that your team will most likely have to revise certain processes to ensure clean data. Clean data is important to ensure accuracy and reliability in your data analytics.
• Build the right support and invest in the right tools: The billion-dollar contractors all have hired large data teams over the course of several years as part of their data strategy. This is certainly not viable for most of the industry, so it’s important for smaller contractors to instead invest in a modern data management solution like Kroo to realize the same benefits.

AI can wait. Data management should be your priority in 2025.

2024 had endless discussions around AI and how it can be used effectively in construction, and I imagine 2025 to have more of those same discussions.

The reality is that if you are cautious about implementing AI or haven’t thought about it meaningfully, then your first focus is to unify your siloed data to take those first steps with data analytics in the form of real-time project dashboards. I’m truly optimistic on what AI can do for the industry, but those benefits won’t materialize without a proper data strategy.

If you make 2025 the year for optimizing your data management, then your team will be well-positioned to start using AI-powered tools.

Use Kroo to take that next step in your data journey.

If you want to accelerate your data management capabilities without investing 7-figures in a large data team, reach out to our team.

We provide a turnkey approach to leveraging your project data, and we can make 2025 the year for your team to take that next step to grow the company.

Kroo is the modern data management platform built for construction, and we already are helping industry-leading ENR contractors with our data pipelines, managed data warehousing, and more.

Check out our website for our case studies and more information on our capabilities, or schedule a time .