How Hourigan Used KrooLake for Turnkey Data Infrastructure
Background
Hourigan is a U.S-based, fully integrated construction and development firm headquartered in Richmond, VA. Founded in 1993, Hourigan serves 12 distinct markets throughout Central Virginia, Charlottesville, and Hampton Roads with more than 200 employees. Hourigan is recognized as a 2024 ENR Top 400 general contractor.
Hourigan employs a diverse construction tech stack composed of Procore, SmartPM, and other software relating to scheduling, CRM, and HR management. They proactively began developing their data strategy over a year ago by starting to connect data silos. The team also began leveraging PowerBI dashboards to help project teams benefit from data at their fingertips.
However, the Hourigan team realized that in order to level up the back-end data engineering for scalable, long-term data infrastructure, they would need to invest significant resources to proactively manage APIs, facilitate reliable ETL processes, and maintain a clean data lake.
Additionally, Hourigan had expressed interest in leveraging LLMs for streamlining key construction project workflows. They recognized the need for a clean data lake as the first and essential step to enabling AI capabilities for the team.
The Challenges & Solutions
Hourigan partnered with Kroo to tackle their data-related challenges by leveraging turnkey data infrastructure provided by KrooLake.
- Turnkey experience in establishing data infrastructure: Rather than spending significant resources (time & money) on external developers/consultants or hiring a robust data team, Hourigan relied on KrooLake to quickly stand up a data lake and pipelines in Microsoft Fabric.
- Expanded data infrastructure for scalability: Hourigan had yet to set up a data lake and had not been taking advantage of this for flexible business applications such as table joins, reporting, historical analysis, LLMs, and more. KrooLake empowers Hourigan to expand their data capabilities easily and at scale.
- Enterprise benefits with reliable real-time reporting: Hourigan uses PowerBI for project dashboards and tried Domo, but they would run into broken reports. With KrooLake acting as the central source of truth for their construction data, Hourigan can reliably power dashboard reports across the enterprise with accurate data.
After Kroo
Hourigan quickly established Microsoft Fabric infrastructure within a week using KrooLake and is now tapping into its turnkey data pipeline for SmartPM. Hourigan is expanding their data capabilities with KrooLake to connect to other software such as Procore and Paylocity.
By having reliable and scalable data infrastructure managed by KrooLake, Hourigan materially improved their data maturity, freeing up resources to focus on construction operations and growing the business using data.
"Kroo has revolutionized our data infrastructure, allowing us to centralize and manage data effortlessly through a turnkey solution. This streamlined connectivity has freed our team to focus on strategic initiatives, enhancing overall efficiency."
Troy Burns | Director, IT, Hourigan
ROI for Hourigan
Material time savings in developing and maintaining scalable data infrastructure.
- KrooLake saves Hourigan months in development hours to build reliable data pipelines for different data silos in their current tech stack, accelerating the ROI realized on their data. External consulting or third-party developers would require a significantly longer timeline and higher cost.
- KrooLake handles all ongoing API maintenance and updates to active data pipelines. Internal data teams usually spend more than 80% of their time on just maintaining data infrastructure. Kroo frees up Hourigan’s time to pursue other value-add activities.
Significant annual cost savings of more than six figures.
- Hourigan strategically chose to partner with Kroo to realize the benefits of turnkey data pipelines and Fabric data lake.
- Hourigan optimized cost efficiency for their data strategy by using KrooLake because external consulting/development resources will cost more than six figures for implementation and ongoing support.
- Hiring a robust team of data engineers would be costly and time-intensive for Hourigan. With KrooLake, Hourigan can maintain its lean and effective team while upscaling their data capabilities.
- See Kroo’s calculator for the estimated annual cost to develop and manage in-house: https://calculator.getkroo.com/
Increased flexibility in managing other types of construction data in real-time.
- By adopting KrooLake, Hourigan can now build on top of the provided Fabric environment and leverage additional data pipelines to centralize all data.
- The PowerBI dashboards that Hourigan has can leverage KrooLake to automate data syncs so that project teams will have real-time data at their fingertips.
- Having a single source of truth in Microsoft Fabric allows Hourigan to manage data cleanliness and drive operational excellence by knowing exactly where workflows need additional improvement/standardization.
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