As the amount of digital data collected during construction continues to grow, stakeholders are asking for better intelligence on how projects are performing. Starting from the cost and financial data handled in the back office, Viewpoint Construction Software has announced a new cloud-based analytics platform that it hopes will eventually find hidden connections in profit fade and even in overall workforce performance.

“We’re pulling in data from many sources, into these data lakes,” explains Matt Harris, chief product and strategy officer at Viewpoint. The company has announced ViewpointOne, a new dashboard and benchmarking tool to view project data from many sources, including financial information, project management systems and field data.

As of now, ViewpointOne is meant to give basic feedback on project performance, but Harris says the next step is building a robust analytics system to offer advice on project management and cost decisions. “Ultimately we want to turn this data into a predictive model to help predict the future,” he says.

At first, Viewpoint Analytics will focus on profit fade, offering top-level project and company managers an indicator on when their financial numbers are starting to slide out of control.

But before that can happen, Viewpoint has to get that data into a usable state. That’s where the new cloud-based dashboard ViewpointOne comes in. This platform, which come with a monthly subscription, will be the place to share data among various Viewpoint products. Harris also tells ENR that ViewpointOne will also serve as an integration point with the cloud-based, project-data services of Trimble, which acquired Viewpoint in 2018. “[Trimble] has a wealth of technology for field information capture that we can weave into our office, team and field platform,” says Harris. 

Early adopters are already feeding their data into Viewpoint’s analytics system. Kansas City, Mo.-based Garney Construction has begun the process of cleaning up its decades of digital project data to feed into Viewpoint’s new system. “We use Spectrum for all of our accounting—we’ve really been using it as a data warehouse,” says Meggan Krase, Garney Construction vice president and corporate controller. She says analytics would offer the company’s leadership a better understanding on how its projects are progressing across the country. “Our leadership came up working in the field, and now they can feel a bit cut off. Analyics can get them better information on how we are performing out there.”