Consistent reporting means showstoppers don’t stop the show

Consistent reporting methods are key to spotting design, procurement and site issues before they impact programmes and drive up cost. That was one the key messages in the opening of this year’s Digital Construction Summit.

The webinar, sponsored by Eleco, featured Bowmer + Kirkland regional planner Will Langford, Careys director of planning & project controls Derek O’Neil, and Eleco head of business development Ben Taunt.

Taunt asked the pair: “Where do hidden delay-related costs typically first appear?”

Langford responded: “Generally, it starts with disruption. It’s little things that are in the background, a bit of disruption on site, which means you then need to re-sequence something.

“Perhaps we’re starting to see that we want some design information a little bit quicker, because we’ve changed how things are moving, or we want that piece of equipment on site faster, we want materials delivered in a different manner – this is probably long before we’ll actually ever get a cost coming through. It’s those little chunks that tend to appear first, and they should be like the warning signs.”

O’Neil said: “Careys is a direct delivery contractor – it’s our own labour, plant and materials that we’re using on site. Tracking resources really gives us the first indicator of the commercial issues that might underlie it. Quite often we’ll see that maybe we’re spending more overtime than we should be, maybe we’re using more labour than we plan to, and maybe the supervision is increasing.

“So it’s doing the basics around resource tracking, doing some histograms, S-curves: that always gives us insight into the fact that commercial figures are going to move before we actually see them. Commercial reporting tends to be month-end, whereas self-tracking progress is on a weekly basis, so we start getting insight before the costs move.”

Taunt then asked: “Is it important to be able to analyse the information and make decisions based on what you’re seeing?”

Langford said: “Reporting is something that’s changing. It has often been subjective and narrative-driven, and it can mask problems along the way. The reporting we’re developing with the Eleco team is really pushing the visibility of this data, because it’s taking it out of the hands of the planner.

“Our planners are really good at working through the detail of the programme, but they’ve got a lot of detail to work with. They might not spot the little things that will make the difference at the end of the day. Now, the planner is collecting the progress data, publishing that through to the database, and then that’s coming through to a much more visible system that upper levels of the regional management and the contract managers and project managers can use to identify those little snippets of problems early.”

He then highlighted the importance of consistency of reporting and its ability to fuel management’s ability to spot issues and intervene. “You have consistent information these days, so your senior teams are seeing the same reporting controls all the way through. [The data] is coming from different sources, but it’s always presented in a consistent manner, so they know what they’re looking for and they can start to see these little tells,” Langford said.

“Consistency of reporting allows them to read reports in a much more transparent way. We’re now using Power BI dashboards generated through the Asta Vision system, driving that information through into the database and out to the dashboards, which are consistent pieces of information. So we can allow our planners to use their own particular flair to describe things in different ways, but at the end of the day, we get this similar output.”

O’Neil agreed: “Every programme at Careys uses that same template. It’s all coded correctly, it’s exactly the same, so the reporting is the same for every single project. We have management reports across the company, so that consistency is really what Asta Vision allowed us to bring in. Everybody’s asking the same questions on the same data set, so you can trust it. So it becomes less about ‘can you trust the data?’ and instead it’s all about ‘how are we going to fix it and what do we do moving forward?’

Taunt responded: “A client said to me the other day that reporting is shifting. In the past, the industry has been really good at writing history textbooks – we’d spit out a document of what happened, we’d file it away somewhere, and we would tick the box saying we’ve done reporting. But now they’re starting to create data that empowers decision-making; it’s actionable information that’s trying to give them visibility of issues before they become a big showstopper.

“I think that’s where we are as a software vendor – we’re trying to provide that technological step up, so we can better point people at information that’s going to support those processes.”

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The Digital Construction Summit series of webinars is organised by CM and Digital Construction Plus. Nearly 1,500 professionals registered to watch last year’s webinars.