Construction Data Trust
Author: Martin Paver
Date: October 11, 2022
From 2019-2029, the UK will deliver a huge £600 billion of infrastructure projects, and project delivery already contributes £150-170 billion to the UK economy every year. However, research from Oxford University indicates that only 1 in 200 major projects are delivered within cost, time and ROI envelope agreed at sanction. When combined with the pressing issues of dealing with a climate emergency, there is a need to work more collaboratively and to derive increased value from hard won experience codified in data.
The Construction Data Trust is an initiative working in the interests of the sector to help shape, extract and securely combine project data to improve project delivery performance; making projects more safe, sustainable, predictable, productive and investable.
Challenge
Solution
Key Outcome
Take Home Messages
Clear valuable insight gives confidence to project stakeholders . This is generally a weakness within construction projects.
The clients challenges were:
- The need to drive a data culture, surface issues and unite around shared objectives, facilitating a transition to data driven project delivery.
- Inability to access supply chain data or time lost manually cleaning and aggregating data
- Poor data to inform decision making; low confidence in the data provided or lacking line of sight.
- Uncertainty on the data/information needed for delivery of their projects
- Misalignment between the data organisations are collecting and the problems that they aspire to solve.
- The need to facilitate a step change in productivity, underpinned by data. Working quicker together than alone.
- The moral imperative to pool health, safety, wellbeing and environment data for the benefit of all.
Projecting Success have taken a lead role in the development of the world’s first construction data trust.
As data steward and analyst we have built a highly secure platform which can receive, clean, store, integrate and analyse data, working on behalf of data providers, members, clients and broader society.
- Created the technical architecture, methods, processes and data pipelines to underpin the data trust.
- Developed the security protocols to give data providers confidence in pooling data, leveraging our ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus accreditations.
- Leveraged our relationships with Microsoft, as a Gold Partner, to develop an secure Azure platform integration.
- Supported the development of the legal framework to enable the operation of the trust.
- Supported the development of the business plan, services and sales pipelines to ensure the ongoing commercial viability of the trust.
- As data is transferred into the platform, it is automatically cleaned and pieced together.
- The platform then connects the data across similar projects building a richer more valuable dataset. This enables more advanced analytics and in turn provides forensic insight.
- In analysing the data, we are able to provide a feedback report on data quality and aggregated insight into specific metrics. For instance, with waste, we can see variance across construction phases, averages across projects, composition of waste and more. This also facilitates benchmarking.
- In the long term, as the trusts holds more connected data, it will become an engine for predictive, analytic insight.
The data trust shows clients the value that can be derived from their data, and how it can be enhanced when supplemented with other data sets.
- Do more with less. The platform broadens the ability for the construction sector to solve challenges which would have otherwise been impossible to resolve.
- Driving up data quality, volumes and insights. Facilitating a step change in data culture.
- Automating data extraction, combined with democratising tools that help to release workforce capacity whilst also driving data standardisation.
- Richer datasets enabling foresight. Objectively predict what will happen before it happens.
- Less time cleaning data and more time focused on surfacing valuable information and insights.
- Increased productivity insight by identifying waste, deliveries, working hours, lost time etc.
- Gives the project team a new dimension of information that will be invaluable in gauging project performance and reporting to stakeholders.
- Promotes environmental awareness and sustainable practice
Construction productivity has underperformed other sectors and industries. By securely pooling data we can surface a wealth of insights which would have been unimaginable. From productivity to carbon, health, safety and wellbeing, we begin to change the game.
The sector is coalescing around a shared goal to improve decision making through data, but this needs to start at the basics with improved data to increase the value of insight. Building standardised data sets that can be connected, strengthened and accessed securely will help kick-start a much-needed transformation for the sector.
Enquire now
Projecting Success aren’t just working on data driven project delivery, we are taking a pivotal role in shaping and creating this future. If you’d like to speak to one of our experts on the subject then please register below, or drop us an email to enquiries@projectingsuccess.co.uk