Data science & Business analytics is playing pivotal role in various industries like E-commerce where one needs to predict spending patterns of customers , in banking to profile customer and analyze whether he will default or not ,in manufacturing industry which size of the product needs to produced maximum and minimum order to avoid wastage /inventory etc .There are ample of data science application in such industry as lot of data points are available and can be studied for various functions like operation , marketing , human resources etc.
However when it comes to construction industry which is one of the most unorganized sector, where Project bidding team is different from Project execution team and commissioning and operation controls ,hence it is very difficult to get data for multiple projects .
I have spent substantial time in project management of EPC projects, hence let me try to correlate one of the construction issue which can be solved by application of Data Science & Business Analytics. For any EPC projects , procurement constitutes of substantial cost of project approximately 40-60 % of total cost . Any delay in delivery of the material/Equipment will lead to delay in project and may lead to penalty and ordering early means your cash flow would be affected. Hence a project manager needs to strike a balance and must make a judgement based on his perceptions, experience, and association with supplier from past projects about its delivery schedule adherence & quality of material.
Say for example company has following data available: -
- Material List with detail specification
- Manufacturing time for the Material/Equipment
- Suppliers & their qualitative and quantitative analysis
- Normal lead time for the Material/Equipment on past project data (From raising a Purchase order to receipt of goods in store)
- Various inspection progress of Material/Equipment manufacturing (On supplier manufacturing facility)
- Pricing data of the Material/Equipment
If above data is to be analyzed, using Data Science techniques & tools we should be able to predict with probability following :-
- Probability of material ordered to vendor would be on time pre-contract.
- What would be the last date to raise the Purchase requisition or place the Purchase order so that Material is receipt on time based on construction schedule.
- Quality of the material supplied would be as per specification based on past quality analysis of vendor.
- Based on manufacturing progress, and correlating past data of manufacturing progress whether material would be delivered on time post contract
- What is minimum and maximum percentage of wastage one needs to consider while ordering of material ,based on past projects re-ordering history
Note:- Above list is not exhaustive ,there are still many more application .
One of the biggest challenge in construction industry is , data are in captured in various tools ,and over a period of time these tools keeps on changing (for example excel) .Hence to collect these data and analyze would become herculin task and predicting models needs to be re-visited and created every time. Say for example if construction company has all these data on a platform from Estimation to Commissioning, predicting , analyzing & designing Data models based on defined KPI would be one time job and can be re-used again and again for different projects.
I strongly feel that construction industry is transiting and will move to data driven project management in coming years to come .Hence with the right approach we can analyze what happened ,what will happen & how can we make it happen for construction projects in future.
Juzer has 17+ years of global project management experience in the construction industry, specializing in 5D BIM solutions and bridging industry gaps through innovative technology integration.